The Bare-Breasted Woman with the Eyes at Her Back

What first attracted me to Yolanda Fundora's drawing were the bare breasts of the woman clutching the pencil. In anthropology it is always the other woman, the native woman somewhere else, the woman who doesn't write, the !Kung woman, the Balinese woman, the National Geographic woman, who has breasts. Breasts that can be seen, exposed, pictured, brought home, and put into books.

The woman anthropologist, the woman who writes culture, also has breasts, but she is given permission to conceal them behind her pencil and pad of paper. Yet it is at her own peril that she deludes herself into thinking her breasts do not matter, are invisible, cancer won't catch up with them, the male gaze does not take them into account. Remember what the Guerrilla Girls once told the Western art world? Only bare-breasted women make it into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In Yolanda Fundora's drawing, the breasts brush up against the arm and hand clutching the pencil.

The woman in the drawing regards the world with the direct and steady gaze of a keen observer. But behind her is a sea of eyes. When a woman sits down to write, all eyes are on her. The woman who is turning others into the object of her gaze is herself an object of the gaze. Woman, the original Other, is always being looked at and looked over. A woman sees herself being seen. Clutching her pencil, she wonders how "the discipline" will view the writing she wants to do. Will it be seen as too derivative of male work? Or too feminine? Too safe? Or too risky? Too serious? Or -not serious enough? Many eyes bore in on her, looking to see if she will do better or worse than men, or at least as well as other women.

The eyes on a woman's back are also her own eyes. They are everything she has seen in her travels and in her return home. They represent the different roles a woman assumes in the various places where she sojourns, each eye seeing her at a slightly different angle. Sitting down to write, a woman sheds the clothes of each of the different roles she has played and lets all the eyes of her experiences come forth as she contemplates her life and begins to put pencil to paper.

Yolanda Fundora intended her drawing to be a self-portrait. She wanted to find a way both to define and to undefine herself as a Cuban-born artist who has shuttled between Puerto Rico and New York City. She wanted, she says, not to always have to categorize herself, so she decided to make the woman a color that does not exist in real life. A twilight blue, purple woman. Her hair, suggesting a rainbow of indecision, a flowering androgynous peacock, is multicolored-blue, pink, purple, yellow, white, black. Behind the woman the sun has set, the moon has risen, and the tip of an island, an unknown country, beckons from afar.

The picture is also a group self-portrait, Yolanda Fundora says. She drew it a few years ago when she was part of a women's art collective in Puerto Rico. Controversies and debates surfaced all the time among the members of the collective about their role as women artists. The sea of eyes acknowledges the different ways in which women look at the world as well as the willingness of women to accept, rather than to annihilate, such a confusing diversity of visions. When women look out for one another, the sea of eyes on our backs is no longer anything to fear.

Yolanda Fundora's artistic vision encapsulates the spirit of this book, which is all about seeing anthropology through other eyes. The eyes are those of women who do their writing as anthropologists, aware of how their own identity is constructed as female within a discipline rooted in male musing about foreign lands. In focusing on the legacy of women's anthropological writings and on the dilemmas woman anthropologists encounter as writers, this book is both unique and long overdue. All eyes, indeed, are on us. But we are not afraid to look back-and to offer a vision of a different anthropology that places women's writing center stage in the debate about how, for whom, and to what end anthropologists embark on journeys that bring them home again to their desks and nowadays, to their computers. To computers, let us not forget, assembled by the delicate hands of a native woman somewhere else.

- Ruth Behar
quoted from Introduction: Out of Exile
to Women Writing Culture,
edited by Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon.
University of California Press, 1995.