Being and Becoming a Woman... by Agata Araszkiewicz

“One is not born a woman”—this statement is a lexical icon of the twentieth century. It is, however, in no way a thing of the past. Today the models of the relations between the sexes are, probably more often than ever, at the core of political transformation, and they inform our sense of being together as men and women from day to day. As an artist, Katarzyna Swinarska primarily refers to the analysis of the emanation of cultural roles that are linked to our original contextualization, or biological sex. The opening statement of this text, quoted from Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal book The Second Sex (1949), the cornerstone of the second wave of both European and global feminism, reads in French: “on naît pas femme, on le devient.” We are not born women, but become them. Phonetically, we can also read the sentence “on n’est pas (une) femme, on le devient,” which can be translated roughly into “we are not women; we become them”. This ontological duplicity (between “being born” and “being”) with its simultaneous existential uncertainty (what does “being born” or “being” a woman mean?) forms the foundation of Swinarska’s creative reflection and artistic pursuits.

In this art “there is no” woman. She is absent in that the artist subverts all possible information concerning the potential “being” of a woman. “Being a woman” means nothing for Swinarska. Her efforts are focused on questioning, undermining, and analyzing the diverse ways in which “a woman” appears as one. If we were to divide this analysis into separate  points, the first would address “objectification.” Chinese Girls* is a series of small paintings in mixed media on canvas which bring to mind a kind of miniature. The protagonists here are small girls—sex slaves who are extremely objectified. The series was born of a nineteenth-century postcard, found by accident, depicting an Asian girl behind the bars of a brothel. In Swinarska’s Chinese Girls we find an allusion to the still little-known phenomenon of “comfort women,” which was the legalized sexual slavery of girls and young women to provide  “comfort” to the Japanese army during World War Two. This was a mass phenomenon that affected, by today’s estimates, from 200,000 to 400,000 victims, mainly Korean, Chinese and Japanese women, as well as women of many other nationalities, who were abducted and forced through torture to submit absolutely to bestial exploitation. The “comforters,” as the term can be roughly translated, are also a profound cultural allusion to the subservient position of women in highly patriarchal societies. The clash between “girlhood” and sexual exploitation shows that “becoming a woman” is a process of exploitation and disfranchisement. Women’s sexual autonomy is a phenomenon of late modernity, and its official beginnings are rooted in the sexual revolution. Following this parallel further, in no way can we conclude, however, that since the 1970s there has been any genuine symbolization of women’s sexual subjectification. Cultural patterns, changes in mentality, and the principles of the coexistence of the sexes have not contributed to a widely accepted, clearly affirmative, positive model of dignified self-fulfillment of women as sexual beings. In our late modern society, women are perceived in a sexual sense by society far more as a “comfort” for men than the other way around. If we understand the “differences between the sexes” primarily as a historical notion, subject to historicization, or historical development, it becomes clear that the matrixes of desire, seduction, and physical fulfillment continue to remain closer to the era of feudalism than to that of any revolution.

When examining the reasoning presented in Swinarska’s work, the second element that emerges from her artistic reflection on the question of “who is a woman?” is “ecstasy.” Ecstasy can be understood in both a religious sense, as a kind of sexual suppression, and in a sexual sense, as a type of religious suppression. According to Jacques Lacan, the French founder of psychoanalysis as philosophy, Saint Teresa, who Swinarska evokes, exemplifies women’s bliss—jouissance—as incapable of being thematized. Jouissance is the excess of bliss in the construction of the subject that prevents the subject from recognizing herself; it is pure transcendence that cannot be contained. Lacan associated it with the feminine, but that which is symbolically mute does not effect change in the system. Ecstasy, then, is a kind of anti-systemic fulfillment that does not undermine the system and is available to women excluded from the symbolic pact. This is because there is no subjectification of women in Lacan’s theory. It remains beyond the possibility of “being” (it does not exist in the social, political, or philosophical sense). The famous Lacanian formula “la femme n’existe pas” (“the Woman does not exist”) is a perfect supplement to the double meaning of de Beauvoir’s statement, which is crucial for our considerations here. For Julia Kristeva, the French thinker who goes beyond Lacan and whom Swinarska evokes, Saint Teresa, with her carnal transcendence, is something more. Her ecstasy transforms the established order (e.g., the religious exclusion of the body), since it undermines it. It indicates that the body is present here and now and that there is no other context except for incarnation, which conditions the fact of “being.” The mystic and her auto-erotic ecstasy lead us to recognize in her a priestess of the body as a kind of new manifesto of femininity, undermining the established, and clearly false, order. Still, because of  the “objectification” of women (see the first point), this is impossible. 

