: Mariology—the veneration of the Virgin Mary—exerts a profound influence on women artists from Catholic backgrounds. Internalizing the mixed signals Mary transmits about purity, female strength, and compassion, they reinterpret the stories and mythologies surrounding her in ways that allow them to explore the ambiguities of the female role in contemporary society while also examining their conflicts about their own sexuality.

Mariology—the veneration of the Virgin Mary—exerts a profound influence on women artists from Catholic backgrounds. Internalizing the mixed signals Mary transmits about purity, female strength, and compassion, they reinterpret the stories and mythologies surrounding her in ways that allow them to explore the ambiguities of the female role in contemporary society while also examining their conflicts about their own sexuality.

In the field of art history, the white Western male viewpoint, unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art historian, may—and does—prove to be inadequate not merely on moral and ethical grounds, or because it is elitist, but on purely intellectual ones. In revealing the failure of much academic art history, and a great deal of history in general, to take account of the unacknowledged value system, the very presence of an intruding subject in historical investigation, the feminist critique at (...) the same time lays bare its conceptual smugness, its meta-historical naïveté. At a moment when all disciplines are becoming more self-conscious, more aware of the nature of their presuppositions as exhibited in the very languages and structures of the various fields of scholarship, such uncritical acceptance of “what is” as “natural” may be intellectually fatal. Just as Mill saw male domination as one of a long series of social injustices that had to be overcome if a truly just social order were to be created, so we may see the unstated domination of white male subjectivity as one in a series of intellectual distortions which must be corrected in order to achieve a more adequate and accurate view of historical situations. (shrink)

Biographical novels about historical women artists have been experiencing a veritable boom in recent years. Written mostly by women, they can be understood as women authors’ attempts to reach out across time to other “artistic” women whose lives “speak to us” today. It has long been a key insight of historical fiction research that a historical novel reveals more about the time in which it was written than the time in which it is set. As (...) such, it can be assumed that contemporary novels about historical women speak as much to twenty-first-century conceptions of femininity as to particular historical moments of female subjectivity. This paper will compare two novels about historical women artists: Janice Galloway’s Clara about nineteenth-century German pianist Clara Wieck-Schumann and Priya Parmar’s Exit the Actress about Restoration actress Nell Gwyn. While based on historical facts, both these novels use the greater freedom of fiction to depart from biographical conventions. It will be demonstrated that although they resemble each other on the discourse level, employing shifts in the narrative perspective, conspicuous typography, and graphic elements, they differ markedly in the biographical and fictional subgenres in which they participate and, hence, in their gender politics. (shrink)

There have been only sporadic attempts to understand Chinese women’s role and influence in the field of visual arts, even though their contribution has been major. This article highlights the significance of women’s participation in modern Chinese culture through the works of several contemporary Chinese women artists who have been professionally active in visual arts in the last two decades. Using an interdisciplinary framework, drawing on concepts from theories of feminism, modernism and postcolonialism, this article seeks (...) to understand a culturally specific field in the history of art, and the relationship of various factors that have contributed to it. (shrink)

This article addresses the extent and ways in which gender inequality in the newspaper coverage of arts and culture has changed in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, 1955-2005. Through a quantitative content analysis, we mapped all articles that appeared in two elite newspapers in each country in four sample years 1955, 1975, 1995, and 2005. First, despite increasing women’s employment in arts and culture and a quantitative feminization of journalism, elite newspaper coverage of women in (...) arts and culture has hardly changed, making up about 20-25 percent consistently over the last 50 years. Second, our results show surprisingly few cross-national differences in the amount of the newspaper coverage devoted to women in arts and culture. Third, although women are underrepresented in the coverage of all artistic genres, there is some evidence of horizontal sex segregation—particularly in architecture and modern dance and fashion —as well as vertical sex segregation—in that attention to women has increased in “highbrow” genres that have declined in status. Finally, as the status of an actor type increases from laymen to artistic directors, the proportion of women decreases in newspaper attention to arts and culture. (shrink)

