Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings

Griselda Pollock, Griselda Pollock

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134768493
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Art
• Sous-sujet: Histoire de l'art

Great collection from for top feminist art historians and thinkers Includes Griselda Pollock and Mieke Bal International perspective focusing on gender and race

PART I

Stagesetting

Chapter One

The politics of theory: generations and geographies in feminist theory and the histories of art histories¹

Griselda Pollock

I am the Director of a graduate programme I devised in 1991. Titled ‘Master of Arts (MA) in Feminist Historical, Theoretical and Critical Studies in the Visual Arts’, its name registers the complex and expanded character of feminist interventions in the study of the visual arts, past and present, including changes in art history, art theory, art criticism and art practice wrought by a range of theoretical and political initiatives. For brevity, it is known as Feminism and the Visual Arts, a phrasing which sets in direct confrontation a tradition of theoretical reflection and social activism by women—feminism, with the theory, history and practices of visual culture. This already breaks the traditional boundaries of art history which segregate that art history from criticism, distancing art history from the production of living culture and thus disavows its own investments in the writing of history. The speciality of the course is the attempt to bring together, in one space, feminist cultural and historiographical theory, studies in the histories of women’s work in the visual arts, analyses and practices of contemporary art by women. Thus the course attracts students who are or are aiming to be artists, curators, critics, art historians, as well as women from related disciplines interested in a dedicated study of feminism and cultural theory. It refuses to observe the frontiers between art history and contemporary art practice, between academic theory and the visual arts.

Devising this ‘dedicated’ feminist course seemed a logical extension of my own work ‘as a feminist’ and I was convinced that I could no longer offer feminist theory or studies in art and art history as an optional extra on courses framed by other theoretical projects. Feminisms own history and internal complexity as theory and practice demanded its own conceptual and academic space. Until 1991, my work had been housed within the broader project of The Social History of Art, within which feminist concerns were a permitted but theoretically underdeveloped subset, often swamped by both the dominance of a materialist paradigm whose main axis of power is class, and by the indifference of the social historian of art to questions of gender and of sexuality. I did not wish to forgo the relevance of a materialist critique for feminist work in art history.¹, ² But few social historians of art allow feminist analysis to sully the purity of a class-based analysis, which thereby reveals its repressive masculinism.

In the practice of feminist studies, I have been as eclectic as necessary, feminist theory being of necessity a form of bricolage which does not, therefore, show feminism to lack a centre, a core, but rather demonstrates how comprehensive is its theoretical and political vision. It is a common misunderstanding that feminism is a perspective or approach which prioritizes gender over all other structures of oppression. Feminism is not for gender what Marxism is for class, and postcolonial theory for race. First, there is a range of feminisms, in varying alliances with all the analyses of what oppresses women. Socialist feminism has always concerned itself with matters of class, and black feminism details the configurations of imperialism, sexuality, femininity and racism. In their breadth, as the plural, feminisms deal with the complex and textured configurations of power around race, class, sexuality, age, physical ability and so forth, but they have of necessity also to be the particular political and theoretical space that names and anatomizes sexual difference as an axis of power operating with a specificity that neither gives it priority, exclusivity or predominance over any other nor allows it to be conceptually isolated from the textures of social power and resistance that stitute the social. Feminism has had to fight long and hard to win acknowledgement of the organizing centrality of sexual difference with its effects of gender and sexuality as one of planes of social and subjective constitution.

For many years I have taught from an avowedly feminist position. I have written and researched in ways that reveal my commitment to a feminist politics of knowledge. But now, on this course, I was no longer merely teaching ‘as a feminist’. I had to make feminism itself a teaching object. Thus I had to map the various traditions and debates which constitute feminist theories of culture, history and art to produce a pedagogically and intellectually coherent scheme of study. There is a politics in this theoretical project. I had to produce a feminist approach to feminism itself.³

I started my first class by asking a simple question: Why are you here? What has brought you to this course/classroom? I collected a range of responses which proved very revealing. One student, auditing the seminar, stated that she had not signed up for the course because she feared the stigma attached to doing an MA in feminist studies. It is a real question given the institutional categories and disciplinary forms by which prospective employment will be achieved. Another said she wasn’t a feminist but felt that there was a lot in feminist theory which was relevant to social studies in the history of art. Between these two positions were those of the fully engaged, often older women, whose experience as mothers or in employment had brought them often painfully face to face with the concrete effects of contradictions which shape women’s lives in the classed, raced and gendered structures of western society. For these women, feminism is a practice, the means to make sense of and survive life; it is not theoretical icing on an academic cake. For many of the younger women, it seemed that it was not overwhelming politics which brought them to the seminar room, but a sense that something interesting and important was taking place in something called feminist theory.

