Skin-deep : women, bodywork and national belonging in modern culture

At a time when national borders and frontiers have become redundant and difficult to draw both in terms of physical topographies and in their symbolic impact, my analysis aims at reflecting upon how the female bodies in present culture report on an attempt at recovering and reshuffling a cultural heritage that Virginia Woolf – among others – acknowledges (and rejects) as basically male-oriented. Working on the texts of a novelist (Angela Carter), a writer and performer (Kathy Acker) and some artists (Susan Hiller, Sarah Lucas and Jenny Saville), the essay tries to focus on the female body as the place where national identities are denied and cultural heritage is remoulded. For women artists, particularly in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the female body becomes a way to come to terms with the loss of identity, or of reference to national identity, making it into a text through which the cultural heritage of a community is negotiated is something to be expected. If National identities are discursive formations, sometimes these discursive formations conflict with gender identities. In this context and with specific reference to present culture, the female body is given as recalcitrant and enigmatic, and it offers its skin as a place where ambiguous declarations of belonging are written.