Faculty Lisa Salamandra's Article "La Viande et la Femme. Image de la femme crue" Published in Diogène

Faculty member Lisa Salamandra published “La Viande et la Femme. Image de la femme crue“, an article pulled from her doctoral research, which was conducted on her series of artworks about the female figure “Raw Meat”, in the journal Diogène.

Lisa Salamandra’s artistic and theoretical research focuses upon a series of artworks in which, in order to construct female figures, she uses advertising photographs that depict raw meat. She cuts these images out of local supermarket fliers that have been delivered to her mailbox where she lives in central France. This combination of female-raw-meat-advertisement-imagery is disturbing for the spectator. Her research probes the reasons why we are affected by images of raw meat, and more particularly, why we are even more disturbed when these images of raw meat are combined with – or fuse with – the female figure.

Her article “La Viande et la Femme. Image de la femme crue” looks at this “meat-woman” issue through the lens of two key elements: sacrifice and blood. The ancestral taboo of blood is associated with the animal and the human body. Her research illustrates our profound ties to the animal, including rituals that constituted an integral part of the daily life of primitive societies; it demonstrates how the myths, rites, and taboos from prehistoric times continue to influence our contemporary perception.

She examines the issues of the unveiling of the body and the violent depictions of women, and observes how the different mechanisms at work in the representation of women enable a multitude of ways to interpret the flesh, its various significances spanning from our most distant past to contemporary societies. In her article, Lisa Salamandra argues that this polysemy is essential for the construction of the “true” image of the female figure, but also for her emancipation.

This research article is the first publication pulled directly from Lisa Salamandra’s doctoral research, conducted solely on her series “Raw Meat.” It is published in the double issue of Diogène (n°267-268) consecrated to A Pluralistic Look at Feminisms from the Past and Today, here and elsewhere.

You can read the article on Cairn.info (in French).