Sexuality, Loss and Maternal Desire in the Work of Carolee Schneemann and Tracey Emin

Abstract

This chapter explores the practice of reading an historically precedent artwork, Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll (1975), through the provocations of one produced twenty-five years later, Tracey Emin’s I’ve Got It All (2000). The use to which female artists have put their own bodies, as both subjects and objects of desire, continues to be a source of contention within feminist art discourse (Jones 2006, p. 149), but Schneemann’s identity as a feminist artist continues to be cited by looking back at the work she made during the 1970s.¹ The published images of Interior Scroll serve as pivotal touchstones of second-wave feminist body art and, in the process of image reproduction, contribute to a canon of works that can be securely identified as properly, if not unproblematically, ‘feminist’.