Self determination, embodied languages and landscapes in women's video art.

This paper addresses how, since the 1960s to the present, part of women's video art has broken the traditional representation of women’s body and proposed new forms of recording women's images, explicit or symbolic, using body part close-ups, and not sparing any efforts to ensure the prevention of the cataloguing of women’s bodies according to normative categories, such as gender, race and age, and in this way challenging the Western representation codes that objectify women. The methodology employed had as its primary purpose the examination of the association existing between the micro-sociological level of body gestures and performances in women's videos and the macro-sociological level of social forces such as the dimensions of gender and sexuality. This study concluded that narratives of identity and self-determination are present in women's video pieces contributing to women's empowerment through visual discourses that could possibly point to the production of new signs and symbols, new values and models, but also for the formation of new types of social roles and even a new type of interpersonal relationships.

The incorporation of violence by women video artists

This paper examines the way in which women video artists embodied violence in their video pieces as a strategy of critique of the patriarchal regime. Since the 1960s several generations of women artists used different strategies of self-harm or explored the physical and mental limits of their bodies to express the anguish of those who are excluded from the patriarchal society on sexist and/or racist grounds. Considering the guiding line that covers three fields – art, gender, and feminist social movements – as well as their key thinkers and scholars in Sociology, Fine Arts and the Humanities, we have built the object of study of this essay, namely, the relationship between women's video art focused on the body, violence and gender along with feminist social movements in the period ranging from 1967 to 2007, in a Western context. The methodology used had as its primary goal to create a link between the micro-sociological level of expressions, body gestures and behaviours in the videos and the macro-sociological level of broader, institutionalized social forces that are at the origin of inequalities, such as dimensions of gender and «race». This study concluded that at least since the 1960s there is the denunciation by women video artists of the general circumstances women live under, while enduring violence of various kinds, such as socio-cultural, psychological and sexual violence against women.