Rethinking Feminism and Visual Culture

Abstract

Why are students today so afraid to identify themselves as feminists? When we address feminism and art in my contemporary art and theory courses, I commonly hear two negative responses. The first invokes the stereotype that feminists, particularly feminist artists, are bra-burning, militant man-bashers; the second is that feminist art and criticism is no longer necessary. In fact, my most homogeneous group of student artists (half men, half women, all white, and from middle-class families) argued that even studying the topic was moot because everything had changed; all was fine between the sexes in our new era of post (or post-post) modernism-an era where everyone's interpretation is allegedly valid, and marginal art and identities are not so marginal anymore. Because these ideas seem to be the current trend among students, these anthologies, published between 1999 and 2001, are significant. Overall, each volume uniquely re-politicizes feminist art and theory and emphasizes its influence on contemporary critical discourse in one or more of three ways: first, they redress how feminist criticism and theory has often become diffused into that of postmodernism by historicizing feminist intervention in the arts; second, they show feminism's pervasive role in all aspects of visual culture; and third, they explore feminism's interconnections with race, class, and sexual orientation. Helena Reckitt's Art and Feminism and Hilary Robinson's Feminism-Art-Theory both collect a multitude of artist statements, art historical analyses, interviews with artists, and critical writings on art and feminism by women such as Mira Schor, Coco Fusco, Griselda Pollock, Linda Nochlin, Adrian Piper, Helene Cixous, and Lucy Lippard, written between 1963 and 2000. Robinson's text divides its essays into chapters with related, but fairly rigid titles such as Claiming Identity, Negotiating