A history of human images free of what art historian Wilenski refers to as "the Greek prejudice".

Anne Wagner has argued that Eva Hesse’s work, "It insists on its languagelike character—its structures of repetition and transformation—at the same time as it maps those properties onto evocations of a carnal world. The body is there somewhere, at the intersection of structure and reference."

In this way some critics (like Chave) see Eva Hesse's evocations of the body as specifically female, as part of an early feminist reclamation of an essential female embodiment, whether understood in terms of womb or wound, while other critics (like Anne Wagner) reject this account of the work as "a symptom of the pathology of the female condition," and read these figures as disruptive of such markers of sexual difference, as less a stable female "body-ego" than a quasi-infantile combination of conflicted drives and part-objects.

As Griselda Pollock (1988, p.139) argues, this coding of the ‘female’ as ‘lack’ produces two conflicting visions: ‘one is the compensatory fantasy of the pre-Oedipal mother, still all-powerful, phallic; the other is the fantasy of woman not only as damaged, but as damage itself’. The response to these contradictory images is either fetishism, where the image is transformed into an objective spectacle of desire, or what Julia Kristeva terms abjection, where the ‘female’ is coded as being anterior to the formation of identity, as being, in fact, ‘the means whereby the subject is first impelled towards the possibility of constituting itself as such – in an act of revulsion, of expulsion’ to the margins, to the very vanishing points of the space of representation (Burgin, 1996, p.52).