Considering the Nude in Feminist Art

Throughout the history of visual art, representations of women have been skewed for the viewing pleasure of men. "We can begin to make a break by examining patriarchy with the tools it provides," wrote British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in which she introduced the idea of "the male gaze" to describe mainstream representations of women, created by and for heteronormative cis men.

Images of women…