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Before the 1960s women were underrepresented in the Art World. Many female artists experienced difficulties entering the Art World. Due to the efforts of Second Wave Feminism (SWF), including Linda Nochlin with Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (1971), this problem came to the fore. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate several feminist artists, theorists, and the Women’s Liberation Movement as important mediators in the search for a female voice in the visual arts. In presenting Barbara Kruger as the main example of this movement, her art practice critiques the overall view and image that is projected on women concerning their femininity, as a way of excluding them from the Art World but also as a way of encouraging biases that live in society. Kruger holds up a mirror to the world. In addition, it is proven that femininity, as a fraction of gender, was an important aspect in Feminist Art practice in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s, when there was a rebirth of feminism. The aim of this research is to show, using three artworks of American conceptual artist Barbara Kruger, that femininity is socially constructed, illustrated by Your gaze hits the side of my face (1981), We won’t play nature to your culture (1983) and Your body is a battleground (1989). The use of feminist theorists concerning gender, social construction, feminism, and art prove this claim. Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Chris Weedon, and Shulamith Firestone are all pivotal characters in the historicizing and theorizing of late twentieth-century Western feminism and art. This forms the basic methodology of the research. The analysis of the art practice of Barbara Kruger together with many other feminist artists of that period gives a critique of how ‘femininity’ and the ‘female body’ are perceived in Western society. Theorists like Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and Laura Mulvey are mentioned in relation to the theoretical framework and form the base of the case study. The results accentuate the expectations that women’s experiences regarding their femininity were foregrounded by Feminist Art practitioners and in particular Barbara Kruger, to demonstrate the inequality of women in the Art World as a result of biases against their sex.

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