Giant Woman On Empire State Analysis

The word feminism covers many different ideologies and methods of dealing with gender inequality. Feminist movements have sparked all around the world for different reasons but still deal with the same underlying issue of gender inequality. In 1930, Anita Steckel was born and would later in her life develop a love of art and develop a passion for fighting unequal treatment and censorship of male and female artists. Steckel begun to create playful and erotic artwork that was her way of fighting the forces that tried to stifle women’s sexuality. To this day this is still an issue, society is very much male dominated and still oversexualizes and objectifys the female body while expecting women submissive and silent about their sexual desires or

The woman is straddling the building and her thigh is slightly transparent where she overlaps the building. This ‘dream-like’ feeling is evoked with the woman lazily stretching out over the city. Her face is the lightest part of the whole work and has a relaxed expression; her eyes are closed and her mouth is shut. Steckel may have depicted the woman this way because Steckel believed in expressing a woman’s sexual desire, not suppressing it. Although within this particular piece there is no penis to be seen Steckel sexualizes the buildings by putting them in between the naked giant woman’s thighs. The giant woman looks natural above the skyline not so much unrealistic, almost as if Steckel is trying to say that the naked form is natural; going a step further maybe with the relaxed form of this woman and the somewhat calmness of the city itself Steckel tries to state how natural the female desire is. There is high contrast between the buildings and the female form, the buildings are a dark saturated black while the body of the woman is greyish white color looking over the city, showing the importance of the naked woman. The larger buildings evoke a phallic-esque feeling because of the use of the Empire State building. The smaller buildings do not have a similar effect. Since the figure is above the skyline it seems because of the placement of the

As of now these are the people that are interested in viewing her work; yet Anita didn’t fully intend for these kinds of people to be her audience. Steckel created her work to challenge the men in society who deemed her work pornographic. She aimed her pieces to disgust people who didn’t like her beliefs. For the most part the people Steckel really wanted a reaction from was the male curators who controlled (at the time) what was art and what wasn’t. Curators can be especially infuriating because liking art is completely personal; yet most of the curators back in Steckel’s time had the same view on the male form in art. Steckel’s issue was that she wasn’t creating art that had the male gaze in mind, yes she was drawing women which a lot of other male artist did; but the fact that she drew these women doing ‘lewd’ acts, turned men off. Steckel presented women, not as objects of potential sexual pleasure for men but women who were more concerned with pleasuring themselves. Can this point be the start of women seeing the world through a ‘female gaze’? Can a female gaze exist? And if it does, does it solely exist to fight the objectification of women? It can be argued that if there is a male gaze that there also exists a female gaze. I