Watching One’s Back: Self-Portraits of Disabled Women’s Backs as Provocative and Protective

The female nude in visual art traditionally features the front of the body to display the breasts and crotch, the most erotically charged areas of a woman’s body, as well as the face, the body part most associated with identity. Images of the nude female body from behind imply that the subject has turned her back on viewers to refuse the gaze and/or that the subject is unaware that anyone or anything is watching or following her. This pose in representations both ignores and facilitates actions of voyeurism. The female back in this chapter serves as a site of simultaneous power and vulnerability. I center this survey on self-portraits I have completed of my own naked back that reveal elements of my asymmetry, amputee arms and legs, and biography. I will draw visual and thematic comparisons between these works and other self-portraits of female artists’ backs from late modern and contemporary art history to mine the implications and consequences of this pose. Two of these examples are by other disabled female artists who produce empowering visions of their backs in the medium of photography.