Visual representations of the reading woman: notes on the mutations of a cultural practice

Abstract

The work presents partial results of an investigation seeking to apprehend the symbolic-representational place occupied/destined to women on what concerns the history of reading. Therefore, it adopts as empirical universe the figurations and visual experiences conceived by plastic artists and photographers in the general context of the history of art. Taking as its empirical object an extremely vast group of pictorial and photographic works, the study analyses three specific moments in which the reading gestures performed by women in their contact with press objects configure themselves according to boards of meaning deeply rooted in the cultural sphere, that is: the zealous mother who transmits to her children, while reading, the precepts and norms anchoring religious and communal life in the Middle Ages; the dreaming young ladies of the romantic period who made of reading, both public and private, a resource of individual and emancipating self-formation; and, at last, reading as a common practice incorporated to everyday life of “modern” women, be they at home or at collective spaces, in moments of leisure or labor activities. By the end of this trajectory, one highlights the fact that reading is a cultural practice of apprehending and symbolizing the world whose gestures, activities, productions and representations take place, to a large extent, in different matrixes of signification that conform and inform social life.