Lisa Yuskavage's Gender Trouble

When evaluating this essay’s analysis of the work of Lisa Yuskavage in relation to Kristeva’s theory of Abjection and ideas surround identity, gender and sexuality, it seems evident that abjection can provoke and cause the affect of disrupting the viewer in order to question their presumed assumptions. Yuskavage’s sexualised female nudes examine ideas around female sexuality and desire, and she is a transgressor whose practice modernizes figurative painting, shifting meanings, undoing fixities and questions presumed knowledge about ‘women artists’ and ‘femininity’ that makes a difference: this is what Pollock stated Kristeva’s view of aesthetic practices should do (Pollock, 1999). Yuskavge’s work illustrates some of the many complexities, contradictions,
Allowing space in the representation of the body for an exploration of its boundaries and personal desires in a way that is not dictated too closely by complex theories like feminism develops the contradictory aspects of their work. Nicola Tyson’s reference to Judith Butler’s ‘Gender Trouble’ gathers together and reuses contrasting theories creating new meanings and new readings of texts in relation to new texts, continuously diversify the category of ‘women’ and ‘feminism’. The androgynous figures in Nicola Tyson’s breakdown tradition binary gender categories in the light of ‘Queer Theory’ and theorist such as Butler to a more open state of possibilities in which the body can exist and be re-invented without any limitations from having to represent ‘feminist theory’ of existing gender, its possibilities are
In the light of a recent National Geographic issued called ‘The Gender Revolution’ (Jan 2017) begins to explain the diversity and complex issue of gender and its different variations. Research and theories surround the notion of gender are expanding and becoming more complex and will provoke artists to reconsider the representation of the body in more fluid and ambiguous ways.

All the aforementioned artists’ all embrace and question the realization in the light of the ‘Gender Revolution’ that it is impossible to categorize gender into fixed binary terms, and choose to portray the body in more obscure and uncertain ways which allow for re-invention of the body, as if it had never existed