“Your body is a battleground”

The Female Gaze: Volume 1 marks the beginning of a new e-series from British Journal of Photography and Female in Focus celebrating the exceptional work of women photographers around the world.

“A woman’s body is never just her own,” Sara VanDerBeek tells British Journal of Photography. The New York-based photographic artist echoes Barbara Kruger’s seminal silkscreen of 1989. Conceived as a flyer for the pro-choice Women’s March on Washington (when a landmark ruling protecting women’s reproductive rights was in the process of being overturned), Kruger famously depicted a woman’s face in two halves, starkly cut between positive and negative exposure. “Your body is a battleground,” it reads.

The conflict harks back to a struggle older and broader than that of abortion alone. Who has ownership of a woman’s body, really? Since the genesis of ‘gender’ as we know it, the female form has existed as public property: a site of constant scrutiny, sexualisation, production and reproduction. From the darker corners of slut-shaming and victim-blaming to the seemingly innocuous question in passing – ‘I suppose you’ll be having children soon?’ – female bodies are, to some degree, always being policed. 

In Volume 1 of the Female in Focus e-magazine, we revisit five stories of women’s bodies, and shifting notions of autonomy and ownership around them. Alongside VanDerBeek’s exploration of the female form throughout art history, Laia Abril’s piercing series On Rape examines how myth, power and law inform concepts of rape and purity. Lina Scheynius’ intimate study of childbirth offers an uplifting take on the process of dedicating one’s body to the bearing of another. Charlotte Schmitz collaborates with sex workers in southern Ecuador’s largest brothel, helping them reclaim the narratives of their bodies, while Jo Spence’s iconoclastic portraits challenge the politics of disease through her breast cancer diagnosis.

From ever-present threats of objectification and violence to the celebrated rites of childbearing and healthcare, the selection of BJP articles speaks artfully of a world in which women’s bodies – for better or for worse – are, indeed, never truly “just our own”.