Negative Female Characters in Cindy Sherman’s Photo: The Changing in Thinking That Feminism Has Brought in the 1970s
These authors contributed equally.
- DOI
- 10.2991/assehr.k.211120.043How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- feminism; change of people’s way of thinking; conflict; Cindy Sherman’s photographs
- Abstract
A great number of people regard postmodernist photographer--Cindy Sherman--as feminist though she herself has never admitted the identity. In her Untitled Film Still, it is quite strange that almost all females have negative facial expressions instead of common smiling faces. The objective of this paper is to explore and analyze the reason why the females in Sherman’s photos are depressed. In order to better understand the series of photos, Cixous’s Anti narcissism theory is adopted. In her paper, The Laughter of Medusa, Cixous argues that women must participate in writing to expand their rights. In the photos, the females are already independent, but they still feel empty and lost instead of satisfied and happy. The females are in the conflict because on the one hand, they long for pursuing independent and free life, but on the other hand, they are in fact unwilling and unprepared to suddenly cut off the emotional connections between themselves and males. In conclusion, the females had already made choices to leave males and live on their own, but they were unsure and conflicted about whether the road not taken is better. The paper provides a comprehensive understanding of the photos which can help the readers to understand feminism from a new angel that there is not only oppression from males, but females themselves are in the strong conflict too.
- Copyright
- © 2021 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.
- Open Access
- This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Nan Liu AU - Bingxin Xie AU - Yating Yang PY - 2021 DA - 2021/11/29 TI - Negative Female Characters in Cindy Sherman’s Photo: The Changing in Thinking That Feminism Has Brought in the 1970s BT - Proceedings of the 2021 3rd International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2021) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 233 EP - 238 SN - 2352-5398 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211120.043 DO - 10.2991/assehr.k.211120.043 ID - Liu2021 ER -