Week 1

What is art? What is feminism? What is feminist art?

Following Amelia Jones, this course “takes feminism seriously but does not seek to patrol its borders by, for example, labeling authors or producers of images ‘feminist’ or ‘not feminist.” This course challenges a standard institutionalization of feminist art, as evidenced by the Tate Modern timeline, as something contained in a white, US-based, 1970s past. It understands this version as an impoverished vision that blocks our understanding of feminist art as a much more expansive field of creative practice and critical interpretation with important roots in other communities and parts of the world. Feminist art is not over and done; it is alive and flourishing, challenging institutionalized hierarchies of art, raising questions about how we see and and make meaning of what we see, influencing image making practices, and making different futures imaginable.

T 03.31 Course overview

Film Screening: Lynn Hershman Lesson, W.A.R. Women Art Revolution (83 min.)

We watched this film on the first day of class with the following questions in mind:

What story of feminist art does this film tell? What theme, idea, story, person, or artwork from the film made an impression on you? Why?

If you missed the film, please watch it in the UW Libraries Media Center (Suzzallo Library, 3rd floor) where it is on reserve. You should ask for it by the title and the call number DVD ZF 077.

Th 04.02 What is feminism? What is art/visual culture?

bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody, “Introduction,” “Feminist Politics,” “Consciousness Raising,” “Feminist Class Struggles,” “Global Feminism,” and “Race and Gender”

bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, “Introduction: Art Matters,” “Art on My Mind”

Cynthia Freeland, But Is It Art?, “Blood and Beauty,” “Cultural Crossings”

Key feminist concepts discussed:

• bell hooks’s definition: “Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.”
• gender equality (reform) vs. systemic change (revolution)
• feminisms as multiple, as a movement open to critique and challenge in order to remain committed to a vision of justice
• intersectional analysis: analyzing systems of oppression not just along single vectors but as operating in a matrix; challenging false universals (like “woman”); understanding one’s own positionality and politics of location; theorizing about practical problems
• sex/gender system: as one that naturalizes and makes normative connections between sex and the social construct of gender; that requires critique and deconstruction in order undo the hierarchies it makes seem natural
• queer (as a noun and a verb)

“Feminism,” Timeline of Modern and Contemporary Art, Tate Modern, London, 2012, photo: Sonal Khullar

By the end of the quarter, you will be able to explode this whiteboard timeline with many other vectors that trace artists and artworks in ways that move us beyond this limited conception of feminist art. See also the Sackler Center for Feminist Art timeline, an expanded but still largely Western-centric chronology. What will you add to these timelines with your own coursework? You are part of this larger project of creative and critical practice!