the vulgar feminine.
The Vulgar Feminine explores how female sexuality is often labelled as vulgar when it exists outside of patriarchal control. This exhibition challenges the cultural double standards that frame women’s expressions of desire, emotion and identity as excessive or inappropriate, while male desire remains accepted and legitimised.
The work reclaims vulgarity as a form of feminist resistance. It confronts the traditional depiction of women as passive objects of the male gaze by presenting the female form with agency, defiance and discomfort. Through print, material and image, the collection embraces eroticism, rage and emotional intensity, while questioning who decides what is tasteful or acceptable.
Influenced by feminist theorists including Laura Mulvey, Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva, the project addresses the ways femininity is policed through class, power and social norms. It also reflects on how women are often dehumanised through language and representation, reduced to animals, objects or abject bodies.
Rather than offering a softened or playful version of femininity, The Vulgar Feminine embraces its messy, grotesque and confrontational edges. It invites the viewer to sit with discomfort and to reconsider how vulgarity can be a tool for liberation.
This array of 21 postcard-sized prints presents derogatory terms historically used to shame and dehumanise women, especially for expressing sexuality. Each definition is sourced from the Oxford English Dictionary, exposing how language reflects and reinforces gendered power structures.
By isolating and displaying these words as individual artefacts, the work invites viewers to confront their impact. What does it mean to reclaim language designed to wound? Can these words be stripped of their harm and reframed as evidence of a culture that fears women’s agency?
This piece challenges viewers to question the power of labels, and to imagine what it means to take them back.
Can text can be as vulgar as image? In these prints, words are stripped of their polite, restrained forms and pushed towards the gaudy and confrontational. Type becomes a body in itself, swollen and distorted. Language that has historically been used to shame, silence, or sexualise women is reclaimed and amplified until it becomes impossible to ignore. In merging typography with image, the work exposes the power of text not only to communicate, but to provoke, seduce, and disturb.
Photography not my own and used for visualisation purposes only.
