Disrupting Bodies: Contemporary Peruvian Women Artists’ Discourses on the Body

In 2018, indigenous Andean artist Venuca Evanán depicted her self-portrait in a contemporary art fair, dressed in Sarhuino clothes, looking to an artwork of a naked woman covered in hair. The painting by Venuca was done in the customary artistic style of Sarhuinos in Lima and shows the different approaches to the female body by an indigenous and an urban artist.

Since the 1960s women artists living in urban areas in Peru, inspired by feminist European and American art movements, approached the body as the main subject in their works and sought to deconstruct the conventional depictions and meanings assigned to it from a patriarchal perspective (defined as objectified, passive, and stereotyped bodies). Since then, many women artists have rendered suggestive proposals about the body through diverse formal and material experimentations.

In parallel, since the 1960s, many indigenous women had to migrate from their rural towns to the main cities in Peru, especially the capital Lima. With migration, the artistic production of rural women changed and many of them begun to use figurative non-academic depictions of the female body to tell their own experiences, to contest conventional roles assigned to them, and to show empowered female subjects.

By exploring different ways in which Peruvian women artists address the female body to disrupt essentialist definitions about gender roles and the body itself, this paper engages in issues of identity politics, self-representation, and especially in the different artistic and gender dynamics established by race, class, and the urban and rural contexts.