In the realm of pixels and virtual spaces, the art of placemaking transcends physical confines, weaving a digital mosaic of voices and visions. Feminist digital placemaking emerges as a vibrant brushstroke on this canvas, painting online environments with the hues of inclusion, safety, and empowerment. The "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement in Iran, mirrored in the "Year of Hope" digital exhibition, showcases the transformative power of feminist digital placemaking in amplifying voices, knitting solidarity, and challenging oppressive narratives. The "Woman, Life, Freedom" (...) movement, sparked by the tragic demise of Mahsa (Jina) Amini, unfolds like a poignant narrative, with women scripting the chapters of resistance. This movement, a collage of courage and defiance, has found a digital stage in the "Year of Hope" exhibition, where each artwork tells a story, each pixel a testament to the unyielding spirit of Iranian women. (shrink)

This article addresses cultural memory’s ability to address past and present injustices by focusing on the artistic-political practices displayed by the professional actresses of Roma descent from the independent theater the Giuvlipen in Bucharest. The founders of this Romani women-centered theater also have ‘invented’ the word ‘Giuvlipen’ – ‘feminism’ in the Romani language – because there had previously been no word to connote both the forms of oppression and the consciousness raising politics performed by Romani women. By applying (...) the lens of intersectional feminism, the argument this article aims to put forth is that Giuvlipen’s artistic performances can foster the awareness raising of the Romani women’s ‘double jeopardy’. At the same time, the artistic performances displayed by the Giuvlipen Theater challenge the habits of historical remembering and its politics of oblivion, which can in turn promote experiential forms of knowledge and new structures and archives of feelings. (shrink)

This book brings together the stories of biographers, novelists, scholars, and artists as they have written about the journeys (some literal, some figurative) they have made to their subjects. Contributors include Elizabeth Wood, J.J. Wilson, Leah Glasser, Jane Lazarre, and Alice Walker.

This article examines the historically embedded relations of three 19th-century phenomena in which the non-consuming body is constituted as a spectacle of admiration. These three phenomena, known as Fasting Women, Living Skeletons and Hunger Artists, all emerged and disappeared in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Viewing the emergence and disappearance of the three phenomena as embedded in the historical crossroads of pre-modern and modern ethics, the article argues that each of these phenomena corresponds differently to the (...) clash between modern `rationality' and the pre-modern celebration of `miracles'. The article maintains that while Fasting Women epitomized that clash by becoming (a highly contested) spectacle of `the miraculous', the Living Skeletons transcended the clash by portraying a spectacle of liminal corporeality (the `living dead') and the Hunger Artists announced the dissolution of that very clash by performing a spectacle of `the controlled self'. Through a focus on the spectacle of fasting (i.e. the appeared, performed, `gazed at' act of fasting), a phenomenological typology of the three phenomena is outlined. I suggest that while Fasting Women and Living Skeletons embodied a spectacle of a lean body, which does not require suffering, the Hunger Artists embodied a spectacle of hunger centred on suffering and pain. The phenomenological `mapping' of these phenomena is then considered in the context of `performativity theory' and proposed as a frame of reference for a sociological study of anorexia nervosa. (shrink)

Les études récentes ont montré que les femmes ont participé, tout au long du Moyen Age, à l’activité économique. Pourtant, leur place dans la production artistique médiévale est généralement ignorée des historiens de l’art, alors même que l’étude de la production d’un artiste ou d’un milieu montre clairement, par les sources et les œuvres, qu’elles ont été présentes à chaque étape du processus de création. La confrontation de la norme à la pratique, par l’analyse de la réglementation de la gilde (...) de Saint-Luc de quatorze villes (Nord, Flandre, Hainaut et Brabant) et des registres d’inscription à la gilde des métiers du livre brugeois, a permis de mettre en perspective les activités des femmes dans les métiers d’art. Elles apparaissent comme maîtresses, ayant passé la maîtrise du métier – et pas seulement de métiers dits féminins –, dirigeant l’atelier, aux côtés du mari ou seules (célibataires ou veuves) apprenties, formant parfois des garçons ou des filles au métier. Elles sont aussi les premières victimes des crises économiques. (shrink)

Les années 1968 sont riches en ruptures et créations pour les plasticiennes vivant en France, sous la double influence des remises en cause des avant-gardes artistiques et du mouvement féministe. Parallèlement aux ruptures effectives dès le milieu des années 1960 dans les parcours individuels, des collectifs de femmes artistes se forment entre 1972 et 1978. Cet article analyse les théories, pratiques et activités des principaux groupes, en soulignant leurs points communs et leurs divergences.

