Education and Feminist Aesthetics: Gauguin and the Exotic

Sexotic: The interplay between sexualization and exoticization

“…At the same time, art seems itself to be sometimes inextricably linked to problematic aspects of ‘traveling cultures’ (Clifford, 1992: 96–116). 6 The political implications of art – for example, of primitivism in the late 19th century and specifically of Paul Gauguin's Tahitian paintings that sexualized and exoticized Tahitian women – are fiercely and critically discussed within art history (Duran, 2009; Solomon-Godeau, 1985; for an overview of postcolonial art history, see Karentzos, 2012: 249–266, but also Kravagna, 2016: 65–83; for empirical case studies, see Schmidt-Linsenhoff, 2010). These and many other cultural products provoke the question of how art and, more broadly, the media with its various genres and formats contributed to (de-)stabilizing the hierarchy between ‘the West and the rest’ by means of sexoticization and how they produce sexotic places (Hall, 1992: 275–233).…”