Jo Spence was a feminist artist and activist who explored themes of gender, class and self-identity. After Spence was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1982, she made several series of self-portraits documenting her battle with the disease until her death from leukaemia a decade later. The photographs expressed her physical and emotional state. Spence's doctor and collaborator Tim Sheard explained, ‘Spence is representing the honest emotions felt living in an unruly body that cannot conform to the pressures of female perfection expected and idealised in Western society’.

Working with artist and psychoanalyst Rosy Martin, Spence developed a co-counselling practice they called 'Phototherapy', which aimed to resolve emotional issues, anxieties or past traumatic experiences through role play and photographic portraiture. The series Libido Uprising criticises the role of women being limited to either carrying out domestic chores or the object of sexual desire. Spence's choice of fishnet tights and red high heels in this photograph are a clichéed costume of seduction, but the tube of the vacuum cleaner that coils around her leg evokes the image of a ball and chain. This may be a nod to the long-standing marital metaphor of referring to one's spouse as a 'ball and chain'. More prevalently, the photograph conveys a image of female entrapment within the roles of housewife and seductress.