Enjoy your Alienation!

Considers the work of several young female British artists and focuses on their approaches to the idea of pleasure. The authors outline the key elements of recent feminist discourse on pleasure and cite the British artists Helen Chadwick, Kate Smith and Lucy Gunning as women whose acknowledged agenda includes the exploration of pleasure via non-linguistic means. They describe works by Gillian Wearing, Tracey Emin, and Sarah Lucas and comment on the writer Slavoj Zizek's theories of enjoyment, identity and representation. They refer to the abandonment of feminist politics and critical theory by the new generation of artists, and comment on the importance of defining the processes of representation and identity.