Depicting Female Bodies: Doris Wishman, Carolee Schneemann, and Legacies of Subversion

This chapter explores the work of Doris Wishman and Carolee Schneemann, two women whose work explores the implications of being a woman, and what it meant to inhabit a body coded female. While the chapter addresses Wishman’s work in the context of exploitation cinema, and her cinema’s relationship to the more established avant-garde and the ways in which her work deserves placement in the avant-garde, it primarily initiates a conversation between Wishman and Schneemann’s work by analyzing the ways they both centralize female bodies in their films and demonstrate the complexities of depicting female nudity.