 In 1968, when the poet Anne Sexton published the Ballad of the Lonely Master Vater in the Hudson Review, she entered into an already increasingly public discourse regarding women's private sexual experiences. A unique historical moment, the 1960s and 70s saw a rise in the cultural legitimization of previously taboo sexual practices and artistic articulations of such practices. In defiance of past prohibitions, Second Wave Radical Feminism claimed masturbation as a quote, political act of individual liberation from confining social structures, the home, marriage, the family, and insisted that women's sexuality was life affirming and non-objectifying. Subsequently, female collectives, sex workshops and masturbation manuals enjoyed unprecedented popularity and helped contribute to what Jane Juffer has termed the quote, mainstreaming of masturbation. This mainstreaming enabled female cultural performers to further explore what it meant to be a sexual woman. In particular, artists such as Miriam Shapiro and Judy Chicago championed what is today known as a vulvic or cunt art to art historians, which can be defined as a type of essentialist aesthetic that focuses on the universal physical characteristics that all women share, their sexual organs or genitalia. While cunt art has been both celebrated as a symbol of sexual impairment and both criticized for its reductionism, this aesthetic continues to play an important role in the construction of sex, gender, and femininity. One contemporary artist in particular, Tracy Emman, continues to push the boundaries of this tradition. Specifically, Emman's many depictions of the masturbating female, which are mostly joyless, problematized, and affirmative, and non-objectifying view of sexuality in their very objection. In this presentation, I will explore the ways that Emman fashions the masturbating and sexually transgressive female body, paying particular attention to how her carefully cultivated artistic persona and her chosen subject matter question the possibility of sexual fulfillment in this postmodern world, both solitary and communal. Cultural historian Thomas Lacker has identified two masturbation narratives that run through contemporary history. The first one as, quote, a mode of liberation, claim to autonomy, and pleasure for its own sake, and masturbation as selfish, purposeless, meaningless, destructive of human relations, and representative of commercial excess. These two narratives are useful in characterizing how artistic conceptions of masturbation have evolved from feminist art of the 1970s to the postmodern feminist present. Norma Brood and Mary Garard have persuasively argued that feminist art has helped form postmodern thought, quote, the understanding that gender is socially constructed, the widespread validation of non-high art forms such as craft, the questioning of the cult of genius, are all qualities associated with postmodernism. What postmodernism does not inherit from 1970s feminist art traditions is a preoccupation with celebrity, materiality, consumerism, and commodification. These contemporary concerns are, however, directly relevant to third wave feminist movements of which emin is arguably a part of. Third wave feminist movements have also attempted to both challenge and liberate various sexual ideologies and practices such as sadomasochism, pornography, and prostitution in essence to use them politically. Leo Bersani has criticized the past pastoralization of sex and has asserted that sex is not, quote, a second wave feminist liberal such as Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin would have it, an expression of tenderness and love, but again structurally anti-communal, anti-egalitarian, anti-nurturing, anti-loving, unequal in its essence. Straddling these two philosophical modes, Tracy Emman's work articulates a desire for tenderness and love, but ultimately questions its possibility. Sex for emin is tinged with loss, objection, humiliation, objectification, commodification, physical and psychological injury, and power games between unequal partners. It might be helpful to ask ourselves then as Peter Osborn has, is emin fucking or being fucked by. Interpretations of sex acts have been complicated and controlled by historical and social context and the sex act changes and shifts its significance depending on the dictates of culture and taboo. In the post-modern moment, one that defies authoritative definitions and challenges both stability and significance, the sexual act is threatened by a loss of meaning. In post-modernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism, Frederick Jameson criticizes the commodification and popularization of so-called offensive forms of contemporary art, claiming that their subversive qualities are effectively nullified by their commercial ones. Jameson's cautionary parable of the end of the theories of transgression concludes with these transgressive artworks finally called on to undo themselves and to abolish the very logic on which their attraction repulsion was based on in the first place. Jameson's disgust with post-modernism hinges upon its symbolic castration of politically, socially, and sexually subversive forms of resistance. The mainstreaming of kink, SNM pornography, and prostitution may help legitimize these practices, but problematically, such mainstreaming diffuses any radical potential. Expressing a similar sentiment in the November 1999 issue of art news, Lyndon Auckland somewhat laments, quote, in a post-modern world like ours, badness is acceptable in women. It indicates feistiness and it's a sign of energy and unconventionality. This bad girl persona adopted by many female artists allows for simultaneous transgression and titillation. Quote, embracing the overly pornographic and confessional have