Another reclining nude. Another glossy body draped in desire. Another artist promising liberation through erotic exposure. Once, such images carried the thrill of transgression. Today, they often feel like déjà vu. Seduction fatigue has set in.

Sexuality in art, once a site of radical possibility, now risks becoming démodé when presented without critique. The question isn’t whether we still need to talk about bodies — we do. The question is: whose bodies, for whom, and under what gaze?

From Transgression to Template

In the 1970s, feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey gave us the language of the male gaze — the way visual culture trains us to consume women’s bodies as objects. Back then, exposing sexuality in art could reveal those dynamics, provoke outrage, and demand new ways of seeing.

By the 1990s, feminist artists like Carolee Schneemann, Tracey Emin, and Cindy Sherman reclaimed the sexual body as a site of agency, self-expression, even confrontation. Schneemann pulled a scroll from her vagina (Interior Scroll, 1975) and forced language itself to be born from the female body. Emin’s unmade bed displayed desire and shame as lived experience rather than spectacle. These works unsettled norms. They were not decoration.

But fast-forward to today, and sexualized imagery often reads less like rebellion and more like repetition. The nude body as provocation is no longer shocking. It risks becoming a visual cliché — especially when stripped of political intent.

Why It Feels Outdated

There are at least three reasons why “sex sells” art is beginning to feel stale.

First, repetition. The archetypes — the femme fatale, the passive nude, the exoticized Other — have been recycled so many times that they collapse into aesthetic wallpaper. What once scandalized now barely registers.

Second, commodification. The art market has absorbed sexuality as style. What was once taboo is now profitable. Eroticism as rebellion is easy to sell, especially when stripped of the messy questions of power and exploitation.

Third, absence of critique. When sexual representation doesn’t interrogate the gaze — who looks, who is looked at, and who controls visibility — it defaults to decoration. It flatters desire instead of interrogating it.

The New Terrain

If sexuality is not dead in feminist art, it is because the terrain has shifted. Today’s feminist critics and artists are less interested in shock value and more interested in systems.

Intersectionality matters. Sexuality looks different on racialized, colonized, or queer bodies than on white heterosexual ones. A nude Black woman cannot be read outside histories of fetish and exploitation. An Asian female body carries the weight of exoticism and ornamentalism. Art that ignores this risks flattening difference. Platform politics. Social media simultaneously eroticizes and polices women’s bodies. Instagram hypersexualizes female influencers while banning nipples in artworks. Artists working online are forced to navigate this absurd double standard — where female sexuality is simultaneously demanded and censored. Algorithmic bias. New studies show that AI image generators reproduce objectification, treating women’s bodies as fragmented surfaces rather than whole agents. In other words: even our machines have learned the male gaze. Feminist art that engages sexuality now must also reckon with how technology encodes desire.

Where Sexuality Still Works

This doesn’t mean sexuality in art is finished. It means that context, intention, and power matter more than ever.

When sexuality is reclaimed to expose systems rather than flatter them, it still hits. Consider the women artists who destabilize stereotypes rather than repeat them. Consider works that turn desire inside-out, showing its violence, its absurdity, its contradictions.

Feminism today is not prudish — it doesn’t demand hiding bodies. But it does demand asking: Who benefits from this image? Who gets to speak? Who gets reduced? Who resists?

Conclusion

Sexuality in art will always matter, but it no longer carries automatic shock value. Without critique, it risks falling into pastiche, a hollow echo of past transgressions. The future of feminist art is not in recycling the same reclining nudes, but in unsettling how we see, desire, and represent bodies.

If artists continue to recycle sexuality without dismantling its gaze, the result is not liberation but stagnation. The body as spectacle is passé. The body as agent — messy, political, desiring, uncontainable — is where the fight remains.

References:

Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual and Other Pleasures. Palgrave Macmillan. Schneemann, C. (1975). Interior Scroll. [Performance Art]. Emin, T. (1998). My Bed. [Installation Art]. Sandoval-Martin, T., et al. (2024). “Perpetuation of Gender Bias in Visual Representation.” MDPI. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/13/5/250 Borau, S. (2024). “Deception, Discrimination, and Objectification: Ethical Issues of Female AI Agents.” Journal of Business Ethics, 198(1), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-024-05754-4 Krievins, K. A. (2023). “Challenging the Gaze: A Feminist Interpretation of the ‘Male Gaze’.” Graduate Reports 2023. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1118&context=gradreports2023