As a conceptual approach in art practice, the female body has represented both a cultural barrier and a source of inspiration throughout art history. The adoption of the female body as an art theme is prevalent across many different artistic movements, using varying conceptual approaches. Women struggle against paradigms of inferiority to this day, though their individual cultural identity varies according to their society’s beliefs and customs – for example, many contemporary Middle Eastern cultures and customs are based on (...) a patriarchal past, when men wielded power over women. Women all over the world experience subjugation to varying degrees in the fields of employment, education, sexuality and reproductive choice. The female body in Middle Eastern societies is a red line that artists are not allowed to cross. Though many Middle Eastern civilizations have dealt freely with the female body, as can be seen in the paintings and sculptures of ancient Egypt, many social and religious factors made the female body taboo in most Middle Eastern cultures. However, on close scrutiny of modern art history in Middle Eastern and Islamic countries, we can identify outstandingly courageous female artists who succeeded in breaking the rules. They chose to express themselves through their own own form of art as an expression of freedom. They chose to use their own bodies as an art medium, which made them pioneers in their countries, and many female artists followed their example. Media art has flourished in Arab countries since the 1990s, especially in Egypt. Many of these female artists distinguished themselves as pioneers, aligning themselves with new art forms and challenging the prevailing stereotypical notion of the female artist at that time. This new mode of female self-expression and identity has developed over time and remains an ongoing process in the twenty-first century. This article considers how Middle Eastern female media artists have struggled to transform stereotypes of women by using their own bodies as an artistic element, and how they have expressed the concept of freedom through their self-body image. (shrink)

Current research in artificial intelligence (AI) sheds light on algorithmic bias embedded in AI systems. The underrepresentation of women in the AI design sector of the tech industry, as well as in training datasets, results in technological products that encode gender bias, reinforce stereotypes and reproduce normative notions of gender and femininity. Biased behaviour is notably reflected in anthropomorphic AI systems, such as personal intelligent assistants (PIAs) and chatbots, that are usually feminized through various design parameters, such as names, (...) voices and traits. Gendering of AI entities, however, is often reduced to the encoding of stereotypical behavioural patterns that perpetuate normative assumptions about the role of women in society. The impact of this behaviour on social life increases, as human-to-(anthropomorphic)machine interactions are mirrored in human-to-human social interactions. This article presents current critical research on AI bias, focusing on anthropomorphic systems. Moreover, it discusses the significance of women’s engagement in AI design and programming, by presenting selected case studies of contemporary female media artists and designers. Finally, it suggests that women, through their creative practice, provide feminist and critical approaches to AI design which are essential for imagining alternative, inclusive, ethic and de-biased futures for anthropomorphic AIs. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary book examines the work of several female artists since 1960 in the areas of dance, music, installation, photography, architecture, poetry, literature, theater, film, and performance art. Each chapter is primarily devoted to an important work by a single artist, seen within its historical context, and with particular attention to how each artist incorporated gender issues or feminist thought into her respective art form. Laurie Anderson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jane Campion, Judy Chicago, Zaha Hadid, Pauline Oliveros, Yvonne Rainer, Cindy (...) Sherman, Amy Tan, and Paula Vogel have each made groundbreaking contributions to their fields. As a group, they represent a tremendous diversity of approaches to art making: from accessible to opaque, from overtly feminist to apolitical, from emotive to cool, from controversial to mainstream. (shrink)

