Ste. Sebastienne
In the Saint Sebastian story, as told in The Golden Legend, the soon to be martyr is lashed to a tree and shot with arrows– and miraculously survives (de Voragine, 1998). The body depicted in this print is treelike, with whorls and lines of bark. Similarly, the arrows don't puncture the skin or bark as they would a human body; they prick the outside and are incorporated, with the bark growing around them relatively undisturbed. When attacked by an outside force, a plant has a slower, hormonal reaction, lacking in muscles and nervous system animals do. They are slower to heal but harder to wound, and incredibly effective at regeneration. They are similar to the model of a martyr in that way: the body can be seemingly irreversibly injured, yet is incredibly able to endure and heal. The tree is obviously the epitome of the natural, which connects it more with femininity, as a woman is supposedly the more natural gender. Further, to be female is to be inseparable from your body as an outer image, subject to consumption and potential violence. Just as Saint Sebastian survives the puncture of the arrows, so does Bourgeois's Sebastienne, who appears to be in motion despite having been pierced– and women survive the male gaze and violence.
The surreal particularity of this female body (the exaggerated proportions, the missing head) also acts in opposition to the nude in Western art. The pose of Ste. Sebastienne is comparable to that of Rubens' wife in Helena Fourment In A Fur Coat, whose body is also "impossibly dynamic...[permitting] the upper and lower halves of the body to rotate separately, and in opposite directions, round the sexual centre which is hidden." This rotation in Ste. Sebastienne takes place in the upper spine of the figure, so that her breasts face front. These specificities render the female figures "naked" as opposed to nude.