Renée Cox – Hot-en-tot Venus, 1994 [photograph]  

In the image Hot-en-tot Venus you see the subject is Renee Cox herself completely naked apart from oversized prosthetic versions of breasts and a butt that are tied around her with string. Cox is posed in a way that is showing her body off with these fake implants that she is wearing, her gaze is striking almost worrisome as if she is daring you to look at her but almost like she doesn’t want you to at the same time. A very powerful image with positive and negative connotations. 

Positive connotations in that the image itself is very powerful and striking, she is showing body confidence to be able to show off 90% of her body, even though the 90s were more accepting of women doing these things in a non-sexual way like 10 years prior, women are still sexualised to this day, so for this image to hold a deeper powerful message without being sexualised is amazing. Which brings me to the negative connotations of what I think the image stands for, the boob and butt add-ons are clearly much larger than Cox’s own, held up in a perky manner a light on what society considers a man’s ‘ideal’ body based off of many modern day magazines and bias blog posts, which sheds a light on why her face seems so tense yet sullen and her pose is almost an intimidation of a pose made to show of her body as if just by her glance she is saying ‘am I perfect now?’ 

When you look in to the context behind this image it becomes an even more powerful photograph about the extraordinarily shocking histories of human exhibition. The photograph is a reference to Saartje Baartman, a Khoisan woman who was objectified as an interesting curiosity and exhibited in Europe in the 19th century, as the ‘Hottentot Venus’. To me, Renee shows us the power of humiliation and inequality this woman endured as well as shedding a light on the horrific slavery of black men and women and even more contemporary issues such as the way women are sexualized by their bodies still to this day.