The difference between a woman’s body as experienced by its inhabitant, and a woman’s body as observed or represented, is the difference between truth and fantasy. This panel will explore the personal, social, and political consequences of that division, as it is projected and enforced by power. This power is expressed in advertising, arts, fashion, film, TV, fiction, and graffiti, as well as in beauty standards, eating disorders and archaic female mutilation customs. Such expressions take place in a worldwide context of objectification of and violence against women that includes rape, battery, sexual harassment, “honor murders,” sex trafficking, survival sex, denial of protein to females, denial of both reproductive freedom and safe motherhood, and other appropriations of the female body. Each of these can be re-doubled by racism, ethnicity, homophobia, caste, disability, and class. How to reclaim the integrity of the female body and its representation? How do women artists explore the concept of body in their works? And what impact does art have on our perception of the female body?

This event is part of Festival Albertine 2017. All events are free and open to the public. Seating is limited and available on a first come, first served basis.

Mona Chollet, born in Geneva (Switzerland) in 1973, is a journalist and a writer. She has been living in France for 20 years and works for Le Monde diplomatique in Paris. Her books include Beauté fatale(2012), about the feminine obsession with beauty, and Chez soi (2015), a defense of time spent at home.

Roxane Gay is a professor, editor, commentator, and author of the New York Times best-sellers Hunger and Bad Feminist, Difficult Women and An Untamed State as well as World of Wakanda for Marvel. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.

Camille Morineau is director of exhibitions and collections at the Monnaie de Paris, and chairwoman and co-founder of the non-profit Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions. With degrees from the École normale supérieure and the l’Institut national du patrimoine, she has worked at public cultural institutions in France for two decades and was recently head curator of the elles@centrepompidou exhibition.

Alexandra Schwartz is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing for 2014.
Watch this event live via Livestream on Nov. 3 at 7pm (EST).

Festival Albertine is made possible with major support from The Recanati-Kaplan Foundation, Susannah Hunnewell, Van Cleef & Arpels, Air France, Fondation CHANEL, and Institut français. Generous support is provided by Champagne Pommery and Intercontinental New York Barclay.

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