The term ‘feminist theory’ has a wide currency now. But what is it? Does it mean that there is a coherent perspective on all areas unified under the rubric feminism? We cannot really say that we now have feminist art history, feminist sociology, feminist legal studies, feminist cultural studies, as cohabitants of the main disciplinary formations. Isn’t feminism more a matter of interventions which change each discipline and theoretical terrain because feminism introduces the repressed question of sex/gender?⁴ Raising that question catapults us from the neatly ordered universe/university of intellectual knowledge with these clear disciplinary divisions into a field of practice. The feminist question— the question of feminism—brings down the dividing and loadbearing walls which compartmentalize academic knowledge to reveal the structure of sexual difference by which society and culture is riven, showing that all disciplines are impregnated with the ideological premises of a sex/gender system.⁵

Feminism as we know it today is, in part, the product of the historical moment in the 1950s/1960s which saw new political, social and cultural theories developed to deal better with the problems posed by late capitalism. The legacy of New Leftism and other political critiques deriving from civil rights movements, black power, anti-racist, anti-colonial struggles and student revolts gave new impetus to the study of ideological practices and cultural forms as being both privileged sites of ideological oppression and the place from which to mount cultural resistance.⁶ At the theoretical level, New Leftism challenged the idea of culture as Culture—truth and beauty, the best ideas and values of civilization—by proposing that culture is ordinary, a ‘way of life’, a ‘way of struggle’, the territory of social meanings and identities.⁷ Such displacements of traditional categories of the political to include aspects of cultural practice, identity and custom were deeply sympathetic to a new feminist politics based on the slogan ‘The personal is political’. But this culturalist approach was challenged by French structuralist and post-structuralist theorizations. These proposed a linguistic-philosophical paradigm, derived from Saussure’s initial theory of semiotics. As a result, not only was theorization as an activity raised to new prominence but a creatively theoretical enterprise took off which has reshaped the humanities and the study of cultural practices. In its engagements with and mutual influence on this ‘cultural revolution’, the women’s movement produced an ever growing theoretical wing : an instance of the women’s movement which is known as feminist theory.⁸ But that phrase defines practices and positions which are extremely heterogeneous precisely because feminism has unevenly registered the shifts within, and the changing theoretical paradigms of, culture, society, language and subjectivity, while functioning as an external, hence political critique of all of them.

Furthermore, the term ‘feminist’ functions as a perpetual provocation to women engaged in feminist scholarship, as much as to other scholars and theorists. Feminism demands that certain issues remain in view, and it functions as a resistance to any tendency to stabilize knowledge or theory around fictions of the generically human or the monolithically universal or any other androcentric, racist, sexist, or ageist myth of imperial western culture and its (often not so) radical discourses.

Thus I would assert that feminism signifies a set of positions, not an essence; a critical practice not a doxa; a dynamic and self-critical response and intervention not a platform. It is the precarious product of a paradox. Seeming to speak in the name of women, feminist analysis perpetually deconstructs the very term around which it is politically organized.⁹ This paradox has shaped the history of the last twenty years of feminist practice, which can perhaps be characterized by the passage from essence (a strong sense of the identity of woman and the collectivity of women) to difference (a more anguished recognition not only of that which divides and undoes the collectivity women, but also of the structural condition of the term ‘Woman’ as an effect of psycho-symbolic systems which produce and differentiate subjectivities across the formations of class, race and sexuality). Yet there has been no linear progress from early thoughts to mature theories. Rather we have a synchronic configuration of debates within feminism, all of which have something valuable to contribute to the enlarging feminist enterprise. Yet they are all, none the less, caught up in the very systems of sexual difference they critique. The issue becomes one of how to make that paradox the condition of a radical practice.¹⁰

It does not surprise me, therefore, that after more than twenty years’ involvement in the women’s movement, I should find myself confronting, as a problem of theoretical definition, the question ‘What is feminism?’ This is very different from the more easily answered challenge, ‘Are you a feminist?’ The latter is a matter of personal affiliation; the former an issue of both historical knowledge and critical distance on my own as well as on a collective predicament. I was glad to turn to a collection of essays edited by eminent British feminists such as Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley also asking ‘What Is Feminism?’, a book which included a major article with this title by Rosalind Delmar.¹¹

Delmar begins by pointing out how fractured and heterogeneous feminism— or what now coexists under that umbrella—has become. The representation of this variety of women’s social and political initiatives as ‘feminism’ is itself a recent development, she argues. For the wave of activism which broke out in the late 1960s was intially known as the Women’s [Liberation] Movement. In the gap between the two terms, Delmar questions any automatic identity between them although their interrelationship is a feature of contemporary feminism which has at times named itself the ‘second wave’, after the activism of nineteenth-century women’s campaigns for the vote. That feminism can be separate from a women’s movement is both a theoretical matter, which I shall discuss further below, and a matter of history. If the decade of the seventies produced feminism most commonly as campaigns and conferences, in the eighties feminism was housed more often in journals and academic courses.¹² The emergence of the seemingly free-floating term ‘feminist theory’ indicates this shift of emphasis. Delmar, however, counters the popular identification of feminism exclusively with social activism by arguing that feminism, historically, is a tradition of ideas about ‘the woman question’ which did not always coincide with politically organized struggles to change the social position of women. Feminism is an address to the philosophical question of sex/gender but it has a discontinuous history because the ways in which the question of sex/gender has been posed were shaped by the prevailing political/philosophical discourses available to women at different historical moments. Thus, in the eighteenth-century moment of revolution, the feminist question was articulated in an Enlightenment discourse on natural rights.¹³ The ideological framework for mid-nineteenth-century suffrage campaigns, however much they claimed descent from eighteenth-century foremothers, in fact derived from then current bourgeois notions of property rights which inscribed hierarchies of class into arguments about women’s right to the vote. Thus white bourgeois feminists did not necessarily concur with universal suffrage, but claimed, like their bourgeois brothers and fathers, the right to represent their working-class or black sisters.¹⁴

