This book offers a renewed look at Emma Hamilton, the eighteenth-century celebrity who was depicted by many major artists, including Angelica Kauffman, George Romney, and Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun. Adopting an art historical and feminist lens, Ersy Contogouris analyzes works of art in which Hamilton appears, her performances, and writings by her contemporaries to establish her impact on this pivotal moment in European history and art. This pioneering volume shows that Hamilton did not attempt to present a coherent or polished identity, and argues instead that she was a kaleidoscope of different selves through which she both expressed herself and presented to others what they wanted to see. She was resilient, effectively asserted her agency, and was a powerful inspiration for generations of artists and women in their own search for expression and self-actualization.

Art history has enriched the study of material culture as a scholarly field. This interdisciplinary volume enhances this literature through the contributors' engagement with gender as the conceptual locus of analysis in terms of femininity, masculinity, and the spaces in between. Collectively, these essays by art historians and museum professionals argue for a more complex understanding of the relationship between objects and subjects in gendered terms. The objects under consideration range from the quotidian to the exotic, including beds, guns, fans, needle paintings, prints, drawings, mantillas, almanacs, reticules, silver punch bowls, and collage. These material goods may have been intended to enforce and affirm gendered norms, however as the essays demonstrate, their use by subjects frequently put normative formations of gender into question, revealing the impossibility of permanently fixing gender in relation to material goods, concepts, or bodies. This book will appeal to art historians, museum professionals, women's and gender studies specialists, students, and all those interested in the history of objects in everyday life.

A comprehensive history of the Georgians, comparing past views of these exciting, turbulent, and controversial times with our attitudes today The Georgian era is often seen as a time of innovations. It saw the end of monarchical absolutism, global exploration and settlements overseas, the world's first industrial revolution, deep transformations in religious and cultural life, and Britain's role in the international trade in enslaved Africans. But how were these changes perceived by people at the time? And how do their viewpoints compare with attitudes today? In this wide-ranging history, Penelope J. Corfield explores every aspect of Georgian life--politics and empire, culture and society, love and violence, religion and science, industry and towns. People's responses at the time were often divided. Pessimists saw loss and decline, while optimists saw improvements and light. Out of such tensions came the Georgian culture of both experiment and resistance. Corfield emphasizes those elements of deep continuity that persisted even within major changes, and shows how new developments were challenged if their human consequences proved dire.

This book examines the increasing intersections of art and parenting from the late 1990s to the early 2010s, when constructions of masculine and feminine identities, as well as the structure of the family, underwent radical change. Barbara Kutis asserts that the championing of the simultaneous linkage of art and parenting by contemporary artists reflects a conscientious self-fashioning of a new kind of identity, one that she calls the ‘artist-parent.’ By examining the work of three artists—Guy Ben-Ner, Elżbieta Jabłońska, and the collective Mothers and Fathers— this book reveals how these artists have engaged with the domestic and personal in order to articulate larger issues of parenting in contemporary life. This book will be of interest to scholars in art and gender, gender studies, contemporary art, and art history.

Transnational Perspecives on Feminism and Art, 1960–1985 is a collection of essential essays that bring transnational feminist praxis into conversation with histories of feminist art in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. The artistic practices and processes examined within these pages all centre on gender and sexual politics as they variously intersect with race, class, sovereignty, Indigeneity, citizenship, and migration at particular historical moments and within specific geopolitical contexts. The book’s central premise is that reconsidering this period from transnational feminist perspectives will enable new thinking about the critical commonalities and differences across heterogeneous and geographically dispersed practices that have contributed to the complex and multifaceted relationship between feminism and art today. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, cultural studies, visual culture, material culture, and gender studies.

Numerous contemporary artists, particularly female artists, have chosen to examine the idealization of the female body. In this crucial book, Emily L. Newman focuses on a number of key themes including obesity, anorexia, bulimia, dieting, self-harm, and female body image. Many artists utilize their own bodies in their work, and in the act of trying to critique the diet industry, they also often become complicit, as they strive to lose weight themselves. Making art and engaging eating disorder communities (in real life and online) often work to perpetuate the illnesses of themselves or others. A core group of artists has worked to show bodies that are outside the norm, paralleling the rise of fat activism in the 1990s and 2000s. Interwoven throughout this inclusive study are related interdisciplinary concerns including sociology, popular culture, and feminism.

This book interprets the fiber art and craft-inspired sculpture by eight US and Latin American women artists whose works incite embodied affective experience. Grounded in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, John Corso-Esquivel posits craft as a material act of intuition. The book provocatively asserts that fiber art—long disparaged in the wake of the high–low dichotomy of late Modernism—is, in fact, well-positioned to lead art at the vanguard of affect theory and twenty-first-century feminist subjectivities.