Essay by Millie Hopton for Contextualising Practice
Positionality Statement
I am a white, straight, cisgender woman born in 1999, who has spent their whole life in Australia. I come from a stable, middle-class background; my parents remain together, and I have had access to both secondary and tertiary education. Being raised in a predominantly Anglo-Australian context, I have benefited from the privileges associated with whiteness and heteronormativity in Australian society. These aspects of my identity shape how I perceive the world and interact with various social and cultural issues. I recognise that my experiences are shaped by a set of social advantages, such as educational access, family stability, and racial privilege, that are not universally shared. Acknowledging this helps me approach my analysis with a greater sense of awareness, especially when engaging with perspectives that are different from my own.
Essay
Woman is not born: she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so – Andrea Dworkin (1981: 481)
Soft sculpture is tactile and bodily, and is historically coded as feminine due to its links to textile craft. It therefore provides a powerful medium for examining the enduring psychological and cultural impacts of early 2000s pop culture on Australian women from Generation Z (Gen Z). Gilbert (2025) contextualises the experiences of several female American celebrities during the early 2000s, including Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and Lindsay Lohan, to investigate the psychological and cultural factors that have followed the hypersexualisation of these young female celebrities. They were subject to slut-shaming and paparazzi abuse, while being marketed by a virginity-obsessed culture. Audiences watched as these women were being promoted for their unrealistic body standards, whilst promoting ‘girl power’, despite their significant lack of diverse female representation (as three white, American females). Gilbert highlights that it is the confusing array of mixed messaging that young girls digested, subconsciously and often without consent, that has contributed to greater internalised misogyny, body image issues, a hyperfocus on appearance, and the silencing of abuse and trauma. Through its pliability and material intimacy, soft sculpture can embody and critique complex intersections of gender, power, identity, and cultural expectations. When coupled with feminist theory and auto-theory, soft sculpture not only becomes a powerful form of embodied storytelling but also a political and philosophical site of resistance. By analysing several key thinkers, including Susan Sontag, Andrea Dworkin, Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, and John Berger, I will engage with the lineage of female imagery through contemporary digital girlhood; the experience, identity, and cultural expression of girlhood as it’s shaped and mediated through digital technologies.
The 2000s: Gen Z, Pop Culture, and the Feminised Digital Body
For many Australian Gen Z women, born between 1995 and 2012, the early aughts (between 2000-2009) were a formative landscape of cultural messaging saturated with images of thin, white, hyper-feminine icons. Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, The Spice Girls and Bratz dolls offered contradictory ideals of being sexy yet innocent, empowered yet compliant, and unique yet consumable. Simultaneously, it was the time of desktop computers and technologically illiterate parents, meaning the internet became an open and lawless space for self-exploration. As Valen (2020) has noted, the internet offered forums for queer and gender-diverse expression but also exposed young people to the proliferation of unfiltered sexual and pornographic content, often consumed in the absence of sex education or understanding of sex workers’ rights. Here, the lines between autonomy and objectification are blurred. Unlike Bratz dolls, the women depicted in internet pornography are real. Their bodies are consumed as sexual possessions in a digital economy of male desire. Andrea Dworkin (1979:481) argues that:
“Men have created the group, the type, the concept, the epithet, the insult, the industry, the trade, the commodity, the reality of woman as whore”.
In this context, the “whore” is not an individual, but a cultural invention shaped by male dominance, rendering women’s sexual visibility as something that exists only within patriarchal ownership.
Lauren Fournier (2022) defines auto-theory as the combination of theory and philosophy with autobiography, as a mode of critical artist practice. It is through an auto-theoretical framework that I have been able to confront my personal experiences as a female and how a female should be. For example, at thirteen years old in 2012, I involuntarily experienced pornography for the first time on Tumblr, a microblogging and social networking website. At eighteen years old, I had undergone laser hair removal surgery, I would fake-tan every Thursday, and regularly got my eyebrows tinted, my upper lip waxed, and my nails done. My desire to achieve these typically unnatural sexualised ideals that I had seen through media was driven by an anxiety of being considered ‘unlikable’, as a naturally hairy, freckly, and pale woman. Throughout my twenties, I have often grieved the loss of my body hair and mourned for the natural element of my own body that I removed, too young, just to be tidy, sexy, and consistent with the female icons that I have been accustomed to aspiring to.
