Brigitte Bardot has died, and with her, a body that became a veritable battleground, as the artist Barbara Kruger would say. A fitting metaphor to explain how bodies, especially female ones, become stages where intense social, political, and cultural struggles are projected, often without women being able to control their own narrative. Bardot's body, despite its apparent empowerment within the framework of the sexual revolution, also functioned as a surface of constant dispute: celebrated as an emblem of freedom and female desire, but at the same time captured by a gaze that reduced her to an object of consumption.

Brigitte Bardot, the French actress and singer who became a major European sex symbol after World War II, has died at the age of 91, her foundation has confirmed. She had been hospitalized in Toulon since November due to respiratory failure. Bardot was one of the biggest mass phenomena of her time and became the embodiment of the modern French woman, even adopted as a symbol of France and a new, sexually emancipated femininity. The film And God created womanThe film, directed by her first husband, Roger Vadim, made her a global star in 1956. The actress also excelled in deeper and more complex roles, such as that of... thriller The truth (1960), by Henri-Georges Clouzot; comedy Long live Mary (1965), by Louis Malle, and Jean-Luc Godard's masterpiece, Contempt (1963).