Women, Modernism, and Performance is an interdisciplinary 2004 study that looks at a variety of texts and modes of performance in order to clarify the position of women within - and in relation to - modern theatre history. Considering drama, fiction and dance, as well as a range of performance events such as suffrage demonstrations, lectures, and legal trials, Penny Farfan expands on theatre historical narratives that note the centrality of female characters in male-authored modern plays but that (...) do not address the efforts of women artists to develop alternatives both to mainstream theatre practice and to the patriarchal avant garde. Focusing on Henrik Ibsen, Elizabeth Robins, Ellen Terry, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Edith Craig, Radclyffe Hall and Isadora Duncan, Farfan identifies different objectives, strategies, possibilities and limitations of feminist-modernist performance practice and suggests how the artists in question transformed the representation of gender in art and life. (shrink)

Women, Art, and Power?seven landmark essays on women artists and women in art history?brings together the work of almost twenty years of scholarship and speculation.

Emily Carr, often called Canada’s Van Gogh, was a post-impressionist explorer, artist and writer. In _Artist Emily Carr and the Spirit of the Land_ Phyllis Marie Jensen draws on analytical psychology and the theories of feminism and social constructionism for insights into Carr’s life in the late Victorian period and early twentieth century. Presented in two parts, the book introduces Carr’s émigré English family and childhood on the "edge of nowhere" and her art education in San Francisco, London and Paris. (...) Travels in the wilderness introduced her to the totem art of the Pacific Northwest coast at a time Aboriginal art was undervalued and believed to be disappearing. Carr vowed to document it before turning to spirited landscapes of forest, sea and sky. The second part of the book presents a Jungian portrait of Carr, including typology, psychological complexes, and archetypal features of personality. An examination the individuation process and Carr’s embracement of transcendental philosophy reveals the richness of her personality and artistic genius. Artist Emily Carr and the Spirit of the Land provides captivating reading for analytical psychologists, academics and students of Jungian studies, art history, health, gender and women’s studies. (shrink)

Photographic representations of women living with or beyond breast cancer have gained prominence in recent decades. Postmillennial visual narratives are both documentary projects and dialogic sites of self-construction and reader-viewer witness. After a brief overview of 30 years of breast cancer photography, this essay analyzes a collaborative photo-documentary by Stephanie Byram and Charlee Brodsky, Knowing Stephanie , and a memorial photographic essay by Brodsky written ten years after Byram’s death, “Remembering Stephanie” . The ethics of representing women’s postsurgical (...) bodies and opportunities for reader-viewers to engage in “productive looking” are the focal issues under consideration. (shrink)

In early China, was it correct for a woman to disobey her father, contradict her husband, or shape the public policy of a son who ruled over a dynasty or state? According to the _Lienü zhuan_, or_ Categorized Biographies of Women_, it was not only appropriate but necessary for women to step in with wise counsel when fathers, husbands, or rulers strayed from the path of virtue. Compiled toward the end of the Former Han dynasty (202 BCE-9 CE) by (...) Liu Xiang (79-8 BCE), the _Lienü zhuan_ is the earliest extant book in the Chinese tradition solely devoted to the education of women. Far from providing a unified vision of women's roles, the text promotes a diverse and sometimes contradictory range of practices. At one extreme are exemplars resorting to suicide and self-mutilation as a means to preserve chastity and ritual orthodoxy. At the other are bold and outspoken women whose rhetorical mastery helps correct erring rulers, sons, and husbands. The text provides a fascinating overview of the representation of women's roles in early legends, formal speeches on statecraft, and highly fictionalized historical accounts during this foundational period of Chinese history. Over time, the biographies of women became a regular feature of dynastic and local histories and a vehicle for expressing and transmitting concerns about women's social, political, and domestic roles. The _Lienü zhuan_ is also rich in information about the daily life, rituals, and domestic concerns of early China. Inspired by its accounts, artists across the millennia have depicted its stories on screens, paintings, lacquer ware, murals, and stone relief sculpture, extending its reach to literate and illiterate audiences alike. (shrink)

Drawing on interviews with women and men musicians, this study examines women's overrepresentation in an instrumental specialty, the electric bass, in alternative rock music. Structurally, this phenomenon may be explained by the instrument's greater ease of learning and lesser attractiveness to men, yet women bassists frequently advance an alternative theory of “womanly” affinity. The entrance of women into rock bands via the bass may provide them with new opportunities and help legitimate their presence in a male-dominated (...) site of artistic production, yet it may simultaneously work to reconstruct a gendered division of labor and reproduce dominant gender ideologies. (shrink)

