Untitled (Cette chair qui se touche...)

This 1970 collage by Nancy Spero, titled "Cette chair qui se touche..." (This flesh that touches itself...), is one of the American feminist artist's most sensual and self-reflective works, the image exploring the intimacy of self-touch and the autonomy of female desire through the medium of gouache, ink, and collage on off-white Japanese paper. The composition shows fragmented bodily forms and textual fragments assembled in a way that suggests both the pleasure of self-knowledge and the difficulty of self-representation, the collage technique creating a visual rhythm of closeness and distance, touch and separation. The off-white Japanese paper provides a delicate, skin-like ground that makes the image feel intimate and vulnerable, the material suggesting both the fragility of the body and the strength of the desire that animates it. The 1970 date places this work in the same period as the other 1970 collages, suggesting that Spero was producing a series of works that explored the full range of female bodily experience from refusal to pleasure, from violence to autonomy. Art historians have connected this collage to the broader tradition of feminist representations of the body, from the self-portraits of Frida Kahlo to the performance works of Marina Abramović, noting that Spero's treatment is more fragmentary, more focused on the partial and incomplete nature of self-representation than the holistic or heroic approaches of these predecessors. The work also demonstrates Spero's mastery of the collage medium as a vehicle for feminist theory: the assembled fragments suggest both the construction of identity through language and the possibility of deconstructing that identity to create new forms of self-expression.

This 1970 collage explored female self-touch autonomy through skin-like Japanese paper intimacy, using gouache-ink fragment assembly to make sensual self-knowledge feel simultaneously constructed and deconstructively liberating.

It matters because Spero drew flesh touching itself and made the paper feel like skin—proving that even a fragment could feel whole if the desire was honest enough.