S0617 Feminist Art Histories and Discentered Narratives of Modernity

During the first sessions the course will outline an introductory approach to contemporary feminist theories, and intellectuals that have been influential in constituting what we know today as feminist art history. This will help to understand feminist art history as an interdisciplinary field of studies constituted and reconstituted by different social and theoretical debates. Also these first sessions will introduce an idea of visual culture and art history as a battleground of representations that contribute to the cultural production of gender, class, race and sexual hegemonic and counter-hegemonic positions.\r\n

Afterwards the course will analyze and discuss different generations of feminist interventions in modernist history. From the 70s\' to the current times, historians, cultural critics, and artists have developed different strategies for contesting the modernist, canonical, positivist and chronological narration of art and modernity. Informed by poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and postcolonial critique, feminist art history does not understand modernity as a uniform, causal, teleological and resolved narrative. Instead, it sees history as a fragmented discourse, based on a permanent dialog between present and past, which is conformed by \"distributions of power based in the continuing social contradictions we call class, race and gender\" (Pollock, 2001:19).

\r\n

Also, the course will explore the textual and discursive strategies that feminist art history has developed to alter the monologic narrative of modernism, which is based on the figures of the artist and the critic as the only possible originators of meaning. A discussion will be opened to analyze different feminist theories that distinguish specific modes of writing and viewing that can be called feminine and feminist. Both inspired by the poststructuralist death of the author and the birth of the text, and by the postfreudian psychoanalytic concept of the maternal body as the location of symbolic transgressions, feminist historians and artists have worked for the production of multiple textualities pursuing an expanded concept of art\'s public sphere, where communities of readers/viewers might participate in the processes of production of meanings, and the introduction of difference in modern history.

\r\n

In the longest sequence of sessions, the course will focus on studying specific cases of feminist art practices, with the aim to initiate an intellectual debate on how those practices read/write differently the historical formations of identity and difference in specific modern contexts. These sessions will introduce subversive gender inscriptions of race, body, sexuality in the visual field that alter the modernist phallocentric logic in which femininity is seen in terms of lack and outside the systems of cultural production, and historical representation. Feminist art practices prove that the production of gender difference beyond the hegemony of heterologocentrism, depends on putting on the hands of different women the control, the exploration and the interpretation of women\'s (self)representations.

\r\n

Finally, using feminist film theory, the course will devote a group of sessions to study the nature of the feminist practices of looking and spectatorship within cinematic representation. At the same time it will situate different generations of feminist film practices from the seventies, when the criticism of the phallocentric gaze emerged, to the present when we find how film narratives explore strategies to stage the differences within women, to see differences differently (De Lauretis, 1987).

\r\n

Goals
To build connections amongst the feminist art histories and (visual) theories informed by poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonialism.
§ To develop critical readings of the historical formations of gender-race-sexuality within the social and artistic contexts of local-global modernities.
To alter chronological and linear histories, through the creation of dialogic spaces between contemporary feminist theory in the present, and the art produced by women artists in the past as an strategy to re-read art history\'s archive and its discursive order.
To promote the construction of modes of viewing and writing about art, and artistic practices that discenter the mastervoice and alter the hegemony of the canons through favoring the inscription of gender and difference in art history.

\r\nMethodology
Lectures based on bibliography will be combined with seminar classes, which will include: Analysis of cases (exhibitions, collections, works of art, films), and student\'s presentations.