Feminist Conference Research Articles

Opening Conversations with Marxist Feminists: A Response to the Symposium on Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today

Marxism-feminism is a vital field with diverse voices and different political agendas for social justice, from the defense of land and water to the reorganization of production. The anthology Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today aims to grasp the originality and relevance of that tradition. The book represents a variety of contributions, defined as Marxist feminist by their authors, who presented papers at the Marxist Feminist Congress in Vienna in 2016. This was the second International Marxist Feminist Conference, the first having been initiated by the feminist section of the Berlin Institute of Critical Theory. Drawing on different theoretical frameworks and practices of Marxist feminism, the edited anthology provides an invitation to converse about our understanding and practice of engaging gendered, racialized heterocapitalism for a better global future. This book symposium and its reviewers demonstrate the richness of the resulting conversation.

Bury the corpse of colonialism: The revolutionary feminist conference of 1949 Elisabeth B. Armstrong

Bury the corpse of colonialism: The revolutionary feminist conference of 1949 Elisabeth B. Armstrong

Life and growth of the Thirteen Marxist Feminist Theses

The fourth international Marxist feminist conference was the most international and best attended with around 700 participants, including Silvia Federici, Nancy Fraser, Tithi Bhattacharya, Lorena Cabnal, Ochy Curiel, Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, Elsa Dorlin, Jules Falquet, and Frigga Haug. The main themes of the panels established continuity with the previous conferences, from debates on intersectionality which overlap in various fields with practical and theoretical issues such as value, the state, law, care, production, and social reproduction to those that were closely linked to the thinking of new organizations and repertoires of struggle. This Special Issue is based on the plenary titled: the Thirteen Theses of Marxist Feminism. Frigga Haug, the author of The Thirteen Theses, considers all of them in her opening interview. The most widely debated theses by the Special Issue contributors are Theses I, II, and III on relations of production and the production of the means of life followed by theses from V to VIII which deal with intersectionality and how to study race, class and gender, the role of labor movement in the process of emancipation, and the issue of primary and secondary contradictions which is closely related to the development of an effective political emancipatory subject. The Special Issue closes with an interview with the philosopher Nancy Fraser on the three faces of labor.

Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference of 1949. Elisabeth B. Armstrong

Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference of 1949. Elisabeth B. Armstrong

Conference Organizing in the Hybrid Age: Lessons from the Fourth International Feminist Geography Conference

The 4th International Feminist Geography Conference, Pushing Boundaries, was held both virtually and in-person at the University of Colorado at Boulder, 15–17 June 2022. The goal of the conference was to bring together feminist geographers from around the world to share their work, exchange ideas, and build professional connections toward advancing feminist scholarship. In this article, four of the conference organizers come together to share their experiences with the process of organizing a feminist conference and the lessons learned along the way, as well as at each stage of planning. Our intended audience is people who have not previously organized a hybrid conference (as we had not). By discussing and addressing challenges and recommendations—including, but not limited to conference format, scheduling, budget, technical support, social media, and timeline—we aim to foster more opportunities for organizing inclusive hybrid conferences in the future.

