Women Challenging the Norms in the Arab Diaspora: Body Talks in Contemporary Art

Mashriq & Mahjar 6, no. 1 (2019), 84–107 ISSN 2169-4435 Martine Natat Antle is Professor Emerita of French at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Email: martine.antle@gmail.com Martine Natat Antle WOMEN CHALLENGING THE NORMS IN THE ARAB DIASPORA: BODY TALKS IN CONTEMPORARY ART At fifteen I was widowed.… I was illiterate. You must understand, it’s important not to be afraid to be different. ―Chabia Talal Before embarking on the production of the artistic expression of women of the Arab diaspora, and in particular how they represent the body and sexuality in art, it is first important to foreground representations of the body by women in Western art, because their production also continues to be relegated to the margins of art history. On a large scale and globally speaking, both in the East and West, women have rarely participated directly in the production of art history. Yet, women in the West, who had up to the 1980s been all but excluded from the art world, have challenged us to rethink and recontextualize the representation of the body. Most often they have found identity and affirmation through the desire to differentiate themselves from the long history of masculine production of art. As Marie-Jo Bonnet observes about nudity in Western art: “The nude is thus one of the greatest conquests of women artists of the twentieth century.” However, rather than following the path of men, Western female artists reverse the connotation through an increasingly complicated critique of masculine voyeurism and exploitation of women’s bodies.1 The artistic project of Western women artists who tackle the body is complex, in that it becomes a project of re-inscription first of the body, then of eroticism and sexuality in art, notions that have been monopolized by Christian religious art since the Renaissance. The body has been reinvested and reappropriated by male artists, thus perpetuating the exclusion of women throughout the history of art. Beginning with the European avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, many Women Challenging The Norms In The Arab Diaspora 85 women denounced the taboos associated with women and their bodies and questioned the social construction of the female body in art. Throughout the following decades, the new feminist theoretical discourses of the 1960s relocated sexuality and sexual practices from the private sphere to the public. More than ever, the liberation of the body found itself at the center of discourse, bringing women artists face to face with many questions, such as how to cast off the masculine yoke, the patterns of male domination, what Foucault called the “law of prohibition”;2 and how to represent the body and eroticism in a new way so as to reverse masculine hegemonies. Numerous women artists set out on this quest for a new language, not only in the West, but soon thereafter in the Arab diasporas relatively unknown to Western institutions. What characterizes these artists of Arab descent, the majority of whom have trained and currently live in the West, is that in opposition to their Western counterparts, they live away from the homeland, in exile. This particular position allows them to articulate “a plurality of vision.”3 As we shall see here, these cross-cultural artists situated in dialogue with the East and West open a novel liminal and fertile space of communication. This “in-between” cross-cultural space implies a process of transculturation that challenges, if not erases, the notions of borders and nationhood. In this essay, I will question to what degree and through what means women artists from the Arab diasporas, who have received little critical attention, deliberately engage—as Easterners—in the challenging of masculine hegemonies.4 More specifically, I will show to what degree these artists create and re-inscribe new configurations of the body and unprecedented body talks in contemporary visual art.5 As African American critic and activist Audre Lorde has so stunningly argued, the search for eroticism is central to all artistic projects. Women artists must initially question the masculine pornographic apparatus that denies women not only eroticism, but also all sexual pleasure. According to Lorde: Our erotic knowledge empowers us. But this erotic charge is not...