To celebrate the acquisition of the Tom Phillips archive, the Bodleian Library has asked the artist to assemble and design a series of books drawing on his themed collection of over 50,000 photographic postcards. These encompass the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which, thanks to the ever cheaper medium of photography, ‘ordinary’ people could afford to own their portraits.Women in Hats explores the remarkable range in the world of millinery from outrageous Edwardian creations to the (...) inventive austerities of the Second World War.This book contains 200 images chosen with the eye of a leading artist from a visually rich vein of social history. Their covers will also feature a thematically linked painting, especially created for each title, from Tom Phillips’ signature work, A Humument. (shrink)

When women take up the work of music education, of the university, and become nomadic, engaging Deleuze and Guattari's war machine, all kinds of things happen. As nomads in music education, women traverse borders and boundaries that would otherwise limit and constrain them as they initiate alternative possibilities related to teaching and learning music. For women working at the university level, this is yearning, the necessity to engage in crucial, meaningful, intellectual work, to think and write work (...) that stimulates and inspires, as we are passionately and artistically engaged in everyday life. The nomadic war machine of women working in music education, embodied as yearning, looks for what more is there, what more in music education can be created and actualized. Conceiving music education as difference, in terms of its creative potential, women engage potentialities of experimentation, risk, and chance. (shrink)

IN THIS ESSAY I CONSIDER POSSIBLE CONTRIBUTIONS OF FEMINIST THEOLogy to theological aesthetics and ethics by comparing the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, the predominant figure in theological aesthetics, with that of Elizabeth Johnson and Sallie McFague. Balthasar's emphasis on contemplation and obedience in response to the unexpected revelation of God's glory contrasts with the practicality, mutuality, and creativity of feminist theological ethics. On the other hand, feminist theology's emphasis on appropriate language and images for God suggests an implicit (...) aesthetics. The artistic work of contemporary African women in crisis situations sheds further light on both Balthasar and feminist theology and brings into relief the relationship of beauty and justice. Although Balthasar's emphasis on the transcendent glory of God may leave him with an undeveloped ethics, feminist theology's agent-oriented approach could benefit from greater attention to contemplation and a transformed understanding of obedience. These conclusions urge greater appreciation and development of the aesthetic and imaginative dimensions of feminist theological ethics. (shrink)

This paper explores the visual construction and representation of co-accused women offenders in court drawings. It utilises three case studies of female co-defendants who appeared in the England and Wales court system between 2003 and 2013. In doing so this paper falls into three parts. The first part considers the emergence of the sub-discipline, visual criminology and examines what is known about the visual representation of female offenders. The second part presents the findings of an empirical investigation, which involved (...) engaging in a critical, reflexive visual analysis of a selection of court drawings of three female co-offenders. The third part discusses the ways in which the court artists' interpretation, the conventions of court sketching, and motifs of female offenders as secondary actors, drew on existing myths and prejudices by representing the women as listening, remorseless ‘others’. (shrink)

Chinese traditional costume is one of the important carriers of Chinese culture. The process of the emergence and development of the culture of traditional Chinese costume also reflects the cultural background and evolution of ancient Chinese society. In the context of the strengthening of the Chinese economy, the inheritance and development of Chinese clothing culture is of great importance for modern society. The epochs of Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern dynasties are a period of Chinese history marked by frequent wars, (...) ethnic integration and convergence of various ideas. Against this background, there was a weakening of the Confucian "ritual" style, followed by the spread of the teachings of Xuan Xue, Buddhism and Taoism, and a freer, down-to-earth, elegant clothing culture appeared. This article consists of the following three parts: Diversity of social background; Artistic forms of costume culture of the Wei-Jin eras; Modern trends in the development of clothing culture. Based, among other things, on such material as the scroll painting "The Fairy of the Lo River" by the artist Gu Kaizhi of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, this article analyzes the influence of the teachings of Xuan-xue, Buddhism and Taoism on the costume of the Wei and Jin dynasties, illustrates the direction of development of modern Chinese costume culture, and continued the path for the development of clothing culture with Chinese specifics. (shrink)