Reclaiming Tituba: What The Crucible left out

Reclaiming TitubaWhat The Crucible left out Winsome Pinnock According to historical records of the 1692 Salem witch trials, Tituba, an enslaved woman who was part of Reverend Samuel Parris's household, was the first person accused of witchcraft to make a confession. Confession was a clever strategy: it ensured her survival and, because prosecutors needed her to share the identities of her necromantic consorts, it gave her the agency to turn the tables on her captors. The more than two hundred denunciations that followed overwhelmed Salem Village, unleashing havoc and profound devastation in the community. For a brief moment, power was wrested from the white men on the church committee and given to an enslaved woman. Why, then, has Tituba been relegated to the shadows of history, the story [End Page 104] of her heroic resistance to her enslaved condition going largely untold? Why did avowedly liberal playwright Arthur Miller reduce her to a minor character in The Crucible, his beautifully dramatized evocation of the trials? Why did he portray her as a stereotypical African voodoo priestess, denying her the complexity and humanity that he bestowed on other characters? I do not know of any fellow playwrights who do not admire The Crucible for Miller's impeccable stagecraft and his skillful use of historical research. As he portrays, Salem Village did become enthralled by the trials in 1692. We now know that many of those who pressed charges against their neighbors did so for financial gain or to settle property rights disputes. Miller subtly adapted that history to enhance the drama of the trials and ratchet up the tension: when a handful of flawed and ordinary individuals are accused of witchcraft, they face the moral dilemma of securing their freedom by owning up to the charges or by professing their innocence (in other words telling the truth) to face condemnation and execution. Will they risk their lives to speak out against the witch-hunts? I fully appreciate Miller's approach to this question. Where I have trouble is reconciling the historical Tituba, the clever strategist, with Miller's version of her. While other characters are tested to their limits, Miller's Tituba is denied agency and interiority, known in the play only for allegedly leading girls in salacious naked dancing and in the sacrifice of chickens. ________ i first encountered tituba as a thirteen-year-old in mid-1970s England, when my school produced an excerpt from The Crucible. I was one of four Black girls in my drama class, but none of us was cast as Tituba. I was assigned to play John Proctor's servant Mary Warren, who becomes an accuser in the witch-hunt. (Out of necessity, productions at my progressive all-girls state school—the equivalent of a U.S. public school—used color- and gender-blind casting long before they became a theatrical trend.) I was a keen drama student with aspirations to become an actress, and my ambitions were encouraged and nurtured by my teachers. My school [End Page 105] drew from a pocket of disadvantage and deprivation embedded in the rather well-to-do environs of Islington, in North London, and the teachers believed that involvement in the arts would give the students aspirations as well as the skills to achieve them. Most of my female teachers were heavily involved in second-wave feminism; in 1972, the school hosted Britain's first feminist conference. The teachers wove the second wave's newly won liberation into their teaching, urging us—their young, female students—to interrogate literature from a feminist perspective. They made no mention of race as such. I suppose the thinking then was that feminist ideas were true for all women regardless of economic background or ethnic identity. One of my beloved drama teachers explained that The Crucible was allegorical, that Miller used the Salem witch trials to speak out about McCarthyism—a period of moral panic in U.S. history in the late 1940s and the 1950s when many institutions and individuals with left-leaning politics were accused of being Communists or fellow travelers whose goal was to overthrow the U.S. government. So seriously was this perceived threat...

Chords of solidarity, notes of dissent: the role of feminist conferences in movement-building in India

ABSTRACT The golden past of the feminist conference is eclipsed by the present cynicism around depoliticisation of feminism, ‘NGO-isation’ and the cooption of such spaces by the state, large INGOs and donor organisations. With inter-generational conflicts and identity-based mobilisation, the current moment in the Indian women’s movement has been termed by Indian scholars as one of a ‘feminist civil war’. In this article, I reflect on the elements that made past processes such as the National Conferences on Autonomous Women’s Movements in India an empowering experience for activists, and that created spaces where the movement could resolve – or at least make visible – its ‘sticky’ issues. I ask: what can we learn about feminist conferences as a driving force for feminist activism in the past for creating inclusive and safe spaces for dialogue in the future? Can they be the spaces where feminist dilemmas of the time can be resolved? Through examining archival materials and personal reflections in dialogue with theoretical discussions on new feminisms, autonomy, diversity and intersectionality, I argue that the feminist conference had a critical role to play in the personal journeys of activists in the Indian women’s movement, and in collectively resolving some of the tensions in the movement through practices such as endorsement of co-written ‘resolutions’ and ‘declarations’ with purposefully diverse grassroots constituencies. In any new avatar, the feminist conference needs to retain such strengths but also take into account the feminist movement’s new, young membership and a changed context by re-aligning its values, modes and materials of engagement to this landscape, so that dialogue on difficult themes is made possible in productive, caring and pleasurable ways.