This argument requires us now to confront the ideological frameworks within which our own moment of an enlarged and internally challenged feminism has been formulated. Late twentieth-century feminism looks back for reinforcement to a historical tradition of women’s campaigns and political struggles, while organizing itself quite differently. For instance, the language has changed. Liberation replaces emancipation, collectivism displaces individualism, radical political theories and sociologies lead to alliances with the left and anti-racist struggles and, far from focusing on traditionally defined political objectives, our feminisms have coined the new term, ‘sexual politics’ and the new slogan ‘the personal is political’.

The renewed wave of feminisms at the end of this century is a response to the fact that such economic and political reforms as were achieved by the nineteneth-century campaigners did not really alter the deep structures of sexual divisions in society or shift the ideological and psychological structures that they sustained. A cultural revolution was called for which both derived from, and contributed to, the interest in the fields of the cultural, the ideological and the subjective which has characterized radical critical theory and cultural practice in the last thirty years. The key term that grasps the specifically feminist version of this larger discourse is ‘the body’. Rosalind Delmar states: ‘The pursuit of questions about the female body and its sexual needs has become distinctive of contemporary feminism.’¹⁵ The new feminisms are, in significant ways, a politics of the body— in campaigns around health and the claims for female sexualities, the struggle against violence and assault as well as pornography, the issues of motherhood and of ageing. The new politics articulates the specificity of femininity in special relation to the problematic of the body, not as a biological entity, but as the psychically constructed image that provides a location for and imageries of the processes of the unconscious, for desire and fantasy. The body is a construction, a representation, a place where the marking of sexual difference is written, and it is because the body is a sign that it has been so invested in feminist politics as a site of our resistance. For this kind of feminist theory, the body is precisely a point of transaction between the social system and the subject, between what is classically presented as an intimate or private inside and a public or social outside. The semioticized body, as a figure of political speech and organization, erodes the distinction between that opposition, which has, up to this point, shaped the conception of the politics of liberation.

In the nineteenth century, bourgeois society made gender one of its major social divisions, and represented this as an absolute split between the public and the private, which was figured by rigidly differentiated bodies, Man and Woman. This polarization incited bourgeois women, ideologically and practically confined to the ‘inside’, private, domestic sphere, to campaign to enter the public sphere (working-class women were already there and paying the price for their apparent transgression of the public/private gender division through both economic and sexual exploitation). Women demanded the right to be represented as part of the outside, the public sphere—as citizens, as consumers, as users of the public domain. Quite at odds with this position is the is in fact already a public space. That is, it is not immune from the play of power. It is not a place twentieth-century feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’, which insists that the so-called private of personal refuge but it can be a site of violence and exploitation that penetrate the most intimate pores of the body of the female subject. By that assertion, however, that the public and private spheres are mutually contaminated, feminism has effectively deconstructed the opposition to create the specific territory of its own political and theoretical project.

Let me come at this point from a different angle. The priority of the sexual body and the language of liberation are not unique to feminism. They are shared with a wide range of radical revolts which took place in the 1960s, amongst students as much as among those fighting against racism and colonialism. Generating the 1960s cultural revolutions of the West were important revisions to notions of the self, which fostered a politics of identity, and produced major shifts around notions of consumption and pleasure. The discourse of liberation was, however, posed in the terms of classic bourgeois political theory, namely the conflict between a self seeking liberation from outside social constraints, and an inside, a self suppressed and oppressed by the social outside. Post-structuralist and critical theory rejected such formulations in favour of arguments in which language, discourse and subjectivity become the key terms for recognizing the imbrication of the self and the social; the idea of the decentred, speaking subject puts the subject as the central effect of social systems identified with language itself. This subject is in fact both spoken and subjectified in social and symbolic systems. Language is then the territory in which both the social and the subject are fabricated. Against the power of the linguistic metaphor, however, and its tendency to collaborate with the social order, the insights of psychoanalysis have been used to undermine the status quo precisely by insisting that the decentred subject is in fact a divided or split subject, formed as both conscious and unconscious by the traumas of becoming a human subject in accession to language under a phallocentric law. Psychoanalysis as theory and institution, however, is troubled by fem...