Since Darwin proposed that human musicality evolved through sexual selection, empirical evidence has supported intersexual selection as one of the adaptive functions of artistic propensities. However, intrasexual competition has been overlooked. We tested their relative importance by investigating the relationship between the self-perceived talent/expertise in 16 artistic and 2 sports modalities and proxies of intersexual selection and intrasexual competition in heterosexuals. Participants were 82 Brazilian men, 166 Brazilian women, 146 Czech men, and 458 Czech women. Factor analysis revealed (...) five factors: Literary-arts, Visual-arts, Musical-arts, Circus-arts, and Sports. Multivariate General Linear Model showed more associations of the arts to intersexual selection in women and to intrasexual selection in men, and overall more relationships in women than in men. In women, literary and musical-arts were related to elevated inter- and intrasexual selections proxies, visual and circus-arts were related to elevated intersexual selection proxies, and sports were related to intrasexual selection proxies. In men, literary-arts and sports were related to elevated inter- and intrasexual selection proxies, musical-arts were related to intrasexual proxies, and circus-arts were related to intersexual proxies; visual-arts did not have predictors. Although present in both sexes, each sexual selection component has different relative importance in each sex. Artisticality functions to attract and maintain long/short-term partners, and to compete with mating rivals. (shrink)

This article explores the contributions of women scholars, writers and artists to our understanding of the medieval past. Beginning with a contemporary artists book by Liz Mathews that draws on one of Boethius‘s Latin lyrics from the Consolation of Philosophy as translated by Helen Waddell, it traces a network of medieval women scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries associated with Manchester and the John Rylands Library, such as Alice Margaret Cooke and Mary Bateson. It concludes (...) by examining the translation of the Old English poem, The Wife‘s Lament, by contemporary poet, Eavan Boland. The art of Liz Mathews and poetry of Eavan Boland and the scholarship of women like Alice Cooke, Mary Bateson, Helen Waddell and Eileen Power show that women‘s writing of the past – creative, public, scholarly – forms a strand of an archive of women‘s history that is still being put together. (shrink)

The inaccessibility of the Ottoman harems to European males helped perpetuate the image of the harem as purely sexual in nature and contributed to imperialistic discourse that positioned the East as inferior to the West. It was only with the emergence of female travellers and artists that Europe was afforded a brief glimpse into the source of their fantasies; however, whether these accounts catered to or challenged the normative imperialist discourse of the day remains controversial. Emerging scholarship also highlights (...) the way in which harem women themselves were able to control the depiction of their private spaces to suit their own needs, serving to highlight how nineteenth century depictions of the harem were a series of cross-cultural exchanges and negotiations between male Orientalists, female European travellers, and shrewd Ottoman women. (shrink)

Recent years have brought enormous growth in the number of women-only art exhibitions. These exhibitions are accompanied by discussions that concentrate on curatorial feminist activism. In this text, I propose a different perspective by taking into consideration all exhibitions where the participants were determined by social category and which were organized in one country during one year. This perspective not only allows us to remark on and analyse activities that otherwise remain unnoticed but also encourages us to extend our (...) understanding of politics behind women-only initiatives. These exhibitions are generally intended to increase the capital of women artists, and to shift forces within the art and social fields in favour of women. However, as my analysis demonstrates, the organizers of different exhibitions occupy different places both in the art field and in the social field, and it is their position that determines, to a large extent, what changes they envision, what objectives they – in consequence – have and how they formulate their politics. This text also offers a reflection on whether the objectives behind organizing women-only shows has been constant or if they are a result of the current situation of women. (shrink)