Digital Historical Practices

Digital Historical Practices Michelle Moravec (bio) Ten years into the twenty-first century, the historical profession is coming to terms with the ways in which the internet is irrevocably changing what we do and how we do it.1 With these remarks, Rachel Leow introduced the Journal of Women's History readership to a roundtable of historical bloggers. A decade later, we are still debating the implications of the "digital" for our profession. Rather than revisiting the various positions, I want to offer insights from my practice as a digital historian. I view digital history as a question-driven research process rather than the production of a particular end product. Becoming a digital historian, a mid-career shift, has not changed my core praxis. I rely, as I always have, on robust research questions anchored in archives. How I go about answering them is where the differences arise. Over the past decade, I have experimented with many approaches to answering historical questions using digital history approaches. In response to a suffrage historian's query, I evaluated gendered rhetoric in the sixvolume History of Woman Suffrage (1881–1922).2 A digital history approach allowed me to highlight how men and women adopted different rhetorical strategies to fight for women's rights. For example, male authors continually engaged in a rhetoric of separate spheres, while female authors instead emphasized aspects of women's nature that justified expanding their rights. In another case, my inquiry began with the quest for an original copy of a historical document, "Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo" (1965), often credited with launching the second wave of feminism. I finally located one, via Google, when a finding aid for a recently processed collection went online. Software called Juxta pinpointed the changes between the published version that historians had relied on for decades, and the original, mailed to just thirty-two women. Juxta creates a side-by-side visualization that colors the text where differences occur between versions. That visualization appears in the essay to document changes made in the published version, which have led to an interpretation of "Sex and Caste" as an attack on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) by white women who wanted more power for themselves or who sought to organize women separately.3 The original Memo's list of recipients, omitted from the published version, indicates that the authors sent the document to a small group of SNCC insiders. [End Page 163] A closing section, also omitted from the published version, illuminates the authors' limited intent to promote discussion among women within the freedom movement. Finally, text added to the published document by an unknown individual creates the impression that the authors emphasized women's oppression in society and their subordination inside the movement to a greater extent than appeared in the original. I began theorizing about digital archives when I stumbled upon online copies of digitized audiotapes from a significant feminist conference, The Second Sex: Thirty Years Later (1979). Using my training as an oral historian, I transcribed the audiotapes of Audre Lorde's remarks that became her famed essay "The Master's Tools." I became curious about the grassroots Black feminists who participated in this event. This investigation led to a nonlinear web essay about using online search engines to research marginalized historical subjects.4 In turn, writing that piece led me to draft guidelines for ethical research practices in digital archives.5 I offer these examples of my work to emphasize that digital history is impossible to pin down to one particular approach or outcome. What my projects have in common is a reliance on a core research process. I begin with a historical question that seems to have a potential digital history answer. Each question requires careful consideration of the most suitable approach and the most appropriate archives.For instance, in my analysis of the correspondence of Carolee Schneemann, a feminist performance artist, I initially worked from an edited collection of her letters. I soon realized the volume contained insufficient evidence to provide insights into her connections to other feminist activists, which led me back to the archive to locate more female correspondents.6 What happened next is...

Report from the Third International Marxist Feminist Conference

Report from the Third International Marxist Feminist Conference

In Memory of Her

In Memory of Her Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (bio) In her keynote address at the 2017 Women in Ministry Conference at Princeton University, Dr. Katie Cannon shared with the audience that she had on July 18, 2016, a "widow-maker" heart attack but—as she said—"kicked [her]self back to life." The last time I saw her, she shared and we reflected on this experience. At the time, I was just glad as her friend that she did so; today, I am convinced that she "kicked herself back to life" in order to fulfill her long-standing dream of launching the Center for Womanist Leadership. Katie and I were colleagues at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1980s. Although we were at different levels of the academic ladder, we became good colleagues and collaborating friends, since we were both "outsiders" as the first two non-Episcopalian faculty members. Katie was a wonderful colleague, an engaging and challenging teacher, and an exceptional mentor, to which I can testify from experience. We taught a Scripture and Ethics course together at the Episcopal Divinity School (EDS), and she tried hard to mentor me out of my German habits of teaching; however, as she publicly recognized, this was done with mixed results. She also helped me, a "resident alien," understand the debates and altercations between black and white feminists, which often puzzled me and left me the*logically stranded. For instance, when I returned from a feminist conference in the Midwest, where an African American speaker had berated a room of Catholic, mostly Irish American and Italian American wo/men for their heritage of being the slave mistress and lady of the house, Katie pointed out that neither feminist nor womanist the*logians reflect much on class. During the years, she also mentioned again and again that she was attacked for referencing my work on a critical feminist the*logy of liberation, because feminist/ womanist the*logians often adopted unconsciously the Southern strategy of using race to divide poor black and poor white people. Hence, what bonded us most was probably our very different but nevertheless common class background, which compelled her to articulate womanist the*logy [End Page 129] and me a critical feminist the*logy of liberation.1 We shared the same experience, as both of our mothers worked as domestics and our grandmothers took care of us. But, of course, this experience was very different because of our historical-cultural background: Katie's in the culture of the Cannon Cotton Plantation, mine as an ethnic German refugee from Romania to Germany at the end of World War II. As children, we both knew hunger and greatly desired to own books to read. Despite all cultural differences, we could become friends because, on the one hand, we were inspired by the same the*logical vision of justice and liberation. On the other hand, we were strangers to socialization into high academic culture and hence could approach it with a hermeneutics of suspicion. Since we met around the same time as Judith Plaskow and I were planning to launch the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Katie was from the beginning a part of JFSR, as a founding member of the editorial board and later also the board of FSR. Her dream, however, was not a journal but a center. Hence, already at EDS, we dreamt and worked together on a proposal for a womanist/feminist center, which Katie wanted to name the Pauli Murray Center. Unfortunately, we were unsuccessful at that time. Hence, I am so very glad that she "kicked herself back to life" and was blessed to inaugurate the Center for Womanist Leadership as her legacy to all of us. In her last interview (with Dr. Alison Gise Johnson in JFSR) she promised: "For my third chapter, I am willing to continue excavating my own soul and work to make the Center for Womanist leadership happen."2 Let's support her to keep her promise! [End Page 130] Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza is the Krister Stendahl Professor at Harvard University Divinity School and cofounding editor of JFSR. Her latest book, Ephesians was...

