In her collection of essays, An Intimate Distance, Rosemary Betterton applies the tools of current critical theory to representations created by women. The subjects of her analysis range from early twentieth century artists to postmodern art practice, providing a historical as well as critical perspective on the ways in which women artist transcribe their cultural “body.” The “Intimate Distance” of the title describes, for Betterton, how women represent their subjective selves while at the same time holding the objective distance. 

Betterton defines her argument in the essay, “Mother Figures: The Maternal Nude in the Work of Kathe Kollwitz and Paula Modersohn-Becker.” In representing the female nude, these early twentieth-century artists disrupted the male artist “as master of the gaze and the natural work, signified through the naked body of a woman.” For Betterton, a unique mind/body split arises since the artist is “looked at as well as looking.” The image of the nude combined with the maternal image signifies the conflict between these women’s artistic identity and their sexual, feminine selves. In a culture that did not allow the role of the artist and mother to coexist, the maternal nude offered the best answer to this conflict. 

The monstrous mother in the movie Alien, the anorexic, the pin-up: all are used by women artists, according to Betterton, to explore the “experiences of he feminine body that are psychically and culturally determined.” The treatment of women in horror films, for instance, has a direct correlation to Cindy Sherman’s images of the distorted female body. Buy by asking “are such transgressions productive to women?” Betterton resorts to what “should” be represented rather than what is, which undermines the book’s objective analysis. Included is an unnecessary psychological profile of the anorexic and the bulimic; Betterton does a better job applying women’s fixation on food and its related diseases to works that explore these subjects, such as Helen Chadwick’s Loop My Loop, a piece constructed with Barbie doll hair wrapped around an intestine, and Laura Godfrey-Issac’s The Alien and the Domestic, both of which “incorporate women’s fascination with food with a culturally constructed body image.” 

Betterton also analyzes more recent developments in women’s art practice, including the ways abstract art can incorporate the body and the self as subject when postmodern theory has declared “the death of the subject.” Women artists have successfully explored the body in nonrepresentational art despite, as Betterton addresses, a male dominance of the form. More importantly, women have found ways to replace the create with a “resisting subject.” The artists represented here are Asian, Jewish and Arab, and in their work they address questions of self and identity while questioning dominant culture. 

Betterton’s conclusion – that such images put the viewer in the place of the subject, thereby enacting a new consciousness of otherness – is idealistic, but her analysis of the challenge facing the marginalized artist and the strategies used to represent the feminine “subject” point to a new direction of representation-