Textual Poaching - "Birth of Venus" 1480's

My Textual Poaching Project

"Birth of Venus," by Sandro Botticelli, shows Venus, the Greek Goddess of love coming from the sea as a beautiful adult woman. She represents physical love - the role a woman should always play - as well as inspired intellectual and deeper love for all. I chose this piece because I identify as a woman, which hasn't always been a positive thing through history. The purpose of this piece was to give power to Venus, a well-known and commonly represented woman in legend and history, and to depict her as beautiful and mysterious. She is nude due to the Greek representation of women that aims to focus on a woman as a whole, but also as a representation of sex and physical attraction. It was uncommon to give power and recognition to regular women, but it was a common thing to focus power on the women they knew in legend. There are 3 women in this painting, though Venus is the focus, and as I remixed the piece to represent my identity as a woman in history as well as in my own life, I included all three. 

"How Texts Become Real," explains well the process of creative interpretation. Jenkins says, "the reader's activity is no longer seen simply as the task of recovering the artist's meanings but also as reworking borrowed materials to fit them into the context of lived experience." This is precisely what I have done with this painting. Throughout history, women have had only a few purposes: to appease the men and bear children (usually sons were more sought after and desired than daughters). To represent this, I simply erased each of the women's mouths so as to not give them a say in their own destinies and futures. I understand that we have come very far from this, and women have much more of a say now, but there are many ways that we, as women, are still restricted. The way in which I removed their mouths is blatantly obvious and ugly, yet when one first looks at the painting, the blocky mouths are not the initial thing that catches their eye - it is Venus' nudity. A woman is seen as a sexual symbol, and they suffer for it!

Recently in social media, a post about sexual harassment went around the internet where women who have been sexually harassed or abused simply posted "Me Too" to their media profiles. I was astonished at the vast number of women who had experienced such a thing in their young lives, and that was only the women who were willing to speak out! Up until then they had primarily kept quiet - their ability to speak on the matter had been diminished by the identity that a woman holds. It is almost expected of women to be targets of such behavior, and to stand against such a thing is considered "embarrassing" when standing alone. 

I believe that a big part of my personal identity as a woman is to help in the continuing efforts to change this stigmatized belief of what defines a woman. We should be allowed to speak up and speak out. We should be in charge of our own identities and should not belong to a stereotype. We should have a say. And the more women who have recognized this over time, the better and more progressive our identities have become.

The Original Piece