Francophone Trans/Feminisms

Abstract In this essay, the author draws on his experience as a trans, francophone, feminist researcher to share his reflections on the difficulties encountered within francophone contexts in the development of knowledge that moves beyond what the TSQ editors call “the familiar and overly simplistic dichotomy often drawn between an exclusionary transphobic feminism and an inclusive trans-affirming feminism.” Without reducing the work of the few francophone researchers interested in trans/feminisms, including the author's, to the fight against exclusionary, transphobic feminist theories, policies, and practices, he demonstrates how problematic it is to articulate their work in terms other than the exclusion/inclusion of trans people within feminism. The author offers as a case study the 2015 Seventh International Conference of Francophone Feminist Research, currently the world's most important francophone feminist conference, to illustrate the near total silence on trans issues that reigns in francophone feminist communities.

Feminist activist women are masculinized in terms of digit-ratio and social dominance: a possible explanation for the feminist paradox.

The feminist movement purports to improve conditions for women, and yet only a minority of women in modern societies self-identify as feminists. This is known as the feminist paradox. It has been suggested that feminists exhibit both physiological and psychological characteristics associated with heightened masculinization, which may predispose women for heightened competitiveness, sex-atypical behaviors, and belief in the interchangeability of sex roles. If feminist activists, i.e., those that manufacture the public image of feminism, are indeed masculinized relative to women in general, this might explain why the views and preferences of these two groups are at variance with each other. We measured the 2D:4D digit ratios (collected from both hands) and a personality trait known as dominance (measured with the Directiveness scale) in a sample of women attending a feminist conference. The sample exhibited significantly more masculine 2D:4D and higher dominance ratings than comparison samples representative of women in general, and these variables were furthermore positively correlated for both hands. The feminist paradox might thus to some extent be explained by biological differences between women in general and the activist women who formulate the feminist agenda.

Intimate Matters after Twenty-Five Years: Reminiscence and Reflections

Intimate Matters after Twenty-Five YearsReminiscence and Reflections John D’Emilio (bio) Rather than add another angle to the historiographical commentary that the previous panelists have contributed, I would like to use my comments partly to reminisce about how Intimate Matters came to be and partly to engage in some retrospective musings about interpretive choices we made then and things I might do differently now. Let me begin with some recollections of why Estelle and I chose in the early 1980s to undertake a broad narrative synthesis of this emerging field of historical writing, what we hoped to accomplish with the book, and what the process of collaboration was like. From one vantage point, I might say that the decision to write Intimate Matters was a case of reckless abandon. I had defended my dissertation and was close to finishing the revisions for publication. I had no job, and there were no prospects in sight. Estelle’s first book was out, and she was in the midst of a very difficult tenure battle. So she too faced the possibility of unemployment. Why not take on a project like Intimate Matters that involved, in some ways, a big leap of faith? There were also, of course, more substantial reasons. Estelle had completed a review essay on the literature on sexuality in the United States in the nineteenth century and thus was already thinking about the broad interpretive arch of the field.1 And even by the early 1980s there were already a number of books of depth and consequence that suggested how significant a topic sexuality was for understanding US history—books like Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right; John and Robin Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America; James Mohr, Abortion in America; Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History; and Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood.2 By absorbing the existing literature in this emerging field and adding some new research to fill in gaps, we hoped to construct a broad narrative that stretched from the age of settlement in the seventeenth century to the contemporary era. Such a book, we thought, might advance a number of goals. By constructing an interpretive [End Page 37] overview rooted in the contours of US history, we would implicitly be making an argument for the legitimacy of sexuality as a topic for historical study. We would also be advancing the field by creating a framework that others could incorporate or argue with. And, importantly, such a book would make it easier to teach the subject by providing a readable core text. There was another reason as well. The early 1980s was an intense period of sexual politics. Heated issues from the 1970s, such as abortion and reproductive rights, were still very much alive. The Reagan presidency and the increasing strength of a conservative moral politics within the Republican Party were leading to initiatives like the proposed Family Protection Act. The aids epidemic was sparking intense debate within the gay world and provoking a new wave of overt homophobia. Within feminist networks there were sharp divisions emerging around issues like pornography, which flared up at the Scholar and the Feminist Conference, held at Barnard College in 1982. Believing in the power of history to inform contemporary understandings of sexual politics, we both saw Intimate Matters as a project worth undertaking. Unlike many of the sciences and social sciences, history is not a discipline in which collaboration is a favored mode of work. Neither of us had collaborated on a project of such ambitious scope. How did we do it? Estelle was responsible for drafting the first half (chapters 1–7), and I was responsible for the second half (chapters 8–15). We exchanged drafts back and forth at every stage of the writing, making extensive comments and editorial suggestions, until we had achieved both a writing style that flowed as smoothly as we could manage and an interpretive framework that we both agreed with. In recent years, when I have reread the book, I have found myself thinking that Estelle was kinder to the female social-purity activists of the late nineteenth century than I would have been had I written...

