ABSTRACT
Tracey Moffatt has stringently rejected the expectation that she should produce “Aboriginal Art” and has instead used contemporary art frameworks to explore complex social and psychological experiences, including those of race. Scarred for Life has been primarily discussed in terms of identity politics but without cognisance of its feminist implications – a gap Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore address. Referring to the family photograph album while also invoking the style conventions of Life magazine, Scarred for Life invokes incidents that occur during childhood within multicultural Australian homes that, while apparently trivial, leave profound psychic scars. Millner and Moore suggest that the jibes and humiliations that are represented in the series are agents of a patriarchal symbolic order against which feminism revolted, a stubborn refusal captured in the subjects of these photographic tableaux. The authors also explore Scarred for Life in light of Bracha Ettinger's concept of self-fragilisation as a strategy for resistance.
