Women’s Body Image in Art: With Rhetoric Criticism of Sonja Foss

Abstract:

The project focuses on the examination of the body image of women in various works of art and rhetoric throughout history while using the framework of the scholar Sonja Foss’s visual rhetorical criticism as a guide. The art depictions of women chosen for the project are from the ancient era to the post-modern world era. There would be no understanding of artwork without examining the rhetorical perspective, especially from a woman such as Sonja Foss. Sonja Foss is used as a guide to examining the depictions of women in the arts because she delved into the rhetoric of art and body image in her research. Her rhetorical criticism gives more perspective on what these artworks depicting women truly represent during the era to the artist and what it could communicate to any viewer. In every era, there is the rhetoric of the women who lived in them.  The analysis of rhetoric in body image and women, the artworks from the eras can be examined fully. The many artworks studied represent women in symbolic or literal ways dependent on the era and there are not many written records of them. Sonja Foss’s work on rhetoric also helped achieve a more in-depth analysis of what the artworks meant and how they communicated different body images of women during the eras chosen.