Fuck Patriarchy! Dystopian Baroque in Mathilde ter Heijne and in The Handmaid’s Tale
Lecture by Alma-Elisa Kittner. A cooperation between the Department of Art and Education and the Department of Fashion and Styles within the framework of the seminars Introductory Seminar in Art-Theoretical and Art Historical Methods (Juliane Saupe) and Fashions, Styles, Identities (Elke Gaugele).
Once again—and as always—the female body is contested terrain within political, social, and visual regimes of order. At the center of this lecture by Alma-Elisa Kittner are the television series The Handmaid’s Tale, based on the novel by Margaret Atwood, and the video work Fuck Patriarchy! by the artist Mathilde ter Heijne. Both works develop feminist politics of images, where conflicts over the control of female reproduction intersect with and intensify with questions of visibility, spatial appropriation, and violence.
A key point of reference for both is their use of the visual repertoire of seventeenth-century Dutch Baroque painting: maids or women reading in peaceful interiors, staging privacy, discipline, and social hierarchies. In The Handmaid’s Tale and Fuck Patriarchy!, however, the interior becomes a site of violence and a normalized state of exception. To what extent does this “dystopian Baroque” expose contemporary fascistoid aesthetics?
Dr. Alma-Elisa Kittner is an art historian and academic councillor at the Institute of Art Education at Justus Liebig University Giessen. She works on topics such as revisions of the Baroque, Jewish visual culture, and hair politics.