Seeing Through The Tropes: How Art History Shaped Women's Identity | Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt

How do the images we see shape the way we understand ourselves and one another?

In this episode of Makers & Mystics, Stephen Roach sits down with art historian and author Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt to explore her new book, Look Like a Lady: Five Visual Tropes of Womanhood and How to See Ourselves Differently.

Drawing from centuries of art history, Elissa identifies five recurring ways women have been depicted and understood: Venus, Vessel, Maiden, Mother, and Monster. These aren't simply artistic categories. They are stories that can quietly shape our expectations about beauty, femininity, motherhood, sexuality, agency, and even holiness.

Together, Stephen and Elissa explore how these visual tropes have influenced both popular culture and Christian imagination and consider the alternative stories that can help us see women as whole, particular, embodied people rather than objects, symbols, or stereotypes.

The conversation moves from ancient Greek sculpture and Renaissance paintings to Victorian photography, contemporary beauty culture, purity culture, and the ways women are represented within the church.

Along the way, Elissa introduces five counter-stories:

Witnessing instead of objectifying
Being instead of becoming an empty vessel for someone else's meaning
Moving instead of remaining passive or contained
Cultivating instead of being reduced to motherhood
Partnering instead of viewing men and women as threats or opposites

At the heart of the conversation is a deeper question: What might it look like to recover a vision of womanhood rooted not in cultural expectations, but in the particularity, dignity, agency, and belovedness of each person created in the image of God?

For artists, this conversation offers an invitation to consider how the images we create participate in forming the imagination of the people who encounter them.

And for all of us, it raises an important possibility: perhaps freedom doesn't come from simply rejecting old stories, but from learning to recognize them—and telling truer ones.

Elissa Weichbrodt is an art historian, educator, and author. Her new book, Look Like a Lady: Five Visual Tropes of Womanhood and How to See Ourselves Differently, examines the ways visual culture has shaped our understanding of womanhood and offers a more expansive, hopeful vision.

Connect with Elissa on Instagram: http://instagram.com/elissabrodt
Get the book: https://bakerbookhouse.com/products/9781587436925_look-like-a-lady

Listen to our previous conversation with Elissa: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s11-e07-redeeming-vision-with-dr-elissa-yukiko-weichbrodt/id1090123738?i=1000605110237

S12 E02: A Social Imaginary with Karen Swallow Prior

What role does the imagination play in shaping the identity of a culture?

Our collective imagination provides metaphors, stories and symbols that bind people groups together and create a common understanding of the world.

But what happens when those metaphors no longer carry the same meanings? Or even worse, when those stories and metaphors no longer create unity but bring division and harm?

Professor and writer Karen Swallow Prior addresses these concerns in her book The Evangelical Imagination.

She tells us, contemporary American evangelicalism is suffering from an identity crisis - and a lot of bad press.

In this episode, Karen discusses what Charles Taylor called ‘A social imaginary’ and how artists and creatives can respond to the evangelical crisis of identity and bring healing to our cultural fractures.

Transcript

S6 E14: The Art of Memoir with Cinelle Barnes

Cinelle Barnes is a memoirist, essayist, and educator from Manila, Philippines, and is the author of MONSOON MANSION: A MEMOIR (Little A, 2018) and MALAYA: ESSAYS ON FREEDOM (Little A, 2019), and the editor of a forthcoming anthology of essays about the American South (Hub City Press, 2020).

In this episode, Stephen talks with Cinelle about memoir as an agent of healing and how her process of writing helped navigate the difficulties of childhood trauma.

**Patrons of the podcast can enjoy an additional interview segment with Cinelle outlining practical steps of memoir writing for any of you writers out there who are interested in learning what it takes to get your story from the pen to the page.

Art As Healing, authors, storytellingStephen RoachFebruary 12, 2020memoir, Women Writers, Cinelle Barnes, Monsoon Mansion, Malaya, writing

Artist Profile Series 24: Flannery O' Connor

Flannery O’ Connor was a Southern, fiction writer and essayist born March 25th 1925 in Savannah, Georgia. She was a devout Roman Catholic with a penchant for satire, dark humor and wild, religious imagination. Today, O’Connor is considered to be one of America’s greatest fiction writers and an apologist for the Catholic faith.

Her stories are far from what you might imagine coming from a Southern Christian writer in the 1950’s. They are full of shocking scenes of violence, depravity and shady, sometimes comic Christian characters such as a bible salesman who steals a prosthetic leg or a pseudo-prophet who steals mummified dwarfs. Her character’s twisted views of reality warps the basic tenets of the faith they profess. Their situations often end in bloodshed.