
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Freya Willemoes-Wissing’s Love Unbound at the AVA
Ashraf Jamal
In the toilet at the Association of Visual Arts – AVA – on Church Street in Cape Town there is a sheaf of plastic sachets that read – ‘Dear ladies .. The s.h.e bin has been placed in this cubicle for your convenience and personal hygiene and is to be used solely for the disposal of: sanitary towels tampons panty liners’. Salutary. And yet, given the exhibition which I was there to talk about – Freya Willemoes-Wissing’s Love Unbound which focused on the plight and rights of woman – the sachet dedicated to the disposal of women’s sanitary ‘waste’ revealed the extent to which, in 2024, we have still failed to effectively cater for the needs of women, remain caught in a complex regarding cleanliness/uncleanliness, deeply rooted in the biopolitical diminishment of womanhood. Trapped between perceived filth and cleanliness – the obscene archetypes of whore and Madonna, profane and divine – women remain hocked and hobbled in a world in which their needs-expressions-rights are poorly regarded and deferred.
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is a clear indictment of inequality. ‘Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth’. This error is pervasive. But it is not only the representation of the world that is concerning, but its psycho-social, sexual, and cultural economy, in which women’s health and well-being remain precarious – indeed, more so, given legislation in a certain country in the so-called ‘civilised’ west – otherwise known as ‘dumbfuckistan’ – in which a woman’s right to decide the fate of her own body is now legislatively denied. If Willemoes-Wissing’s exhibition is screamingly topical, it is because it is wholly focused on the continued entrapment of women, and their frustrated quest for freedom.



However, long before de Beauvoir’s seminal text, The Second Sex, first published in 1949, there was Mary Wollstonecraft’s masterpiece, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, first published in 1792. Even then, Wollstonecraft was acutely aware that marriage was a system, or economy, of ‘legal prostitution’. Women ‘must marry advantageously, and to this object their time is sacrificed, and their persons often legally prostituted’. This devastating view is one which Willemoes-Wissing shares – indeed, the very term, ‘legal prostitution’, appears in the artist’s book, ‘The Wedding Album’, which tracks a ‘battle’ for liberty. At the root of Wollstonecraft and Willemoes-Wissing’s critique lies so-called ‘civilisation’, a class-based society which falsely places supposed ‘refinement’ at its apex. However, as Wollstonecraft witheringly reminds us, ‘the minds of women are enfeebled by false refinement … treated as subordinate beings, and not as a part of the human species’. This rarefaction of womanhood is pathological and enfeebling. Both genders are debased within such a false economy, for ‘men endeavour to sink … still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment’.
A bipolarity occurs in the division of reason and pleasure, the ideal and the sensual. By consigning women wholly to the sensual realm, denying them access to a life of the mind, in which ‘their senses are inflamed, and their understandings neglected … they become the prey of their senses, delicately termed sensibility, and are thrown about by every gust of feeling’. ‘Civilised’ women are, therefore, ‘so weakened by false refinement, that, respecting morals, their condition is much below what they were if left in a state nearer to nature’. If Wollstonecraft’s critique is devastating, it is because, like Jane Austen, in her novel Sense and Sensibility, she is acutely aware of the fatality factored into the indulgence of emotional excess. It is, therefore, the cultural engineering of women’s fatal state which Willemoes-Wissing addresses, a fatality, indeed, a death-cult, in which women are still sacrificed centuries later. For one cannot ignore their persistent placement at the intersection of fatality and idealism, thereby excluding womanhood from normalcy.
As Naomi Wolf has noted in The Beauty Myth, published in 1991, ‘If the beauty myth is not based on evolution, sex, gender, aesthetics, or God, on what is it based? It claims to be about intimacy and sex and life, a celebration of women. It is actually composed of emotional distance, politics, finance, and sexual repression. The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men’s institutions and institutional power’. It is the corruption at the root of advertising that reveals the degree to which women are repeatedly denied agency and cynically objectified. ‘Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty; women are allowed a mind or a body but not both’. Of course, Wolf’s pithy formulation is a generalization. However, that it should hold true two hundred years after Wollstonecraft’s challenge against ill-education, reaffirms the on-going misery that afflicts women.



