In this interdisciplinary thesis, I have undertaken an original synthesis of personal investigation and art historical exploration into how and why working-class women are predominantly represented negatively, and structured a theoretical inquiry around these stereotypes of classed femininity. Unpicking the ways in which constructions of normative femininity are shaped by both classism and sexism, I have argued that “positive” feminine attributes have a classed-character and refer to a middle and upper-class ideal. I have reclaimed aspects of working-class womanhood that fall outside of the aspirational ideology that enforces normative gendered presentation.
In addition to working across the disciplines of art history, British political history, sociology and cultural studies, I have applied phenomenological and auto-ethnographic methodologies to bring my own background into the analysis of my case studies, using my life experience as a research tool to contest bias and stereotyping in the existing critical literature and demonstrate the possibility of alternative readings. My argument reframes the aesthetic concept of the grotesque in terms of a classed process of construction, through the imposition and interiorization of class shame, and uses this to bring into focus an experience of the sublime centred on a class-conscious aesthetic agency which repudiates stigma: The Anti-Pygmalion. This framing and methodology have enabled me to produce unique new interpretations of the experiences and creativities of working-class artists, and to propose new answers to the questions of who can be found beautiful, and what can be experienced with recognition and emerging excitement.
By focusing on class discourse, subjectivity and lived experience, and applying this focus to the area of art history, I located a gap between aesthetic concepts and theories, and the work of feminist sociologists which discusses working-class women’s lives. In bridging this gap, my thesis expands the body of knowledge of research in the visual arts, offering an original approach to thinking about the reception and refiguration of stereotypically ugly or grotesque images. I have developed the concept of the Anti-Pygmalion as a way of crystallising this approach, and motivating future research.
I have challenged the classist assumption that working-class artists don’t exist, or that becoming an artist erases one’s “former” working-class identity, by offering a counter-narrative about how working-class people access art and knowledge. I show how classed backgrounds inform our attitudes to knowledge, culture and politics, and our work in research, photography and film. In the introduction, I discussed the gendered construction of the aesthetic categories of the grotesque and the sublime, with reference to the key texts in both areas. However, I do not make constant use of these texts in my discussion of my case studies, because – as I establish in the
186 introduction – these categories have seldom been articulated in a way that takes account of class. As I argue, women’s bodies are far more often described as “grotesque” than male bodies, and working-class female bodies are far more often aligned with the grotesque than bodies which comport themselves according to “respectable”, i.e. middle-class, femininity. Although the sublime is predominantly theorised from the point of view of bourgeois men, feminist writers such as Yaeger and Zylinska have offered reconceptualisations of the sublime to account for feminist perspectives of gender difference within aesthetic experience, including notions of risk and danger from the point of view of women. I extend these reconceptualisations to include the risks and pleasures of working-class self-representation.
My theorisation of both the grotesque and the sublime is limited to using these concepts to name two recurring features of my case studies: on the one hand, the systematic degradation of working- class women’s bodies, their treatment as grotesque; on the other, the way in which the exhilaration of Anti-Pygmalion self-representation cannot be understood as mere aesthetic appreciation of something beautiful, but approaches a sublime intensity of mixed emotions. In other words, this thesis is not primarily about the grotesque or the sublime, but uses these terms as place-holders for a kind of experience that is not fully addressed by the existing theorisation of these concepts. I repurpose the terms in order to use them descriptively, to understand situations and experiences in a new light and elevate them into an aesthetic understanding. This enables me to provide readings of my case studies which draw out the ways they are capable of inciting complex, interesting and rare experiences in viewers, against a critical reception in which this experience has been under-theorised and these works have often been read within narrow and stereotypical frames of reference.
As I made explicit from the outset, this is an auto-ethnographic project: my starting point has been my own embodied encounters with the works in my case studies. The highly personal and subjective nature of this project is both a weakness and a strength. Comparison with other working-class art viewers’ experiences of the sublime in art reception may have provided some useful data, but would have required a very different methodological framework. Race is also largely untheorized in this project, and further research projects are needed to take account how race features in the construction of bodies and identities considered grotesque, and how it might also inform a different experience of the sublime. However, the personal nature of this project has meant that new stories have been told, that have countered the class bias at play in the literature on the sublime and grotesque.
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