Cartographies of grief (and subversion): a sensory approach to the deconstruction of the female body

The transition between the 1980s and the 1990s in the western late capitalist societies saw the outline of divergent socio-anthropological and historiographic trends not coincidentally polarized on the body's figure. Thus, the theoretical definition of a posthuman, transhuman, commodified or digital body replaces an alternative one hinged, mindful of the AIDS crises, on the vulnerability of the suffering Leib. Within an art-historical and visual culture horizon, this contribution hypothesizes a methodological framework that investigates the destabilizing potentialities of the body made fragments in the non-androcentric construction of subjectivity. Specifically, it will try to demonstrate in genealogical terms how female artists (Annette Messager, Kiki Smith, Lorna Simpson, Roni Horn, Mona Hatoum, Vivienne Koorland), in the wake opened by other female artists active since the Sixties (Alina Szapocznikow, Ketty La Rocca, Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Villiger, Hannah Wilke) and even since the Twenties (Carol Rama, Georgia O’Keeffe), have subverted western phallogocentric narratives by the resemantisation of a specific strategy. That is, reconfiguring their bodies in cartographic terms. Starting from the pivotal categories of "abject" (Kristeva) and "part-object" (Klein), and from the critical proposals already elaborated in the art-historical field, this study will argue a technical-sensorial approach instead of a psychoanalytic one. The deconstruction and cartographic reconfiguration of the body, whether it is one's own or collective, healthy or ill, real or imaginary, requires a close interaction between the morphogenesis of the image, its haptic assembly and the emotional-semantic coefficient derived from them. This study will try to stress this plexus introducing a methodological and theoretical focus, followed by the analysis of some case studies.