The third point of this analysis comprises  two equivalent notions—“the imagined” and “silence.” Swinarska develops in her work the realm of what could be called the intimacy of the “imagined.” If in Lacan everything that perpetuates norms, patterns, and roles of culture is treated as “symbolic,” the “imagined” draws closer to fantasy, anarchy, and revolt. It is a realm of unfettered phantasms. In Swinarska, the yearning for women’s fullness is manifested in a return to childhood and fairy-tales. This “escape” into childhood is twofold: it is a return to the omnipotence from before castration associated with the awareness of the differences between the sexes, but it is also a return to the topos of girls’ fairy-tales as an imaginary realm in the logic of fulfillment—it turns out culture is not a fairy-tale for the adult woman (in this sense, a girl and her faith in the world is often symbolically dead in an adult woman). To escape injury from that which is symbolic—laws and stereotypes— favoring the “imagined” is the only way out. This gesture may save female creativity and the capacity for innovative reflection. Despite this, women’s contribution to culture—history, thinking, civilization—is underrated and not valorized (the powerful Silent Heads* series). Contemporary Polish “herstorians” (women researchers who study the presence of women in history) coined the term “unworthy of history” in the title of a recent publication*. While remaining on the side of the “imagined” is an escape into symbolic silence, this silence rescues, and it is utterly different from the eliminatory silence of history, which erases the presence of women.

One more element emerges from Swinarska’s art. Her art is sensual and close to tangibility, physicality, and the touch; it is an art that consistently traces the “moments” of becoming a woman. This “becoming” must be singled out as a kind of separate proposal. No truth is final, and no stereotype really exists. In Swinarska’s art, reasoning focuses on process, which, in itself, is “physical,” it is incarnated in a “physical” matrix. This is expressed in the persistently recurrent, physical titles—Skin or Heart. Their subject is a woman in ecstasy, a woman who asks questions; or rather, a subject in ecstasy, a subject who asks questions. We are not women—we become them. Still, in Swinarska’s art we become women in order to be reborn, out of scraps of dreams, doubts, the power of perseverance—out of (subversively construed and ironically transcended) down and foam…

Translated by Jennifer Zielinska

1* Chinese Girls (2010) is a series inspired by a nineteenth-century postcard from San Francisco depicting a small Chinese girl behind a barred window. That Chinese emigrant families sold girls to brothels was tolerated in American society. The other pictures from the series make use of contemporary selfies of young Asian girls that the artist found on sex websites. 

 2* The installation entitled Silent Heads (2016), comprised of paper, glass, and sound, is an allusion to the erasure of women from history. With portraits painted in Chinese ink on cotton paper, the artist creates a wall depicting 45 women. These women are well-known, under-acknowledged, or forgotten intellectuals, writers, and artists. The paintings are accompanied by a soundtrack of the artist’s voice reciting these women’s names.

3* Iwona Chmura-Rutkowska, Edyta Głowacka-Sobiech, Izabela Skórzyńska, Niegodne historii? O nieobecności i stereotypowych wizerunkach kobiet w świetle podręcznikowej narracji historycznej w gimnazjum [“Unworthy of History”? On the Absence and Stereotypical Images of Women in Light of the Historical Narrative in Middle School Text-books], Poznań 2015.