A Feminist Critique of Capitalism: Class, Gender, Work, and Unrest in Women’s Art after 2008

Abstract

In 2010, two years into the global financial crisis that exacerbated the already substantial socio-economic divides of global capitalism, artist and activist Lynn Hershman Leeson released !Women Art Revolution (!WAR), a documentary that is militant in its convictions as much as affirmative of how ‘the Feminist Art Movement fused free speech and politics into an art that radically transformed the art and culture of our times’.1 Hershman Leeson collected material for decades, including about forty interviews with artists, curators, and critics engaged in feminist critique in, and since, the 1960s and 1970s. A commitment to intersectionality informs this social document as a review of the ‘new ways of thinking’ that developed ‘about the complexities of gender, race, class, and sexuality’ in the American feminist art movement.2 That is, Hershman Leeson created a positional and reflective audio-visual record from which the question of class is not absent, but is instead woven into the expansive concept of politics that the feminist movement in art, and more broadly, set as one of its primary goals. ‘What we found was a whole different way to talk about work, and I discovered very quickly it wasn’t the ways the boys talked about work’, says artist Harmony Hammond in her interview of 2008.