ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some aspects of the artwork of Sonia Delaunay and Louise Bourgeois. The professor of English and Women's Studies, Susan Stanford Friedman, incisively formulated it in these terms: creation is the act of the mind that brings something new into existence procreation is the act of the body that reproduces the species. Women who challenged the twentieth centuries-old bias were met with a whole series of internal and external obstacles: guilty feelings, rejection, contempt, and insinuations regarding their morality, mental health, and womanhood. The tension between mother and the mother who is a woman—and as subject to needs and desires oriented towards other experiences—is also viewed in the light of other perspectives. In psychoanalysis, many conceptualisations and lines of research have focused on the need to distinguish between "maternal" and "female." There is a "sexual feminine"—a phantasy of excess of drive—that, psychoanalysis has detached or concealed from the "maternal" and from the nurturing breast.
