Oyster – serie

From the poet Laura Battiferri to the naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian, history has long tied female intellectual brilliance to an unattractive appearance. But what if ‘ugliness’ was not a curse, but a strategy? This groundbreaking study is the first to critically explore how literary and painted portraits of women in science and the arts - including philosopher Marie de Gournay and painter Rosalba Carriera – challenged conventions by deliberately staging unconventional beauty as a tool of emancipation. The book exposes the hidden negotiations between appearance, intellectual legitimacy, and artistic ambition in early modern Europe. Through vivid case studies, it uncovers the interplay between gender, the body, and creative genuineness, revealing how these remarkable women redefined female authority on their own terms.Innovative insights into female agencyA feminist perspective on the portrait genreCurrent investigations into the 'unattractive' intellectual

Andy Warhol began using wallpaper as an artistic medium in the mid-1960s. Despite the extensive scholarship on his work, this aspect of his oeuvre has received relatively little attention in research. This book examines these overlooked pieces to highlight key shifts in his artistic practice. Wallpaper and interior decoration were central to Warhol's transition from graphic designer to Pop artist and his complex engagement with painting. The medium’s affordability and mass-producibility enabled Warhol to challenge the conventions of the traditionally serious, heteronormative, and male-dominated realm of painting. These medial characteristics align with Warhol’s self-fashioning as an artist who deliberately employed techniques of queer opacity and disguise.First monographic work on Andy Warhol’s wallpapersNew insights gained from an in-depth exploration of previously overlooked archival materialInnovative methodology combining queer theory and masculinity studies

This publication is dedicated to the changes in masculinity/ies that visual artists have been addressing since the 1970s and are currently working on more than ever. Contributions from art and other cultural studies illuminate the diverse artistic processes by which the idea of masculinity as a seemingly universal, irrefutable constant is being successively replaced by the assumption of a plurality of masculinities. The volume comprises four sections: Postphallic Masculinity, Queering Masculinities, Optimised Masculinity/ies and Vulnerability. Based on the premise that male bodies do not have an intrinsic essence but are socially constructed and thus transformable, visions of future masculinity(ies) are discussed and concretised.

This volume investigates the positions of women artists, their institutional frameworks, and the role of other female actors in the art world in Ibero-America and on the Iberian Peninsula from the 19th to the late 20th century, focusing especially on the interweaving of post-/decolonial and feminist approaches. Although women artists could not simply act outside existing power systems, they could mirror them in their works – and thereby challenge them. The overlapping of different regimes of subalternity led to specific strategies of self-empowerment, such as the formation of networks. What role does the fact play that both the Iberian Peninsula and the Ibero-American countries were perceived as a cultural "periphery", although they were simultaneously divided by the colonial wound?

This is the first major publication in any language to re-evaluate the problematics that enmesh feminism, gender, and contemporary Nordic art. The book probes the shifting nature of the "Nordic" to challenge its popular image as liberal when it comes to genders, sexualities, and ethnicities. It questions the so-called wave model to suggest instead a history of sporadic (re)surfacings and submersions of feminism’s impact on Nordic art over the last sixty years. The intersectional, transhistorical, and transcultural focus nuances the Nordic and demystifies common tropes while reflecting the principal concerns of feminist art scholars working today: the welfare model; gender, sexuality, and the body; transculturality and decolonialization, and posthuman feminism and glitches.Vigorously intervenes in and re-evaluates the problematics enmeshing feminism, gender, and contemporary Nordic artWith a special focus on decolonialism and transculturality

During the last decades of the 19th century, women used the camera, still a new technological apparatus, to establish independent lives as professional photographers. Women photographers had a particularly strong position in the Nordic countries, where photography became a tool with which to attain personal, economic, and political independence. Many hired only women assistants and remained unmarried, and some lived in lifelong relationships with women partners. Moreover, these women pioneers belonged to a generation which, for the first time, had the power to define their own visual representation as well as that of other women. Through a wide range of stories about individual photographers, this book presents a counter-history to existing histories of photography, demonstrating the medium’s liberating potential for women for the first time.Counter-narratives of women’s independence in photographic historiesBringing to light previously unknown Nordic women photographersWith contributions from leading scholars in photography studies from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland