Archive - Topic - Gender and the Arts

[1] Genres of expression favored by female authors in Japan such as science fiction and manga (graphic novel) have long been classified as subcategories of so-called subculture with labels like girls’ manga and female sci-fi writing. From the sheer number and variety of works penned by female creators in these...

The lesbian is the heroine of modernism. – Walter Benjamin (90) [1] In scholarly examinations of the period prior to the First World War, Marie Laurencin’s work has been viewed almost exclusively as a footnote to early twentieth-century French modernism, important primarily for its recording of the youthful visages of...

[1] BERELOWITZ: In your book you discuss the embodiment of gender in American art of the first half of the 20 th century and trace an unfolding and connected discourse in American modernism from the early days of the Stieglitz circle in the 1920s through Regionalism in the 30s and...

[1] The artists who emerged as the Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s were as a group notoriously macho and homophobic. For Fritz Bultman (1919-85), a young painter associated with this first generation of the New York School, such attitudes could only have added to his persistent state of discomfort. In...

[1] The objective of this study is to articulate a revisionary reading of Frida Kahlo's "What the Water Has Given Me" ["Lo que el agua me ha dado" 1 ] (1938, Fig. 1), a reading that will argue for the painting's central importance for an understanding of Kahlo's œuvre in...

[1] Ever since the showing of The Dinner Party in the late 1970s, exhibits of Judy Chicago’s artwork have repeatedly elicited vehement public debate. Her defenders laud her as a groundbreaking feminist whose methods and works challenge the patriarchal structure of the art world. Her critics accuse her of producing...

[1] It is possible now to speak of a triumph for women in the register of philosophical aesthetics, especially since this word identifies precisely what aesthetic thought has always denied them. We are well aware that Western philosophy has been notoriously gender-biased, despite claims of universality in its premises and...

[1] Over the past two decades, British artists Gilbert and George have made enormous and colorful photographic art works depicting nude or semi-nude men alongside multiple self-portraits. Large pictographs from the 1980s show vivid cartoon-like penises; larger-than-life-sized images from the 1990s depict the artists themselves, stripped nude, mooning the audience...

"The physical body symbolically reproduces the anxieties of the social body." -Mary Douglas [1] The tattooed seaman. The image is so deeply embedded in the collective American psyche that the men can hardly be separated from the ink. The habitual naturalization of this connection intrigues me. Today the linkage is...

[1] When I graduated from college I was barely twenty and unused to living on my own in the world. A foundation was willing to pay me to continue reading books, always a great pleasure for me, so I set off for graduate school at the University of Chicago, entering...