become a means of releasing women's sexuality from the comforts of a progressive eroticism and turning that into an angry voluptuousness. For many female artists, then, this practice allows them to subvert traditional gender roles, sexual ideologies, and practices. However, the mainstream has not only embraced badness, but also established a market for it. This leaves radical artists to consider what exactly, just exactly how they should navigate badness in a capitalist environment that thrives on and promotes such labels. Within the economic and sexual politics of the 1990s, the YBAs, or Young British Artists, the group that Emmett is traditionally associated with, achieved an especially notorious reputation for flaunting convention, participating in and promoting consumer and pop culture, and posturing themselves irreverently against serious conceptual art of the 1980s. The YBAs, championed by advertising executive Charles Sachi, and originally collectively exhibited in the appropriately titled Sensation Show in 1997 at the Royal Academy of Art, have been at the center of contemporary art controversies regarding the use of graphic violence, sex, and other scandalous subject material in their art. Among the many artworks displayed at the Sensation Show, Tracey Emmond's infamous tent, everyone I have ever slept with, 1963 to 1995, created an uproar when people, perhaps willingly misinterpreted the work as a distasteful display of sexual bravado. It wasn't, quite literally, it was everyone she had ever slept with, including her grandmother, her brother in the womb, and all sorts of other non-sexual partners. So if the public reads and celebrates sex in Emmond's work, perhaps it is because Emmond herself consciously encourages it, and quote, if I was in denial about my sexuality, she has said, I'd be in denial about aspects of my work, which deal with personal revelations. Emmond's claim both reflects and fosters the popular view held toward her work, that it is directly related to her personal experience and that there is no distinction between Emmond the artist and Emmond the woman. While such a blatantly autobiographical reading is tempting, it ultimately threatens to reduce Emmond's art. Rosemary Bederton poses a more sophisticated reading of Emmond's artistic body and the function of her body of work. Quote, through her work, she territorialized her own body as the signifier of Mad Tracey from Margate who operated as a transgressive figure within the conventions of the art world. Especially in regards to the emotionally charged and sexually explicit nature of Emmond's work, the impulse to allow slippage between artist and woman, art subject and object creates a messy terrain for us to navigate. The perils of a woman promoting her art as autobiographical are connected to the anxiety society continues to feel about the female who is simultaneously sex symbol and serious artist, both cerebral and embodied. Third wave feminist critic and writer Naomi Wolf has candidly addressed this double standard. Quote, I am sick of the opposition trying to make me choose between being sexual and serious and I am sick of being split the same way by victim feminism. I want to be a serious thinker and not have to hide the fact that I have breasts. I want female sexuality to accompany rather than undermine female political power. Similarly, Emmond's reputation as a serious artist is often challenged by her personal appearance, taste and activities. The fact that she models for Vivian Westwood and Bombay sapphire gin dresses in expensive and provocative clothing and attend celebrity functions. I am feminine, Emmond has said. I like nice clothes and unfortunately, a lot of people don't take me seriously because of this. Trivials this might seem, the reality behind Emmond's gripe is nonetheless significant. As if directly challenging her detractors an important aspect of Emmond's work is the reclamation of the female body as a spectacular sexual site. Her strategies include emphasizing the physical, the fashionable and the erotic aspects of the body. Works like My Beautiful Legs and Sometimes I Feel Beautiful suggests pleasure in personal grooming and aesthetic self-objectification. In My Beautiful Legs, the focus is entirely on Emmond's gams from the knees down, clad and stylish probably expensive designer heels. Sometimes I Feel Beautiful is a photograph of Emmond in the bathtub looking tanned, pretty and peaceful. In this moment of feeling beautiful, Emmond actively desires and courts the viewer's gaze. She is both artist and the model and as such disturbs traditional notions of aesthetic modesty and vanity. When Emmond feels beautiful, she's going to show off critics be damned. Not only has Emmond participated in the fashion marketplace as a model, but she has also worked as a designer for high-end labels such as Longchamp. Through her 2004 collaboration with that company which resulted in a limited edition luggage and handbag line, Tracey Emmond for Longchamp later caused her regret. Emmond clearly learned from her foray into the world of consumer merchandising and used her experience to create more challenging conceptual art. For example, Emmond's Longchamp creations featured detachable rosettes. According to the advertisements, the rosettes featured an Emmond hand-drawn Longchamp logo and a handwritten name of a street, city, or hotel which reminds her of a moment of love. Each rosette is therefore an original signed by the artist. In 2005, Emmond made another series of rosettes that referred back to her Longchamp ones though instead of the name of a location, action, cut, oh yes, and more featured drawings of a masturbating woman in the center of the rosette. Aside from the obvious sexual signification, the blue ribbon quality of the rosette design carries