Message from the Women's Worlds Congress: Women, Globalization and Modernity

In this paper, I analyze how the global feminist conference, Women's Worlds Congress 2011, imposes on its audience a certain political vision of the current order and the position of women. Modernity, which is implicitly regarded as the best way for women to improve their lives, is really only one of the many options available, but is made to look like as if it were the only reasonable choice women could make. One of my recent leadership experiences, namely my participation as a presenter at the Women’s Worlds Congress in Canada, focuses on what are frequently referred to as “girls’ and women’s issues”. The Women’s Worlds Congress (WWC) is especially interesting for me to analyze as it was an international-level event, which received media coverage reaching tens of millions of people around the globe and involved participation of prominent political figures and celebrities. So, it can be claimed that this event has left a trace in at least some of its audience’s views and perceptions. The postcolonial theory course provided me with the theoretical foundation I can now use to critique some of the major assumptions underlying the global feminist conference, specifically the language used by WWC when presenting its vision and goals. This language raises a number of critical questions theorized by Mohanty, Chakrabarty, and some other authors. Most importantly, borrowing from Mohanty’s analysis, this language portrays women as an “alwaysalready constituted” and homogeneous group based on shared oppressions and exclusions from the benefits of various phenomena, particularly, in the WWC context, globalization (200). This is evident in the following phrases: “How are women particularly restricted, excluded, or secluded from any possible benefits of globalization?”, “Globalization has contributed to the destabilization and marginalization of women and communities. Yet certain consequences have yielded positive results for women”, and “Women are using new tactics to break cycles of

Former east, former west: Post-socialist nostalgia and feminist genealogies in today’s Europe

This paper connects current studies of post-socialist nostalgia to the issue of feminist genealogies in the contemporary European context. Studies of post-socialist nostalgia can prove significant not only for the former socialist East - to which they have traditionally been limited - but also for the “former West”, that is post-Cold War Western Europe. In the first part of my paper I draw a connection between feminist genealogies and post-socialist nostalgia in the former East, looking in particular at the phenomenon of Yugonostalgia from a gendered and feminist perspective, and taking my research on the 1978 Belgrade feminist conference Drugarica Zena/Comrade Woman as a point of departure. The narrative about Yugoslavia being closer to Western Europe and to Western European feminist movements in the 1970s, in comparison to today’s marginalization of post-Yugoslav successor states, indicates that changes in gender regimes are deeply connected to shifts in ideological and geopolitical relations, including the shifting boundaries of Europe after 1989. In the second part of this essay I transpose the study of post-socialist nostalgia to the former West. When looking more closely at Western European countries, particularly at those who had significant communist parties such as Italy and France, it is clear that even in the West certain articulations of post-socialist nostalgia for radical pasts have emerged, helping us to unravel women’s and feminist movements’ genealogies that have been made invisible. I take the case of the recent Italian movie Cosmonauta as a symptom of post-socialist nostalgia in the former West.

