Pain versus Pleasure: sexuality in women’s performance

Abstract

This article investigates the opposition of pain versus pleasure in the performances in the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo collection, from 1972 to 2021. The performance works analyzed share, as a major attribute, a relation to extreme physical limit. This study correlates the concepts of pain and pleasure with the advances and setbacks suffered by women socially, politically, and culturally in order to understand who are these women received into the museum. Also, we discuss women’s aesthetic construction in the history of art, considering the various intersections of gender, race, and class to comprehend the complex sexual web in women’s art.