Sophie Gilbert, in Girl on Girl, writes that ‘to be a girl is to be looked at’ (2025:51), echoing John Berger’s foundational argument that critiques ‘the male gazeWays of Seeing (1972: 46):
“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself… From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.”
The split between the “surveyor” and the “surveyed” – between the woman who watches and the woman who is watched – was embedded in the pop culture that shaped young minds. Teen magazines taught girls to edit themselves. Reality shows encouraged constant comparison. Saturated by glossy magazines, diet ads, and tabloid shame cycles, girlhood became a performance of bodily surveillance. The act of ‘performing’ aligns with the post-structuralist gender theorist and philosopher, Judith Butler, who argues that gender is not something we are, but something we do. Therefore, the bedazzled, pink and packaged pop aesthetic functioned as both a fantasy and a trap, reinforcing rigid gender norms and cultivating a version of femininity that was curated for visual consumption by the heteronormative, white, western, capitalist, patriarchal, male gaze. Lily Allen sings in her 2006 song The Fear:
“I am a weapon of massive consumption,
It’s not my fault,
It’s how I’m programmed to function.”
Over my twenty-six years, my identity has been shaped, expressed, and often curated through a series of available online platforms that I joined, including YouTube (2006), Facebook (2010), Skype (2010), Snapchat (2012), Instagram (2012), Tumblr (2012), Pinterest (2012), Vine (2013), Spotify (2014), Co-Star (2017), LinkedIn (2018), Tinder (2019), TikTok (2020), Twitter (X) (2020), Hinge (2021), and Threads (2024). Each platform has acted not just as a tool of communication, but as a site of performance, demanding that I (a young person) become legible, attractive, articulate, and emotionally available to connect with anyone who might want to connect with me. My ability to take and post desirable images, engage appropriately, and cultivate an appealing presence has enabled me to maintain long-distance relationships, secure professional opportunities, and find both sexual and romantic partners. But beneath this connectivity lies a constant negotiation of visibility, desirability, and self-surveillance. One that is inherently gendered and deeply entangled with the economies of digital femininity.
Soft Sculpture as Embodied Critique
For decades, feminist artists have confronted the problem of how to tell the truth about their bodies. Queer bodies, sick bodies, racialised bodies, female bodies. What is their language, and what materials do they need to transcribe it? As Auther (2010) has argued, soft sculpture, with its connotations of domesticity, craft, and containment, offers a language through which these cultural contradictions can be materialised and reimagined.
My soft sculpture work (presented through photographic documentation) The Angel in The House (2025) (Figure 1) draws direct inspiration from Rebecca Horn’s Berlin Exercises (1974) (viewed in Rebecca Horn: The Glance of Infinity 1997), in which she uses physical extensions and restraints to manipulate the body’s posture, tension and vulnerability. Horn’s early performances rendered the female body as a simultaneously constrained and expressive site of pain, control, and transformation. The Angel in The House (2025) (Figure 1) features two 16m long soft sculptural pieces worn by a performer. Filled with rice and stuffing, the soft sculptures look like long, white arms; they mimic the scale of the body yet exaggerate it to a surreal, unwieldy extent. Their softness invites comfort, but their weight (both literal and symbolic) reveals a burden. They become absurd extensions of the self: trailing behind the performer down multiple flights of stairs or pinning them to the spot in weighty spirals.
The arms are worn, dragged, dirtied, and marked by every surface they touched. Their soiling becomes an act of defiance against purity, a mocking of the colour white’s symbolic role in traditional Western femininity, where it embodies cleanliness, spirituality, and virginity. The title of the work, The Angel in the House, directly references Elkin’s discussion of Virginia Woolf’s critique of Coventry Patmore’s 1854 poem of the same name, in which the self-sacrificing wife is the ultimate muse. She is selfless, passive, and pure. My work reclaims that archetype through a lived physicality that is burdened, exhausted, and entangled. The angel (woman) has, quite literally, been through the shit.
Like Horn, I am interested in the tension between restriction and expansion – how soft materials can take up space, trace trauma, while also inviting touch, care, and confrontation. This approach situates itself within the feminist fibre art tradition outlined in Elissa Auther’s 2010 Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, where she explains that the low status of fibre art was simply a symptom of wider devaluation of women’s creative labour of craft in general. Auther’s work reveals how textile and fibre-based practices have historically been excluded from the “high” art canon due to their association with femininity, domesticity, and utility. By embracing materials such as cotton, thread, stuffed fabric (and rice), I intentionally collapse the art/craft divide, reclaiming what has been dismissed as trivial or decorative and turning it into a site of feminist resistance.
Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro in Female Imagery describe the experience of being a woman, who is also an artist, whereby ‘she [artist] feels herself to be the “subject” in a world which treats her as “object”’ (1973:53). In this foundational essay, they argue that women artists, long denied participation in (patriarchal) art traditions, had developed their visual language rooted in the bodily, the decorative, and the domestic. They discuss recurring motifs, such as ovular shapes, central-core imagery, embroidery, and layering, which become evidence of a distinctly female sensibility shaped by lived experience and cultural exclusion. Although Female Imagery emerged within the context of second-wave feminism in 1973, its framework remains pivotal for understanding how materiality and gendered labour inform artmaking. In the context of my practice, the legacy of Female Imagery is both foundational and complicated. It aligns with and departs from Chicago and Schapiro’s essentialist view by confronting post-Y2K hyper-femininity (capitalist and consumer culture, misogyny disguised as empowerment and media saturation of overtly gendered expressions of femininity).
Horror in Feminine Self-Perception
It was not until viewing Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 horror film The Substance that I could wholly rationalise the internalised self-hatred that I carry as a young woman. Fargeat’s film renders with disturbing clarity the internal and violent relationship women have with their own bodies as we age in a youth-obsessed world. Fargeat depicts a fading actress’s desperate attempt to reclaim her youth through a black-market serum which leads to grotesque transformations. The film’s body-horror elements serve as a visceral metaphor for society’s obsession with beauty and the lengths individuals go to preserve their youth.
The Substance can be situated through Dworkin’s framework: the horror of being split into desirable and discarded. Similarly, it aligns with Susan Sontag’s writings in On Women (2023), where she critiques how Western culture applies different standards of aging to men and women. She argues that while aging in men is often associated with increased authority, wisdom, and sexual attractiveness, aging in women is framed as a loss of beauty, desirability, and social value.
Recently, I’ve noticed a growing trend among women in my life and online, choosing to undergo cosmetic procedures like Botox, lip fillers, and, in some cases, the risky Brazilian Butt Lift (BBL), as seen with celebrities like Kim Kardashian. As Lijtmaer argues (2010), technological progress makes body modifications more accessible and affordable, increasing the cultural pressure to alter one’s appearance.
This impulse is not new. Through art history, the female form has been manipulated to conform to ideals of desirability. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ Grand Odalisque (1814) exemplifies this: celebrated for its technical precision, the painting distorts the female spine with three extra vertebrae to achieve an elongated, sensual form (Maigne et al., 2004). Ingres positions the woman turning toward the viewer, reinforcing the dynamic of the surveyed subject, painted for the male gaze, and tailored to a European male audience (Black, 2006). It is no coincidence, then, that over two centuries later, women continue to reshape themselves to meet visual expectations. Not to be imagined, but to exist as imagined. As John Berger writes (1972: 46): ‘Men act, and women appear. Men look at women. Women watched themselves being looked at.’
Lauren Elkin’s notion of the “art monster” resonates here – a woman who refuses likability, beauty, and compliance. In Art Monsters (2023), Elkin argues for a feminist model of artistic expression that embraces rage, ambition, and transgression. Soft sculpture can embody this monstrousness by exaggerating the very femininity it critiques. The creation becomes a feminist tool: a way to reclaim space and reject the tidy, consumable girl. Being an Art Monster is to highlight the emotional performance of femininity. The Angel in the House (2025) is a sculpture of a technological haunting, sewn with the weight of having been watched too soon, too often, and too intimately.
To Conclude
This work forms part of a larger conversation within my practice: one that seeks to externalise the interiority of a girlhood shaped by scrutiny, contradiction, and digital saturation. The Angel in the House is not a historical figure to me but is a presence that still haunts every attempt to assert autonomy and to take up space without apology. Through soft sculpture and textile-based works, and by using auto-theory as a strategy, I reject the demand to be small, clean, and consumable. Instead, I make messes. I exaggerate. I drag. I soil. I begin to unpick the programming of pop culture, to question the version of femininity I was sold, and sold myself.
Notes
[1] Bratz is an American media franchise and fashion doll that debuted in 2001. The four original dolls feature almond shape eyes, large glossy lips, and stylised body proportions.
[2] The male gaze is a concept from feminist theory, articulated by Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, that draws on depictions of women, where the female form is often idealised and presented as an object from a voyeuristic, heterosexual, male perspective.
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