Rethinking the Subject: Feminism and Creative Practice
LECTURE ONE
Why Feminism?
(What of Feminism?)
Alexandra Kokoli
a.m.kokoli@rgu.ac.uk
Lecture Overview
• What is (second-wave) feminism?
• What has been/is the relationship between
feminism and creative practice?
– Areas and types of intervention
• Feminism & psychoanalysis
– The gaze
– Fetishism
• Feminism and/against art history
WACK! Art & the Feminist Revolution
(Los Angeles, MoCA, Connie Butler, curator)
•
•
•
•
‘My ambition for “Wack!” is to make the case that
feminism’s impact on art of the 1970s constitutes the
most influential international “movement” of any during
the postwar period – in spite or perhaps because of
the fact that it seldom cohered, formally or critically,
into a movement the way Abstract Expressionism,
Minimalism, or even Fluxus did.’ (p. 15)
Feminism = ‘an ideology of shifting criteria’ (ibid.)
Not defined by a few charismatic individuals
Open-ended
Subject to constant self-evaluation and critique
Political or militant?
• Too diverse; C. Butler: not coherent enough
• E.g. WACK! included artists who didn’t identify
as feminists!
• Redefining the limits of ‘the political’ (‘the
personal is political’)
• ‘art practice with no overt political content may,
nevertheless, be able to sensitize us politically’
[Susan Hiller, ‘Anthropology into Art: SH interviewed by Sarah Kent
and Jacqueline Morreau’, in Women’s Images of Men (London:
Pandora, 1990), p. 151]
Griselda Pollock
“The Politics of Theory: Generations and Geographies in
Feminist Theory and the Histories of Art Histories”
‘[F]eminism signifies a set of positions, not
an essence; a critical practice not a doxa [=
commonly held opinion]; a dynamic selfcritical 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 terms around which it
is politically organised.’ (p. 5)
Feminism(s)?
A belief (based on experience and/or analysis)
that women in society are systemically
disadvantaged and actively discriminated against
because of their gender, combined with the
commitment to challenge (through critique) and
overthrow (through activism) the conditions that
legitimate such discrimination, as well as the
discrimination itself.
• Education
• Employment
• Control over one’s own body (fertility; selfdetermination)
 Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires (eds.), Feminisms, series: Oxford
Readers (Oxford: OUP, 1997)
Second-wave feminism(s)
(late 1960s to mid 1980s)
• Origins:
– women’s movements & consciousness-raising groups
(rape & domestic abuse crisis centres, ecology)
– Marxism (mostly UK & Europe)
– Civil rights movements (mostly US)
• Present & future:
– Intellectual and artistic legacies/ feminism in the
academy
– Professionalisation of feminism?
– ‘Turn to culture’ (Michele Barrett) in 1980s-90s,
followed by a re-turn to grassroots feminism (e.g. online blogs and publications;
http://europeanfeministforum.org/ , etc.)?
Equality vs. Difference
EQUALITY
• ‘Liberal feminism’
• Like the suffragettes?
• Aim then: equal rights
and access
• Aim now: women in
positions of power (~ US
popular feminisms)
DIFFERENCE
• ‘French feminisms’
• Focus on the
psychosocial construction
of femininity
• Engagement with
psychoanalysis
• Marxist too (UK & Fra)
• More radical (in theory!)
• More intellectual
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)
trans. H. M. Parshley (London: Vintage, 1997)
‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a
woman. No biological, psychological, or
economic fate determines the figure that
the human female presents in society; it is
civilization as a whole that produces this
creature, intermediate between male and
eunuch, which is described as feminine.’
(p. 295; beginning of the chapter ‘Childhood’)
Why ‘subject’?
• In the grammatical sense
• It is through and in language that we are
• Jacques Lacan (post-structuralist
Freudian): we do not own/inhabit
language, it owns us!
• Thus, we are subjected to the Symbolic (=
the sphere of signifiers, i.e. carriers of
meaning designated by convention)
• Subjected to and shaped by culture in
general
The troubled marriage of
FEMINISM & PSYCHOANALYSIS
• Freud on femininity: proscription or description?
