Reclaiming the Body: Feminist Performance and the Production of Female Subjectivity

Abstract

This essay examines how the structural absence of female subjectivity in modern and contemporary art reinforces visual hierarchies that position women as objects rather than agents of meaning. Drawing on the work of feminist art historians Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock, and gender studies scholar Judith Butler, the essay argues that women’s exclusion from artistic authority is historically and discursively produced through institutional and representational structures. This essay asks: how do feminist performance practices challenge this structural absence, and to what extent can embodied performance reconfigure the relationship between the female body, spectatorship, and agency? Through a comparative case study of Tap and Touch Cinema (1968) by Valie Export, Interior Scroll (1975) by Carolee Schneemann, and Rhythm 0 (1974) by Marina Abramović, the essay demonstrates that feminist performance does not simply represent female subjectivity, but actively produces it through embodied confrontation, authorship, and exposure.