If we think of artistic creation as a basic dimension of humanity we need to question the absence of female artists in history. We should also look at their gradual emergence in the late 20th century, an emergence that coincides with the feminist movement and a change in the conception of art itself, revealed chiefly by Duchamp. But does art by women have some specificity? Without giving a definite answer as far as subject matter is concerned, we note (...) that the conditions suited to both history and the history of art may affect their creation but without specifying it ontologically. If, moreover, some women artists define their work as feminist, it is through an act that combines artistic and political transgression. The exhibition currently arranged by the Georges Pompidou Centre, elles@ beaubourg, provides new resources for these complex questions. (shrink)

Martha A. Hall’s artists’ books documenting her experience of living with breast cancer offer future health professionals a unique opportunity to sit in the patient’s position of vulnerability and fear. Hall’s books have become a cornerstone of our medical humanities pedagogy at the Maine Women Writers Collection because of their emotional directness and their impact on readers. This essay examines the ways that Hall’s call for conversation with healthcare providers is enacted at the University of New England and (...) provides a model for how such works might be used at other educational institutions to encourage empathy between practitioners and patients by engaging in conversations about anger, fear, and other common reactions to life-threatening illness. We explore the unruly nature of Martha A. Hall’s narratives of illness and care, as well as how the form of the books themselves engages the reader in a deep relationship with Hall’s personal pain and her humanity itself. We explore, too, the cumulative effect of these powerful books on readers who handle them regularly, as we do in our roles as professor and archivist. (shrink)

One kind of government-supported censorship of the arts targets not the expressive content of any particular artwork but instead seeks to suppress the activity of a group of people based on some feature of the group’s human identity such as race, gender or class. Using examples from the history of the development of black music in the United States that followed from the legal oppression of slavery and from evidence of changes in the Punjabi theatre in Pakistan following state-sanctioned suppressions (...) of women this paper demonstrates that human-identity-related arts censorship not only harms but can actually serve to spur and enhance, rather than suppress, artistic innovation. (shrink)

This article explores Eli Sisters as a reinvigorated rogue who finds his artistic calling in Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, published in 2011. With the help of insights from narratology and genre theory, the article provides a textual analysis of Eli’s discourse, perspective and behaviour. Eli casts a critical light on the senseless violence, unbridled greed, ecological devastation, and hyper-masculinity inherent to America’s Frontier myth. As a reinvigorated rogue, he raises questions about what it means to be human and reflects (...) upon morality. With hindsight, the rogue as an artist creates a generically hybrid narrative that parodically imitates and transforms the genre conventions of the Western and the picaresque tale. The article also draws attention to the power that Eli assigns to women in a story about male heroic conquest. These include otherworldly female figures from classical mythology and the brothers’ mother. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American UniversityTheodore GracykArt Subjects: Making Artists in the American University, by Howard Singerman. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1999, 296 pp., $19.95 paper.Howard Singerman's Art Subjects is a study of the training of visual artists in American universities from 1912 to the present. More precisely, the book is an account of how two philosophies ofeducation have (...) competed to inform that training. At the outset, Singerman announces that the book explores a long-standing "struggle between vision and language" (p. 10) that culminates with a decisive privileging of language. The book mimics its putative subject in at least one interesting way. As it was for art and the training of American artists in the twentieth century (at least on Singerman's account of them), so it is with the book. Each moves from a practice grounded in objective reality to a jargon-ridden discourse that limits entry to anyone outside of its acutely self-regarding disciplinary field. Although the book's acknowledgments segment thanks one individual for demanding thatSingerman "come to a real conclusion" for the book, readers should note Singerman's subsequent admission that it may not have one. At times it even appears that Singerman goes out of his way to avoid drawing one.Art Subjects appears to have started life as Singerman's doctoral dissertation, but it only occasionally displays the dull by-the-numbers writing of such documents. The book has a clear organization and its numerous quotations are carefully documented. The overall argument is framed, beginning and end, with Singerman's autobiography of his own time as a university art student. It provides him with his framing question: if he has a M.F.A. in sculpture but never learned to sculpt, what does his professional degree signify? The answer is that it indicates that his work is no longer facile. He has progressed from the realm of the artist whose work is professional, displaying facility, to the stage where he is professional. He has progressed to the point where being an artist is theartist's true subject: "Artists are the subject of graduate school; they are both who and what is taught" (p. 3). If this progression is best indicated by an artist's lack of facility in producing works of art, that is the price of professionalism. In the post-World War II university, art training is "founded on the primacy of theory over practice" (p. 181). Yet the result is professionalism without a clear profession other than as an employee of the post-World War II university: the M.F.A. prepares artists for the university discipline of art. Citing Foucault, Singerman seems satisfied that artists have taken command of a theoretical field. Disciplinary boundaries are created and policed by its rules of professional discourse. At the same time, Singerman declares his intention to "use the concept of the discipline as it constrains and structures discourses to keep from having to judge whether or not art is a profession" (p. 201). He likewise mentions [End Page 119] but does not take any stand on the "putative decline of recent art" (p. 210). This ongoing refusal to judge deprives the book of potentially interesting conclusions. It also calls into question Singerman's repeated references to the "self-criticality" of the discipline.Singerman's neutrality might berefreshing were it not for his use of Foucault to introduce the notion that each new "proposition" within the disciplinary discourse represents progress in a "theoretical field," moving "knowledge" forward. Talking about art (and not, to be sure, talking all that much about specific works of art) and talking about being an artist may or may not represent progress. For instance, Singerman's early chaptersmake the case that the triumph of artistic modernism must be understood as a repudiation of a "female" aesthetic and even of women as artists. Singerman returns to the topic ofwomen artists only once, to note Griselda Pollock's approval of the entry of feminism into the academic discipline of art. Thus Singerman is silent on the question of whether progress is made when the number of women is... (shrink)

