The Vagina and De Facto Feminism in the Artwork of Naʿama Snitkoff-Lotan

In 2011 Zipi Mizrachi established “Studio of Her Own—a space for young Modern Orthodox female artists in Jerusalem,” to fulfill a requirement in the Gender Studies Program at Bar Ilan University in Israel. In this alliance, young women create and exhibit their art in public spaces (fig. 1). The exhibits often address the body and sexuality (Sperber 2015), similar to the radical feminist art produced in the United States in the 1970s. This article investigates the artwork of Studio of Her Own participant Naʿama Snitkoff-Lotan (b. 1984), a graduate of the Ceramics and Glass Department at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, the most prestigious art studies institute in Israel. I consider the concern with vaginal art in Snitkoff-Lotan’s body of work to be representative of the focus on sexuality and the body in the art of Modern Orthodox Jewish women in Israel. The artist positions her Modern Orthodox religiosity and art as separate and noncontradictory. She argues that her vaginal art focuses on women’s reproductive and childbirth experiences and fears. I argue that despite the artist’s resistance to identifying her artwork as feminist “cunt art” that challenges Modern Orthodox Judaism, this art can still be interpreted through a “de facto” feminist lens.

This article is based on analysis of the artist’s oeuvre and a partially structured interview in Hebrew I conducted with Snitkoff-Lotan in her house in the Israeli settlement of Maʿale Shomron, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories on June 29, 2014. Snitkoff-Lotan is married but does not wear a headscarf, as is customary among married women in the mainstream Jewish Orthodox world. During the interview she was pregnant. At this writing she is a mother of two children and teaches ceramics in a day center for the elderly. She is currently studying for a master’s degree in art therapy.

Figure 1.

Exhibition of first year of the second cycle of Studio of Her Own (Studio Mishelach): Young Artists Center in Jerusalem, 2012. Jaffa 23 Gallery, Jerusalem. Curator: Irena Gordon. Photographer: Aviv Nave

I analyzed the interview thematically (Strauss and Corbin 1990), reading and listening on several levels to identify narrative characters and themes and consider absences (Brown and Gilligan 1992, 197–208). I was alert to my positionality as a man studying a woman’s experiences, especially on sexual subject matter. Rosalind Edwards (1993) emphasizes being aware of “double subjectivity” in qualitative feminist research. The reflexive approach recognizes that the researcher is always part of an interview, influencing the account on multiple levels. As a male researcher, I recognize myself as an “other” in a way that enables me to identify and clarify themes from the stance of otherness. From this positionality, I stress the gaps between my questions and the perspectives and musings of the artist. This awareness of multiple subjectivities (Krumer-Nevo and Sidi 2014, 234) nevertheless posits the artist front and center, attending to her context, layers of meaning, and specific experiences.

Scholars have studied representations of the body and sexuality by US feminist artists (Semmel and Kingsley 1980; Schapiro and Wilding 1989; Schneider 1997, 43–87; Jones 1998; 2012, 170–217). In the 1970s artists such as Judy Chicago (b. 1939), Magdalena Abakanowicz (b. 1930), and Keren LeCocq (b. 1949) created vaginal representations that Chicago and her students called “Cunt Positivism Art.” These works aimed to celebrate women’s bodies and to free women’s body images from male domination (Dekel 2013, 30–37). While Snitkoff-Lotan speaks about her work in the context of childbirth rather than sexuality, the works themselves seem to reference vaginal art and resemble feminist artistic precedents focused on women’s sexuality. My analysis of Snitkoff-Lotan’s vaginal art relies to some extent on Amelia Jones’ method of antiessentialist rereading of 1970s “cunt art” by “seeing differently” (2012). Jones uses a strategy of looking and interpreting that deliberately reads and misreads the works to open them up to new interpretations.

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