Abstract: This article, grounded in the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, examines the role of the female body in conceptual art and performance after the 1960s. Drawing on Lacan’s concepts of feminine jouissance, the “not-all” (pas-toute) structure, the gaze, and the limits of symbolic inscription, this study argues that women’s body art is not an erasure of subjectivity but a strategic evasion of phallic capture. Through works by Eleanor Antin, Mary Kelly, Susan Hiller, Cindy Sherman, and others, the body emerges as a surface resistant to symbolic fixation, invoking a jouissance that remains irreducible to the phallic economy. This exploration is conducted in the rigorous academic style suitable for scholarly platforms such as Academia.edu, with careful referencing and structured argumentation.

Introduction

The emergence of performance and conceptual body art in the late 1960s provided women artists a radical means of re-engaging with visibility, identity, and representation. Unlike the early minimalist discourse that sought to treat the body as a “neutral material,” female artists foregrounded its libidinal, gendered, and socio-symbolic investments. From a Lacanian perspective, particularly as elaborated in Seminar XX: Encore, the body of the woman cannot be fully represented within the symbolic order; it carries an excess that resists full inscription. This article interrogates how strategies of impersonality in women’s body art enact a refusal of phallic legibility and instead open a space for a form of subjectivity grounded in the feminine jouissance beyond the phallus.

Feminine Jouissance and the Refusal of Eroticization
In Seminar XX, Lacan introduces the concept of feminine jouissance as a form of enjoyment that escapes full articulation in language. Feminine jouissance is distinct from phallic jouissance; it is not structured entirely by the law of the signifier. As Lacan states: “There is a jouissance that belongs to that ‘she’ who is not-all.” (Lacan, Encore, 1972-73, p. 76-77). This jouissance is characterized by its opacity, its resistance to symbolic domestication, and its proximity to the Real.

In the works of Eleanor Antin (Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, 1972) and Mary Kelly (Post-Partum Document, 1973-79), we encounter a refusal of the eroticization typically demanded by the gaze. Antin’s systematic, emotionless documentation of bodily transformation during dieting, and Kelly’s quasi-scientific analysis of child-rearing, both eschew personal confession and erotic display. They situate the female body not as a site of phallic desire but as a surface on which an unrepresentable jouissance silently inscribes itself.

The Body as Surface: Not-All and Symbolic Resistance
Lacan’s formulation that Woman is “not-all” in the symbolic implies that no single signifier can encapsulate feminine being. The female body thus appears less as an essence to be revealed than as a surface that resists closure. In Antin’s and Kelly’s works, the aesthetics of serial documentation, deadpan neutrality, and medicalized abstraction reflect this structural resistance. These strategies do not celebrate egoic selfhood; rather, they enact an impersonality that disrupts the symbolic demand for coherent, phallicized subjectivity.

Cindy Sherman, particularly in her Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), extends this logic. By using her body as a mutable screen onto which different cultural images of femininity are projected, Sherman demonstrates that “woman” is not a unified identity but a series of performative positions—none of which captures the Real of feminine jouissance.

Beyond the Mirror: Gaze and the Disruption of Visibility
constituted by the point from which it is seen. Women’s body art after the 1960s often enacts not the seduction of the gaze but its deflection. Standardized poses, neutral expressions, and clinical formats deny the viewer the satisfaction of recognition or erotic possession. Instead, the body becomes a “stain” in the field of vision—the place where the gaze fails to close the circuit of meaning.

This disruption aligns with Lacan’s broader claim that “there is no sexual relationship” (il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel), meaning that bodies are asymmetrically related in the symbolic order and cannot be sutured by representation. The female artist, by making her body a surface of interruption rather than exhibition, embodies this impossibility.

Conclusion
Through a Lacanian lens, the impersonality of women’s body art reveals itself not as a negation of subjectivity but as a radical reconfiguration of it. Situated in the space of the not-all, these works resist the symbolic closure demanded by the phallic order. The female body, rather than being captured by the gaze or fully represented by signifiers, asserts itself as a site of Real jouissance, of an enjoyment that eludes mastery.

Thus, women’s body art from the late twentieth century exemplifies a subversion of traditional representations of femininity. It offers a space where identity is not fixed but fluctuates, where the subject is not whole but fractured, and where art reveals the fault lines of symbolic meaning itself.