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1	Wangechi Mutu: Feminist Collage and the Cyborg Smith, Nicole R. 01 December 2009 (has links) Wangechi Mutu is an internationally recognized Kenyan-born artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. She creates collaged female figures composed of human, animal, object, and machine parts. Mutu’s constructions of the female body provide a transcultural critique on the female persona in Western culture. This paper contextualizes Mutu’s work and artistic strategies within feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial narratives on collage, while exploring whether collage strategies are particularly useful for feminist artists. In their fusion of machine and organism, Mutu’s characters are visual metaphors for feminist cyborgs, particularly those outlined by Donna Haraway. In this paper, I examine parallels between collage as an aesthetic strategy and the figure of the cyborg to suggest meaningful ways of approaching differences between women and how they experience life in contemporary Western culture. Wangechi Mutu Collage Feminist art Cyborg Donna Haraway Western art Postmodern art Postcolonial art Contemporary art Machine Organism Kenya Female persona Assemblage Photomontage Constructed identity Art and Design