Feedback/Autotheory: On Marianne Wex’s Let’s Take Back Our Space

From 1972 to 1977 the German painter Marianne Wex undertook an extensive research project aimed at demonstrating the cultural nature of gendered physical postures, published in book form as Let’s Take Back Our Space: “Female” and “Male” Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, in 1979. Emerging from Wex’s experience with feminist consciousness-raising and collective self-education, the dialectical account of her own political and personal awakening deploys the language of kinesic analysis alongside ethnographic self-study. The dialogue of Let’s Take Back Our Space with pop behavioral psychology and cybernetics is integral to Wex’s systems thinking, while her self-implication as articulated in both text and images represents a radical, even defiant, divergence from those referents in a project of what queer and trans* theorists have come to call “autotheory.”