Exposició "El cos de les dones"

The exhibition gathers brushstrokes of culture and popular knowledge that have paid attention to and accompanied women during their life cycle from reaching reproductive age to the end of this period. This show can serve, if so desired, as a reason for reflection on the treatment that has been granted to women's bodies over the last hundred years. But also on the attention that has been paid to women's knowledge about their own health, their own body, and their own desires. This long vital period of women encompasses from before menarche (first period) to well beyond the last drop of menstrual blood. Society has created an entire cultural device of control, taboos, attentions, assumptions, speculations, sufferings, pleasures, and above all of silences around the female body. Being a woman has never been an easy task, nor have the ways of learning to be one ever been the same. Each society and historical moment elaborates a knowledge transfer device. Currently, a large part of the world lives and consumes under the dictates of needs generated by capitalism. Women's bodies are placed in the focus of a market that seems to have found an inexhaustible great business. Women's life cycles are presented under a presumed standardized and universal female identity susceptible to being medicalized, modeled, attenuated, modified, etc. But has it always been like this? Have women always resorted to the Internet or to conventional or alternative medicine to know their body and face the physiological transformations they experienced. What is proposed in this exhibition is an ethnological reading on this topic: How Catalan women have learned and shared knowledge about the physiological transformations of their body How they have faced challenges such as fertility, abortion, sexuality, etc. Material and immaterial culture in reference to women's body How society has modeled and shaped women's sexuality and health More information Exhibition "El cos de les dones" on the website of the Department of Culture Within the itinerant exhibition program of the Directorate General of Popular Culture and Cultural Associationism, of the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya