‘Suddenly everyone is interested in the subject of women’ reads one of the texts within Emily Floyd’s latest installation. We might be excused for thinking it is a comment on the internationally resurgent interest in feminist art practice over the past year. Instead, the words are quoted from Germaine Greer’s landmark book of 1970, The Female Eunuch.
Like the various recent retrospective exhibitions including Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Floyd’s work is motivated by the spirit of revival and reassessment. These projects all also have the benefit of critical distance from the text afforded by the passage of several decades since the book’s publication, and since the rise of the phenomenon it belonged to—feminism’s second wave. Floyd’s approach to the text is both personal and academic: she belongs to the generation born shortly after the book was published, the generation whose mothers it strongly influenced, and her work questions what currency the text might still hold.
An eccentric and often exasperating book, one characterised equally by gross generalisations and flashes of insight, The Female Eunuch’s central argument is that the liberation of women depends on their sexual liberation. According to Greer, women have become separated from their libidos. The idea of a woman who is castrated by the repression of her sexual desire provides the text with its central rhetorical figure, the so-called ‘female eunuch’.
Emily Floyd is known for works in which she reconstructs quotations from canonical works of literature—including The Stranger by Albert Camus, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky and The Trial by Franz Kafka. In other distinct works