47. Become Your Own Muse

Catherine Cormack's 'Women in the Picture' investigates how visual culture constructs ideas about female bodies, beauty, and femininity across Western art history. The book traces archetypes from classical Venus through later cultural images, showing how these representations exclude and silence women's lived experiences. Cormack combines art-history scholarship with cultural analysis to reveal institutional biases in museums, academies, and popular imagery. She highlights how exclusion from looking and making art limited women's agency and shaped public perceptions of womanhood. The work aims to equip readers with historical context to recognize and challenge patriarchal visual norms.

Susan-Lori Parks' 'Venus' dramatizes and reinterprets the life of Sarah Bartman, a Khoikhoi woman exhibited in 19th-century Europe as a spectacle. Parks interrogates how colonialism, racism, and fetishization transformed a human life into entertainment and scientific curiosity. The play blends historical fragments with inventive theatrical techniques to reclaim agency and voice for its subject. Through fragmented narrative and lyrical language, Parks challenges established histories and the ethics of representation. 'Venus' is both a critique of past exploitation and a powerful act of artistic restitution.