dangerous curves and other mishaps:|
life in the female body
As soon as I saw the beautiful sepia toned photographs of the young women, I knew I would use them somehow in my art. My sister had come across the photos in the Salvation Army thrift store in Whitehorse and passed them on to me. They are snapshots taken in and around the summer of 1933 in Haliburton Ontario. This I know from peering at the faded photographers’ stamps on the reverse of some of them. The young women are good chums. This I know from looking at them. It’s why I was so drawn to these images. The girls are relaxed, unabashedly affectionate, and at times deliriously unselfconscious. They seem full of themselves, full of shenanigans.
I have been collecting vintage etiquette books for the past fifteen years. When my book Storm Clouds Over Party Shoes, Etiquette Problems for the Ill-Bred Woman was published in 1997, I had about five
etiquette books in my possession. Now my collection numbers over one hundred and together they call out to me from inside my grandmother’s glass fronted bookcase. They call out to me because they contain a landslide of evidence from the not-so-distant history of North American women and girls. They enshrine rigid and often cruel codes of conduct setting out what it means to be female. Included in this Michelin guide of sorts is a kind of pernicious owner’s manual for the female body.
What I wanted to do in the Dangerous Curves mixed media series is connect the dots between the past and the present; to show that this same merciless emphasis on our bodies is playing out today. It’s playing out today in the U.S. diet industry estimated to be worth anywhere between 40 and 100 billion dollars a year (1); it’s playing out today in the 7,400,000 American women who underwent cosmetic procedures in 2001 (2); and – most disturbingly of all – it’s playing out in the bodies of Canadian girls as young as 5 and 6 who are taking weight control measures (3). We’ve not come a long way baby. We’ve not come very far at all.
I am guessing that the young Canadian girls of mirthful disposition in my ‘found’ photographs would be today – if still alive – somewhere between the ages of 87 and 92. My sincerest hope for them is that they were able to hang on to the spirit of ebullience and mischief that shines thru in their photos; that they were able to live out their lives safe and sound – at home in their perfectly imperfect female bodies.
1. “The Diet Business: Banking on Failure”, BBC News World Edition, Feb 5 2003
2. MSNBC “Dangerous Beauty”, Julia Sommerfield, June 4, 2002
3. “Body Image and the Media”, Canadian Women’s Health Network, 2007
Sheila Norgate