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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathDoll-Bodies
 
 
 
 
 

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reformulated. Three main complexes are up for discussion: – the inspection of the body fragment within the context of body perception, gender representation and the pornography debate; – reflections that make reference to a crisis of the subject position, the fading away of the symbolic order, and medialized perception; [14] – technoid fantasies within which both the monstrous as well as phantasms of autonomy shaped by various current technological and media developments are brought up. The last two complexes are virtually inseparable.

Gender representation, body (fragment) and pornography

Figurations of bodies or parts of the body are uncircumventably connected with traditional constructions of femininity and masculinity in art history and the mass media. At the latest since the Romantic Movement, the figure of the doll connotes more a female than a male—in particular in the sexualized variants preferred by the Surrealists, in which the secondary sexual characteristics were a central element of the visualization. In the history of

 

art, fragmentations or dismemberment scenarios have also been played through more on ‹female› than on ‹male› bodies. This categorization continued in the mass media of pornography.

In this respect it is no wonder that the subject of the doll has been taken on primarily by exhibitions and publications that have emerged since the eighties within the context of feminist-oriented artistic practices and theory formations [15] and in which the productions by Surrealist artists have been taken up again, restaged and reformulated.

A feminist debate on the meaning of the body fragment in modernity already set in in the eighties. [16] In retrospect this debate can be viewed as a delayed confrontation with the legacy of the concept of «degenerate art» (at least in German-speaking countries), the implications of which—long taboo—could not even be thematicized until the eighties. These implications concerned the Nazi glorification of an idealized body as a mirror phantasm of racial wholeness and perfection as well as the ‹literal› reading of body fragments as a metaphor for decadence and disease, which in a certain way was

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