with it connotations of competition, success, and public display. Emmond's rosettes retain their material history as coveted awards and also obtain new significance as images praising female sexual behavior and bestowing status on it. Despite these more celebratory, fun depictions of the female body, Emmond mostly traffics in disturbing, traumatic, and alienating images of sexual subjugation. Various types of rape, sexual abuse, and joyless board masturbation stand out among Emmond's monoprints as an obsessive theme. And I didn't do anything wrong. The central figure is that of a masturbating female surrounded by various phrases such as might have had a few weird fantasies though, I'm really fucking and hey, don't leave me. The figure is rendered in Emmond's trademark scrawl, convulsed into submissive posture of sexual presentation and positioned awkwardly almost uncomfortably. The phrases circulating around the figure might be conceived of as thought bubbles, the monologue or dialogue accompanying these weird fantasies Emmond alludes to. Since the figure is solitary, we have to assume that she is either telling the viewer or an imagined remembered other not to leave. In any case, there is loss or fear of abandonment implicit in the work and intrinsically connected to the sex act. Particularly, the figure's insistent, I'm really fucking, stands out as suggestive of Lacker's second type of masturbation narrative, the delusional meaningless type. A similarly depressing depiction of masturbation is I used to have a good imagination. This work shows a woman sitting on a couch underneath what looks like a gun. The title phrase scrawled across the bottom of the print. The threatening presence that the gun brings to, the threatening presence of the gun brings to mind victimization. Perhaps a sexual assailant holding a gun to the head of the individual he's about to victimize. In Emmond's image, however, the gun is autonomously aimed at the woman whose joyless masturbation is posited by the text as a result of a lack of imagination. Is this figure indicative of punishment? Does masturbation lead to a drying up of creativity instead of fostering creativity? Or is the figure's lack of imagination related to this post-modern condition of overstimulation? Observing the banality implied in such an image of compulsive compulsory masturbation, Jennifer Doyle suggests that quote, the work equates a failure of imagination with masturbation, with the excesses of everyday desire. The woman in the picture seems like she might be bored. The picture seems drawn out of boredom. Apparently, the figure has masturbated so extensively that she has lost the ability to create fantasy narratives and has become jaded. In this image, Emmond makes the titillating seem everyday or commonplace and she turns the sexualized object into the bored and boring subject. One might ask where the liberation is present in such a vision. Knowing myself is perhaps Emmond's most self-consciously critical masturbation piece. It features the familiar scrawled female spreading her legs, this time rendered in violent red lines under a chunk of Emmond's typically misspelled prose. And there's a prose. Yes, I didn't spell it that way. Sometimes I try not to masturbate. Sometimes I make myself go weeks and weeks without even touching myself sexually. I, my self-esteem, instead of going lower, becomes higher because I no longer have to deal with my ever-boring sick fantasies. This piece does in stark contrast to the feminist pieces from the 1970s where women, quote, emphasize the materiality and specificity of the female body precisely to liberate women from ignorance about their bodies and shame about sexual pleasure. With this past optimism in mind, the title of Emmond's work is actually ironic. Knowing oneself is not the positive and beneficial activity encouraged by second-wave feminism and pro-masturbation movements is actually painful, disturbing, detrimental, and, once again, boring. Instead of celebrating sexual autonomy, Emmond's figure finds herself trapped in her head. The confessional tone of the piece hinges on the language of deprivation, even asceticism, refraining from sexually pleasuring oneself actually saves the figure from wallowing in her sick fantasies, which, for all of Emmond's candor, are omitted. In response to this negativity, Chris Townsend has noted, quote, the attention to history in these prints is frequently upon sexual experience, masturbation, anal, and vaginal intercourse, and its inevitably catastrophic aftermath, a collapse into hysteria and emotional distress. Townsend's fusion of the sex act and its negative outcomes is significant in respect to Emmond's own refusal to separate sex from trauma. Both articulations emphasize the risk inherent in female erotic expression. While feminist art of the 1970s, such as Judy Chicago's, celebrated a binding female essentialism, and emphasized fertility, egalitarian sex, and special feminine knowledge, Emmond's post-modern, post-traumatic sex leftovers emphasize objection, loss, pain, and disembodiment. Emmond's treatment of the post-modern sexual subject emphasizes a fundamental insecurity over whether holistic, egalitarian relationships are possible, especially relationships with the self. Whether masturbating or engaging in intercourse, the hastily rendered figures in Emmond's monoprints and fabric arts suggest that sex is either a distraction, an excessive compulsion, or a way to assert dominance and power. Emmond's figures are always blind, whether shutting their eyes, and fantasizing in isolation, or bearing their heads into pillows when engaging with other partners. The phrase, I'm really fucking, thus becomes the slogan for the disconnect Emmond subjects feel, both from their bodies and from themselves. Thank you.