This article examines and presents examples of contemporary advertising within the medical and health professions that continue the process and organisation of knowledge about women and their reproductive bodies. It draws on feminist and poststructural perspectives to inform a critical evaluation of the visual representations of menopausal women and hormone replacement therapy. These representations work to construct certain definitions of the feminine that sustain and support existing contradictory cultural meanings and values about menopause. I argue that the images continue to (...) misrepresent and define what forms of femininity and sexual gender are desirable and acceptable for menopausal women. The article addresses the problems of gender discrimination and bias within the advertising industry, and illustrates the ways in which readers of visual texts may be influenced by stereotypic assumptions concerning a woman's lived experience of menopause. It illustrates how specific symbolic images directed towards men and women for hormone replacement therapy, testosterone deficiency and sexual dysfunction influence the viewer's decision making and action responses. (shrink)

This article analyses Mary Kelly’s Love Songs, 2005—07, which was exhibited in 2007 at Documenta 12. The series of artworks addresses the political and ideological legacies of early Anglo-US feminism through the perspectives of two generations of women. Drawing on oral and photographic archives, as well as historical re-enactments, Kelly indicates how her work does not simply record a feminist legacy but, rather, keenly intervenes in the process. I propose that this intervention is an ethical one. Drawing on Luce Irigaray’s (...) writings on the maternal gift, I demonstrate how Kelly’s project may be understood to enact an ethical relationality that I find is fundamental for thinking about the vexing issue of feminist intergenerationality. I conclude that while Love Songs maps no specific course of action, nor indicates exactly why or how a current generation of feminists should proceed, it nonetheless generates a space in which to imagine the radical futurity of the maternal gift. (shrink)

This article discusses the relationship between Eleanor Antin’s Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1973) and Elizabeth Manchester’s All My Dresses With All My Shoes (2002) in terms of the differently structured temporalities of making and viewing through which the concept of femininity materializes in each work. Diachronic understandings of post-feminism, as a concept emptied of a former moment of political consciousness, are contested through my readings of artworks that call forth a complexity of tenses. The article argues that the connections and (...) tensions between the two works, which are generationally distinct in terms of the political and cultural climate of their production, require a critical apparatus that suggests the simultaneity of differently valued temporal experiences. The notion of temporal play is further explored in relation to Vanessa Beecroft’s performance and film works VB29 (1997) and VB35 (1998). Here the traces of earlier feminist strategy, in which femininity is cast in relation to loss, are reconfigured in the failure to achieve the stasis of the photographic moment. (shrink)

This paper brings a critical focus to difference and the creative arts in education with specific attention to art as a site of knowledge in New Zealand conditions. The 1990s and early 2000s are marked by a paucity of critically engaged literature on the arts in education and a conspicuous absence of discussions on the politics of difference. Alongside the global return to empirical research in education where quantifiable data‐based projects tend to attract attention ahead of fundamentally crucial questions of (...) philosophical and critical registers, there has been an apparent reinvention of liberal humanistic concepts of creative practice. These tendencies are coupled with strategic political alignments of creativity with industry. The outcome appears to be a withering of attention to the politics of difference on the vine of educational philosophy, policy and practice in art education. The paper suggests that if the creative arts are to hold or gain any purchase in the stakes of education in a global world this vine must be tended and revitalised through a rigorous application of critically framed questions so that discourses of difference can be recognised as a social and political responsibility in the art educational encounter. (shrink)