The master’s thesis Regarding the Pain of Women is intended to explore the perception of pain and gender differences and to connect this research with artistic practices. In my thesis, I studied the changes in the perception of women’s pain in the sciences and arts in history and the related notion of power and power relations, focusing more specifically on the 19th and 20th centuries.
As part of my theoretical work, I first defined the concept of pain in philosophy and its history. An overview of the beginnings in antiquity is followed by an analysis of key changes in the notion of pain during the Age of Enlightenment, in which the practices of torture, cruelty, punishment, and the notion of power were put at the forefront. Central in this part are the conceptualization of masochism in the analysis of the works of Sigmund Freud and Gilles Deleuze and the placement of gender difference in the perception of pain, which I have broken down in more detail in the conceptual context of bios, zoe, and psyche. In order to explain in more detail the difference between the sexes in terms of pain perception, I devoted myself to elaborating a view within which the problematization of the attitude towards the pain of women and a photographer as an observer and empathetic being in this situation are placed.
I connected the theoretical and practical parts in terms of the history of weaving, women’s work and by the interconnection of body, text, and pain.
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