Contemporary Feminist Art by Women in North Africa

Contemporary Feminist Art by Women in North Africa: Body Talks dissects the diverse perceptions of the body and how it becomes symbolically charged in the artwork of six contemporary Maghrebi female artists: Majida Khattari, Lalla Essaydi, Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Déborah Benzaquen, Fatima Mazmouz and Zaïnab Fasiki. With a focus on the French, Maghrebi, and North American market and examining artistic mediums ranging from painting and photography to videos and installations, Ramona Mielusel highlights how the body functions as both subject and object of aesthetic discourse. The author denotes these artistic works as the intersection of the intimate and the impersonal, of the individual perception and the communitarian and societal view, without promoting a fixed notion of the body in a specific spatiality and temporality. This book explores the work of female Maghrebi artists and their intentional framing of the body's duality between the symbolic and the real, between cultural interpretation of the body in literature and the actual perception of the body.

Ramona Mielusel is associate professor of French and francophone studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Chapter 1
Ornate Bodies: Symbolic Markers of the Arab Female Body in Majida Khattari's Photography
Chapter 2
The Elusiveness of Arab Women and their Subversive Presence in the Architectural Photographic Space of Lalla Essaydi
Chapter 3
Women's Body, Empowerment and "Soft Transgression" in Some of Zoulikha Bouabdellah's artworks
Chapter 4
Transgressive Bodies: Exploring the Outlier Identities and Bodies in Déborah Benzaquen's Photography
Chapter 5
Liberating the Body in Fatima Mazmouz's photographic work: from the Personal to the Political
Chapter 6
Decriminalizing the Body: Art and Nudity against the Hshouma by Zaïnab Fasiki