Feminist Interventions on the Masculine Dominance of the Canon: Questioning the Discourse of Femininity and ‘Legitimate’ Aesthetics in Artist Bodies by Shigeko Kubota and Şükran Moral

The canon and canonization practice is built on the masculine gaze and its dominance in visual culture. The canon, which left the female artist and her work at the periphery of its own construction, across with feminism in the visual field as of the 1960s. Since this date, female body artists, who have performed performative productions with a feminist gesture, have been associated with the canon as a counter-attitude to the discursive and visual canon, even if they cannot create a new canon. This article re-reads the concept of canon with feminist theory and examines how the power and influence of the concept puts pressure on the marginalized female artist and her work. In this examine, the practices of Shigeko Kubota and Şükran Moral, who produce contrasting productions with masculine discourse and image culture, are evaluated at the point of meeting the canon and feminism. Kubota and Moral are two artists who have common interests in struggle the canon in different geographies and times. Moral, who made feminist productions in Turkey in the 1990s, transformed the female body into a place where femininity issues were discussed, as Kubota applied, and in this discussion, she took a stance against the canonical structuring in visual and traditional discourse.