THE WOMEN'S LIBERATION MOVEMENT AT FORTY, Ruskin College, Oxford, 12-13 March 2010.

To walk into Ruskin College on the fortieth anniversary of the first women’s liberation conference was for me, as for many of the women there, to summon up the remembrance of conferences past; and not only the first Women’s Liberation conference which this conference was remembering and celebrating. For anyone involved in the women’s movement, the History Workshop movement or left politics in the 1970s and ’80s, the seminar-rooms and lecture hall of Ruskin were very familiar and full of memories. Several generations of women were represented at this conference, as a display of hands at the opening address demonstrated. There were some who had been instrumental in the organization of the very first feminist conference in Britain, some who had grown up into the Women’s Movement with those women as their foremothers, and some with a relatively recent involvement in feminist activism. I was far too young to have...

Destinations of Feminist Art: Past, Present, and Future

When women's movements challenge the forms and nature of political life, the contemporary play of powers and power relations, they are in fact working towards a modification of women's status. On the other hand, when these same movements aim simply for a change in the distribution of power, leaving intact the power structure itself, then they are subjecting themselves, deliberately or not, to a phallocratie order. This latter gesture must of course be denounced, and with determination, since it may constitute a more subtly concealed exploitation of women. Indeed, that gesture plays on a certain naivete that suggests one need only be a in order to remain outside phallic powers. -Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman Feminism's headline-grabbing conflicts with New York City's museums have usually been addressed to straightforward equal-opportunities issues. Damning statistics about the low numbers of women artists are accompanied by photo-friendly scenes of placard-waving women. This is a mission that the Guerrilla Girls art collective has combined even more effectively with the use of theatrical costume. In January 2007, wearing their signature gorilla masks to maintain anonymity, two Guerrilla Girls took the platform at the Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA's) first-ever feminist conference, Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts. Among the list of eminent and emerging scholars and artists present were Marina Abramovic, Ute Meta Bauer, Beatriz Colomina, Coco Fusco, David Joselit, Geeta Kapur, Carrie Beatty Lambert, Lucy Lippard, Richard Meyer, Helen Molesworth, Wangechi Mutu, Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock, Martha Rosler, Ingrid Sischy, Anne Wagner, and Catherine de Zegher. Feminist Future was the first in a yearlong round of feminist-centered events in the art world. These have included panels at the College Art Association conference in New York organized by the Feminist Art Project; the establishment of a center for feminist art at the Brooklyn Museum with the permanent installation of Judy Chicago's monumental work The Dinner Party (1974-79); and two major exhibitions, Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Geffen Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (with further venues to follow, including MoMA's contemporary art venue, P.S.I).1 Perhaps as an attempt to remedy the atrocious record on women artists in New York's museums, these two major exhibitions of feminist-engaged art were women-only affairs. Following Irigaray's warning, however, we must pay careful attention to the form that feminism takes as it enters the mainstream museum world. The complicities it ends up enduring in the name of woman may not in fact benefit that half of the sky. Although the statistical approach is a necessary means of pressurizing museums to improve their policy on gender equality, it is a far less adequate format for presenting the more complicated issues of sexual difference and artistic representation. Before actually viewing these two ambitious exhibitions and attending MoMA's inaugurating conference, I had hoped that the nearly four decades of feminist art, art history, and theory taken up there would assert themselves with a degree of intensity and complexity that would knock me off my feet. Alas, they did not. Perhaps this is an overly tall order, considering the framing dates for the two exhibitions and MoMA's infancy in matters feminist. To be sure, certain occlusions and limitations became visible to me immediately. With WACK! focused on 1965-80 and Global Feminisms addressed to art by a younger generation of women born after 1960 (with works made mostly after 1990), the 1980s seem to have dropped out of the picture. That decade saw feminism embarking upon its first serious period of self-examination. The celebration of universal sisterhood was complicated by differences, of power, geopolitics, sexuality, and so on, and psychoanalytic approaches such as Irigaray's asked difficult questions about the unconscious as well as women's complicity with masculinist structures of power. …

East European feminist conference

East European feminist conference

Ourselves Alone?: Clár na mBan Conference Report

This article is a review of a report of a republican feminist conference, published by its organizers, Clár na mBan. The conference took place in Belfast in March 1994. The article supports the conference's criticisms of the ‘peace process’ as exclusive and undemocratic. It also takes issue with a number of republican and nationalist assumptions about historical and contemporary Ireland.

Feminist history conference

Feminist history conference