Willemoes-Wissing’s exhibition is as focused on the imprisonment of women, their carceral fate, in the very instant that it calls for liberation. A haunting drawing of a woman, in her wedding dress, seen through opaque glass, underscores this entrapment. As for the melancholia that afflicts the pregnant woman, the figure knotted, inward, snagged in its own silent pain? It is clear that Willemoes-Wissing is asking us to consider dread and the unknowable as an inescapable dimension of motherhood, which has all-too-glibly been idealized. That Willemoes-Wissing then draws a pregnant male figure, with belly thrust proudly outward, like the bold prow of a ship, with elbows thrust outward too, and head firmly fixed to a distant horizon, reveals, in turn, the obscenity of male egocentricity and utter lack of true feeling. Worse, the dangerous mockery implicit in this appropriation of the capacity of the female body.
‘No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility’. De Beauvoir’s view is shared by Willemoes-Wissing. But it is not only men’s insecurity that is concerning, but the ways in which it is denied-suppressed-deflected. As Michel Foucault reminds us, power is always embattled. Therefore, it is not only the fact that men control the world that is concerning, but that they are untiring in their morbid desire to continue to do so. John Berger provides us with a tragic equation – ‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves’. Mirthlessly voyeuristic and stultifying, this is a fatal economy from which Willemoes-Wissing strives to escape.
Of course, this flight is never simple or straight-forward. Radical deviance is necessary. The much-discussed matter of polyandry – a woman’s right to marry more than one man – is one which Willemoes-Wissing performed in the opening to her show. It proved a triggering controversy. Why is polyandry frowned upon while polygamy is permissible? This inequity, once again, pivots on the power assigned to men and the perceived powerlessness of women. Willemoes-Wissing’s objective, beyond triggering debate, revolved about a more complex problem – that woman’s liberty is never ever self-evident. Beside the vision of a bride trapped behind opaque glass, we see a wedding dress made of gauze, the stuff for wrapping wounds, strung through a pitch fork. Embroidered about its flared rim are words – ubilili, gender in Zulu, kaerighed, darling in Danish, ghost, power, and others – which speak to the biopolitical, and its darkly amorous romantic dimension. Nothing is innocent, nothing pure. Rather, contamination becomes the very ground of being and culture. As for the allusion to witchery in the strung pitchfork? It is impossible to ignore. Once again, it is the debased archetype affixed to women that is confronted. But of course, supposed debasement is as easily understood as a feared strength. As Catherine McCormack notes in Women in the Picture: Women, Art and the Power of Looking, published in 2021, ‘The witch, the whore and the monster are all really the same archetype. Dangerous and unpredictable, they defy the archetypes of ideal womanhood… They undermine maiden virginity with their unapologetic sexuality. They don’t submit themselves to their husbands, nor are they exclusive with their partners’.

A rally march formed outside the gallery when Willemoes-Wissing had a constitutional lawyer guest speaker Mark Oppenheimer.
It is precisely this rebellion that is at the core of Willemoes-Wissing’s exhibition, Love Unbound. Radically performative, profligate in its use of mixed media, caught always at the cusp of a burning question, some wound or chafing struggle, it is, ultimately, an experimentation in freedom. After all, as McCormack notes, ‘Embracing pleasure as a strategy for liberation comes with a risk, especially in a world that often doesn’t tolerate women’s independent pleasure. As Angela Carter wrote in The Sadeian Woman: the woman who is free to follow her desire in an unfree society is viewed as a monster’. This prejudice prevails. It is against this suppression and reductive cancellation of woman’s freedom that Willemoes-Wissing positions her provocative wager. Women are not to be ‘disposed’ of, the traces of their leaking bodies are not the signs of some obscure horror but a great testimony to life. This is eloquently and exquisitely celebrated in a quilted mosaic of silky pastel sanitary pad packaging that gently flows down the galleries antiseptic white wall. As an experiment with material culture, and its inextricable connection with the woman’s body, it is not a mere spectacle, but truly spectacular.