Gender stereotypes and visual construction of the artist in the 19th century

Feminist theories applied to the visual arts have enabled putting into question the role of gender stereotypes, understood as a category for the visualization and the control of the bodies of women under mechanical reproduction. It is in following its evolution throughout the 19th century through caricature and press illustration that it becomes possible to interpret the assignation of women to domestic roles, the misogyny confronting those stepping out of type, and the creation of types and counter-types in the space devoted to art. Confronted with the normalisation of behaviours and affects, the stereotypes of the Bohemian painter, blue-stocking female artist and homosexual aesthete are so many repulsive figures fascinating to explore. Visual spaces become a somatic field of stigmatization and of political contestation of norms, which fashion in return the gazes modernity allows.