This article contributes to a more nuanced and contextual approach to women’s decision-making concerning their stored IVF (in vitro fertilisation) embryos through attempting to craft a space for the expression of the complex, and contradictory, emotions attached to these decisions, unhooked from any notion of abstract moral status inhering in the embryo itself. Women struggle to express the confounding nature of the relationship to the stored IVF embryo as something of-the-body but not within the body, neither self nor (...) other, person nor thing. In order to try to address this sense of the ineffable, I draw in this article upon a series of images by German-born American artist, Kiki Smith. The article explores three major themes, each alongside one of Smith’s artworks connecting to an experience of discomfort or confounding unease. (shrink)

In this response, I suggest that Black southern women in the U.S. have always been central to the “reconstruction” that Taylor identifies as a central theme of Black aesthetics. Building on his allusions to Alice Walker and Jean Toomer, I explore Walker’s tearful response (in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983) to Toomer’s Cane (2011). Walker identifies their mothers’ and grandmothers’ informal arts of storytelling and gardening as the hidden roots of both her and Toomer’s work. (...) I suggest that Walker’s tears function to water her mother’s (and othermothers’) gardens, thereby sustaining southern Black women’s foundational work in reconstruction. Through telling their stories and planting gardens, along with crafting meals, designing clothes, and designing and decorating homes, southern Black women have always been necessary to Black aesthetics—filling worlds with aesthetically-rich and energetic artworks that Black formal artists such as Walker channel and transfigure into their formal artistic productions. (shrink)

My interest in undertaking the study of images of Arab women in Western visual ethnography and art emerged from my own life experience. My identity as an Arab feminist having lived in different Eastern and Western communities has shaped my understanding and affected my observation in this research. As an Arab woman being observed in the first place, I am taking the role of the "outside"/inside' observer in this study. I am observing the observers and the observed, and both (...) become the observed in my chosen study. I observe visual images of Arab women under the gaze of Western observers. Ethnographers, photographers, and artists become the observed under my investigation. Here again, visual images of Arab women are observed—in fact they only have been observed as objects, a result of their display as visual images by Western observers. Contemporary North African women, Assia Djebar, Houria Niati, and Leila Sebbar are observers who examine visual images of North African women that were painted by Western artists. In examining their works here, they in turn become the observed. Also I observe Elizabeth Fernea's visual ethnographic work on North African women. Fernea and her project become the observed in my research. Finally, I undertook the role of the observer in this study mainly in order to understand myself and identify my place in the society of other women and men. I introduce a cross‐cultural dialogue that will question the bipolar cultural boundaries in feminist and historiographic scholarship. (shrink)