The Female Gaze in Art and Photography

(Hardback)

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Historically, male artists have re-presented women through their eyes. The Female Gaze in Art and Photography redresses this imbalance, looks at art through womens eyes. It shines a light on the work of twenty contemporary women artists and photographers from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East and United States of America, placing these creatives and their works centre stage.

The female gaze is not singular; it is multifarious, often based on the creatives lived experience. It positions subjects as whole people and not objects. The female gaze reclaims womens bodies as repositories for multiple meanings. It emphasises the emotions of and intimacy between creator and subject, who are at times the same person.

The Female Gazein Art and Photography offers an empathetic re-presentation of women, men and those identifying as LGBQTIA+. The art and photography covered is also thematic, addressing issues affecting our lives today: love and loss; lifecycle of women; motherhood; gender, sexual and racial identity; the fractured self; autonomy and agency; strength, resilience and vulnerability; relationships; racism; marginalisation and diversity; feminism; migration and dispossession; and climate change among others.

The Female Gaze sits alongside and is a valuable addition to Charlotte Jansens Girl on Girl and Katy Hessels The Story of Art Without Men, showcasing the talent of women creatives in todays world of art and photography.

Author Bio

Anita Selzer is an acclaimed author of thirteen books in adult and childrens non-fiction. Her interest is in women, gender and culture, and history. She has earned a BA, Dip Ed, Master of Education, PhD in Education and Grad Dip in Womens Studies at universities in Melbourne, and was awarded the Peter Fensham Education Scholarship 1989 at Monash University for her PhD work on gender, history and education. She was also the recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award (APA, now renamed RTP research training program) and the Postgraduate Publication Award for a paper based on her PhD work.

Selzer has been a lecturer in politics and English and worked in womens affairs in the Victorian Premiers Department as an administrative officer. She has also been a book reviewer for Cambridge University Press and the peer-reviewed journal Gender and Education.

Anita Selzers young adult publication, I am Sasha (Penguin, 2018), was shortlisted for the NSW Premiers History Awards in 2019, and is currently being taught in schools. It is about her father, who assumed a female identity and lived that identity as a teenage girl during the Holocaust to survive. A 40-minute movie, Sashas Game, based on this book is currently being produced.

Among her other publications, Selzer wrote a series of books on Australian Sportswomen (Macmillan Education, 2000), which focused largely on Olympian athletes; The Armytages of Como (Halstead Press and National Trust of Australia: Victoria, 2003); Governors Wives in Colonial Australia (National Library of Australia, 2002); and Educating Women in Australia from the Convict Days to the 1920s (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Her recent publication are I am Woman (Shawline, 2020), a memoir focusing on gender issues, and Reclaiming Beauty (Shawline, 2022), which has been nominated for the Elizabeth and Colin Roderick award for 2023.