Where Did Griselda Pollock Write the Expanding Discourse Feminism and Art Hisory

Women, Art, and Art History: Gender and Feminist Analyses

Griselda Pollock

• Concluding REVIEWED: 16 Jan 2020
• Last MODIFIED: 30 Jan 2014
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199920105-0034

Introduction

Following a worldwide feminist movement in the subsequently 20th century, women became a renewed topic for art and art history, giving rise to gender assay of both creative production and art historical discourse. Gender is to exist understood as a system of power, named initially patriarchal and also theorized as a phallocentric symbolic society. A renewed and theoretically developed besides as activist feminist consciousness initially mandated the historical recovery of the contribution of women as artists to art'due south international histories to counter the constructive erasure of the history of women equally artists by the modern discipline of fine art history. This has likewise led to a rediscovery of the contributions of women as art historians to the discipline itself. Gender assay raises the repressed question of gender (and sexuality) in relation both to creativity itself and to the writing of art'south necessarily pluralized histories. Gender refers to the asymmetrical hierarchy betwixt those distinguished both sociologically and symbolically on the basis of perceived, but not determining, differences. Although projected every bit natural difference betwixt given sexes, the active and productive processes of social and ideological differentiation produces every bit its effects gendered difference that is claimed, ideologically, as "natural." As an axis of power relations, gender can be shown to shape social being of men and women and decide creative representations. Gender is thus also understood equally a symbolic dimension shaping hierarchical oppositions in representation in texts, images, buildings, and discourses nigh art. It is constantly being produced past the work performed by fine art and writing about art. Feminist analysis critiques these technologies of gender while itself likewise being one, albeit critically seeking transformation of social and symbolic gender. The analysis of gender ideologies in the writing of fine art history and in fine art itself, therefore, extend to art produced by all artists, irrespective of the gendered identity of the artist. Women, having been excluded by the gendering discourses of modern art history, accept had to be recovered from an oblivion those discourses created while the idea of women every bit creative person has to be reestablished in the confront of a an credo that places anything feminine in a secondary position. Women are non, even so, a homogeneous category defined by gender alone. Women are agonistically differentiated by course, ethnicity, culture, religion, geopolitical location, sexuality, and ability. Gender analysis includes the interplay of several axes of differentiation and their symbolic representations without any a priori assumptions nearly how each artwork/creative person might negotiate and rework dominant discourses of gender and other social inflections. The postcolonial critique of Western hegemony and a search for non-Western-centered models of inclusiveness that respect diversity without creating normative relativism are driving the tendency of the research into gender in and fine art history toward an equally yet unrealized inclusiveness regarding gender and difference in general rather than the creation of separate subcategories on the basis of the gender or other qualifying characteristics of the artist. The objectives of critical art historical practices focusing on gender and related axes of power are to ensure consistent and rigorous research into all artists, irrespective of gender, for which a specific initiative focusing on women as artists in club to correct a skewed and gender-selective archive has been necessary, and to expand the paradigm of art historical research in general to ensure that the social, economical, and symbolic functions of gender, sexual, and other social and psycho-symbolic differences are consistently considered as part of the normal procedures of art historical analysis.

Foundational Texts: Gender, History, and Image Shift

Without a foundational understanding of the social meaning and symbolic performance of gender, both the historical process of artistic creation and the historical representation of that history will not be grasped. Women working on art history (domain and discipline) draw on germane theoretical interventions in historical research while also using sociological studies of institutions to call for a paradigm shift in art history itself. Scott 1986 offers a primal argument for gender analysis in the historical disciplines, examining different theoretical paradigms that take been introduced to arroyo gender as an axis in history. Kelly-Gadol 1977 is a critical reading of the major cultural shifts from late medieval culture in which Troubadour culture immune women bureau in relation to love by means of appropriating feudal relations to the Renaissance in which new concepts of the decorative courtier airtight out such opportunities for women. In art history, Nochlin 1973 is the foundational text of a specifically feminist challenge to art history. Nochlin calls for a radical, epitome shift in art history (discipline). Raising the "woman question" becomes a lever to challenge the exclusion of all social and institutional factors in the written report of art'south histories. The text's title is, withal, representative of its own moment in 1971 when women art historians had to confront a discipline that presented fine art history (domain) almost entirely without women, having established a canon solely composed of great masters. Honoring Gabhart and Broun 1972's neologism "Old Mistresses" (cited under Initiating Exhibitions: Women Artists of the Western Tradition) to point out how language already disqualifies women from recognition every bit "masters." Parker and Pollock 2013 (written in 1978 and originally published 1981) identifies the discursive habits of the bailiwick of fine art history equally structurally gendered and gendering. The authors, nevertheless, also stress the ways that women artists actively negotiated their own differential situations to produce distinctive interventions in their ain cultural context and to show how they negotiated the epitome of adult female and of the artist in different contexts. Broude and Garrard 1982 lays out the case for feminist studies beyond all periods of art to reveal the cardinal office of gender in historical cultures and visual practices while recognizing the distorting effects of an unacknowledged masculinist and heteronormative bias in fine art historical interpretation. The authors demonstrate the overall shifts in art historical method that upshot from awareness of gender in culture. De Lauretis 1987 uses a Foucaultian model to understand gender as an effect produced in its representations, self-representations, and feminist deconstructions, challenging a model that, privileging man/woman difference, makes lesbian subjectivities invisible. Battersby 1989 traces gender across philosophical aesthetics to reveal its foundational and standing gender thinking. Broude and Garrard 1992 tracks the developing range of theories of gender in relation to art historical analysis registering the impact of postmodernist concepts of authorship and subjectivity while balancing such trends with an equal acknowledgement of the agency of women in contesting historically variable organizations and representations of gender relations.

• Battersby, Christine. Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics. London: Women's Press, 1989.

  An extended, philosophically based analysis of the gendering of the concept of genius from the ancients of the West to Simone de Beauvoir, revealing the identification of genius with the masculine body and conventionalized masculine attributes defined in opposition to the equally constructed and rhetorical figure of the feminine. Such an analysis is necessary in order to create the ground for any afterthought of the contribution of women to art.

• Broude, Norma, and Mary Garrard. "Introduction: Feminism and Art History." In Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany. Edited by Norma Broude and Mary Garrad 1–xviii. New York: Harper & Row, 1982.

  Introducing their first major collection of noun works of feminist art historical scholarship, Broude and Garrard position feminism's touch on on art history as a major reconceptualization of previous history and art historiography as patriarchal, necessitating radical revisions to the distortions created by sexual bias in the creation and estimation of art and demanding a new definition of the cultural and social uses of fine art.

• Broude, Norma, and Mary Garrard. "Introduction: The Expanding Soapbox." In The Expanding Soapbox: Feminism and Fine art History. Edited by Norma Broude and Mary Garrad, one–25. New York: Harper Collins, 1992.

  Representing the theoretical and methodological diversity of feminist studies in fine art history from its 2nd decade, Broude and Garrard both identify the effects of "postmodernist" theories of authorship, the gaze and the social construction of gender in fine art history, while contesting the tendency to polarize feminist scholarship betwixt mod and postmodern, essentialist and constructivist, traditionalist and theoretical. They advocate incremental change in the discipline and argue for a standing acknowledgement of the importance of studies of women's authorship in art.

• de Lauretis, Teresa. "The Technology of Gender." In Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Movie, and Fiction. Past Teresa de Lauretis, 1–xxx. London: Macmillan, 1987.

  Challenging predominantly masculine narratives of gender that finer install the heterosexual contract, which may be reproduced in feminist texts, because of the fact that gender is e'er existence produced in the play between representation and self-representation, de Lauretis sketches out methods for countering the exclusion of nonheteronormative subjectivities by suggesting that otherness and divergence is always already present in the "spaces off" of dominant discourses.

• Kelly-Gadol, Joan. "Did Women Accept a Renaissance?" In Becoming Visible: Women in European History. Edited by Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, nineteen–50. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

  Kelly-Gadol stresses that the temporalities of gender relations may not but non coincide with the progressive model of historical periodization—the Renaissance as progress—but may exist in conflict. Histories attentive to gender do not necessarily coincide with those that are gender-blind. Reprinted in Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 19–50.

• Nochlin, Linda. "Why Take There Been No Great Women Artists?" In Art and Sexual Politics: Women's Liberation, Women Artists, and Fine art History. Edited by Thomas B. Hess and Elizabeth C. Baker 44. New York: Collier, 1973.

  Get-go published in ARTnews (January 1971), pp. 22–39, 67–71. Nochlin discouraged her colleagues from answering her question by seeking candidates for "not bad woman artist." She questioned the rhetorical figure of the democratic genius and insisted upon the function of discriminatory institutions and practices that had limited women'due south, and others', potential and access to training and recognition. Her perspective suggested that reduced bigotry would create a level playing field for women.

• Parker, Rozsika, and Griselda Pollock. Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology. 3d ed. London: I. B. Tauris, 2013.

  Defining fine art history every bit an ideologically impregnated soapbox, the authors rail stereotypes of femininity (mindless, decorative, derivative, dextrous, weak) negatively invoked to sustain an unacknowledged masculinization of fine art and the creative person. They critique the gendered bureaucracy of art versus craft and assess the strategic interventions into the representation of gender deviation, body, and identity of artists from the Middle Ages to the belatedly 20th century.

• Scott, Joan W. "Gender: A Useful Category for Historical Analysis." American Historical Review 91.5 (1986): 1053–1075.

  DOI: 10.2307/1864376

  Scott reviews working definitions of both the social structure of gender and the symbolic office of gender in representing and enacting hierarchical deviation. Gender is presented not only as a historically fabricated social relation merely too as an constructive chemical element in representational systems that likewise exceed the relations of masculine and feminine. This is a disquisitional text of the potential for gender as a category for historical research. Available online for purchase or by subscription.

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