From Self-Help Mirrors to the Surveilled Self: Feminist Video and Healthcare Activism in the 1970s

Salacious yet restrained, Martha Rosler’s 1977 striptease exposed more than just her naked body. Remade specifically for video, it called attention to the use of new media and technology in reshaping women’s subjectivity at the onset of the information age. Examining the early video projects of Martha Rosler, Lisa Steele, and Hannah Wilke, this paper argues that these artists politicized video’s feedback capabilities in response to the increasingly mediated and networked commodification of the body under the purview of biopolitics. During the 1970s, corporate and entrepreneurial interests wrested control over biopolitical life from sovereign states, and transformed biological processes into forms of data and technology. Reacting to these transformations, feminists demanded autonomy over the female body and actively sought to reshape the medical landscape. Activists like the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective and the Self-Help Movement fostered a collective environment of knowledge production based on self-observation meant to evade commodification. Within this context, artists like Martha Rosler, Lisa Steele, and Hannah Wilke turned to video to document their own bodies as political protest. This paper demonstrates that while documenting their own bodies, female artists utilized the specific technological conditions of video, including its live feedback function and anti-institutional distribution networks, to create a feminist media language analogous to consciousness raising.