Marianne Wex | Let’s Take Back Our Space

Marianne Wex

Let’s Take Back Our Space

Berlin, Germany: Frauenliteratur Verlag, 1979

366 pp., 24 x 19 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown 

Subtitled Female and Male Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, this title features 2037 photographs of men and women and asserts that body language is a result of sex-based, patriarchal socialization, affecting all of our other "feminine" and "masculine" role behaviour. 

Anticipating the phrase "manspreading" thirty-five years ago, the volume illustrates how a woman will sit “legs held close together, feet either straight or turned slightly inward, arms held close to the body. In short, the woman makes herself small and narrow, and takes up little space." Men, on the other hand, sit "legs far apart, feet turned outwards, the arms held at a distance from the body. In short, the man takes up space and generally takes up significantly more space than the woman.”

Originally published in German, in 1979, an English translation appeared five years later in 1984, Let’s Take Back Our Space is considered to be the artist's lone surviving work. Shortly after its creation she became seriously ill and later embarked on a successful career in medicine. 

In 2009, Let’s Take Back Our Space was exhibited for the first time since its unveiling. It has shown a few times subsequently, and is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (above, bottom). 

Wex died last week, at the age of eighty-three. 

"The German artist Marianne Wex started out as a painter before producing her photographic project Let’s Take Back Our Space, one of the great unsung works of 1970s feminist history and cultural analysis. Born in Hamburg in 1937, Wex studied at the city’s University of Fine Arts, where she later taught for seventeen years. In 1979, she published Let’s Take Back Our Space as a book, with the subtitle “Female” and “Male” Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures. It is a visual survey comprised of hundreds of photographs assembled into dozens of thematic grids: Seated persons—leg and feet; arm and hand positions; standing persons—leg and feet; arm and hand positions; people sitting and laying on the ground; arm and leg positions; Egyptian, Greek, and Roman statuary; how the men of Christianity took over an old goddess gesture; the stultifying effect of the patriarchal socialization of men. And so on. The images were culled from a huge range of sources—advertisements, reportage, fashion magazines, studio portraits, the history of art—and many were taken on the streets of Hamburg by Wex, who proposes that our smallest, most unconscious gestures speak volumes about the power relations of gender in daily life."

- David Campany, Aperture