– Woman as ‘castrated’; ‘penis envy’
– Hysteria as a gendered mental disorder
– Femininity described in unfavourable terms: prone to jealousy;
poor creative impulse (procreative instead); poor moral faculties
– Lacan: ‘castration’ purely symbolic – the recognition of difference
• Juliet Mitchell: not only description but analysis
• Jane Gallop: may be interpreted against the grain
• Jacqueline Rose (in ref. to hysteria case studies): not
just analysis, but admission of how complex, difficult and
often unpleasant it is to take one’s position in the binary
sexual economy
 See the brilliant Jacques Lacan: A feminist introduction by Elizabeth Grosz
Feminism and Visual Culture
• Critique of popular visual culture (cinema, advertising)
– Psychoanalytic and Marxist models and terms of analysis
– The (gendered) gaze; fetishism
• Critique of art (& design) history and their methods (the canon,
etc.)
–
–
–
–
Why have there been no great women artists? (Linda Nochlin)
‘firing the canon’ (Griselda Pollock)
Pollock and Parker, Old Mistresses (1981)
Challenging the ‘modernist myth’ (R. Krauss) of originality
• Creative practice as critique
– See next lecture!
• All three connected, in theory (same principles) and practice
(same people involved)
[CRITIQUE = not the same as criticism, though usually critical; detailed analysis that
aims to uncover the internal logic of the text/object in question, as well as examine
the text/object itself]
A different popular visual culture (?!)
Triumph Underwear, 1960s
‘Undies to be searched in.’
‘Don’t scoff. In five minutes
time you could get mistaken
for a Secret Service courier.
Handsome Colonel
Fernandez, the infamous
Transylvanian double agent,
would search you thoroughly
for the microfilm.
Blushmaking? Not if you are
in Triumph undies. Get in
some quick.’
Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), in Visual
and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1989), pp. 14-26
Mulvey: film-maker, curator, theorist, and academic
(Birkbeck College)
• For a political use of psychoanalysis (in the feminist
and broader sense)
• Influence of Bertolt Brecht: pleasure supports the
illusion of spectacle and thus the ideology of
representation
• ‘Displeasure’ as a politically justified aesthetic choice
– E.g. Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s film Riddles of the Sphinx
(1977)
‘The daily life of a woman with a child. […] I have seen many
experimental and "art" films but during this film I became so
bored that after about 45 minutes and more than half the
viewing audience had left I finally got up and walked out
also. I don't recommend this movie unless you need a place
to take a nap.’ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076625/
Ideology
• Set of beliefs, values and opinions that shapes the way we think, act, and
make sense of the world, ourselves and our position in it.
• ‘We’ = no such think as a personal ideology. About social groups and
communities. Traditionally, about ‘class’, but also gender, ethnicity, etc.
Sometimes, ideology is the very process by which we identify ourselves
as part of a particular group.
• ~ Misrecognition of the economic system and of identity. Marx: ‘false
consciousness’ = a screen separating us from the world and through
which we perceive the world; false because it doesn’t allow us to
recognise our actual position in the production process, i.e. that the
labour of working class produces surplus value and perpetuates
capitalism (i.e. complicit in their own subordination).
• Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements (1978): ideology no longer
about our position in the process of production, but about identification
with a made-up group through what we chose to consume. Hence, the
‘Pepsi people’; the Specsaver’s people (and those who fail to qualify).
The Gaze
(Lacan; Mulvey)
• Not the same as looking but point of view (not optics but
perspective) – the blind are implicated too! (cf. Sartre)
• Connected to mastery & drawing boundaries between
self and other
• Male gaze: a gendered fantasy of coherence between
– Knowledge
– Power
– Pleasure
Grounded on:
– an ‘active/passive heterosexual division of labour’
• Scopophilia: the mutual implication of the attraction
exercised by narrative film on the one hand, and the
pleasure that heterosexual men take in looking at
beautiful women on the other
– the culture industry and patriarchy in cahoots
Fetishism
• Fetishism = 1. the psychosocial mechanisms of
objectification; 2. the privileging of belief over knowledge
(Mulvey)
(At least) 3 kinds:
• Freudian: the substitution of the Mother’s missing
Phallus with something else – ultimately, the disavowal
of sexual difference (cf. Beauvoir: woman = eunuch).
Feminine beauty makes up for (& covers up) female
inadequacies
• Marxist: commodity fetishism bestows an apparently
innate value on a commodity, while disavowing the real
source of its value that is labour power. Fetishism
obscures class relations.
• Anthropological: the bestowal to an object of qualities
and powers that are not supported by (or even
connected to) its use (William Pietz)
Deadly combos – e.g. cinema (window to the world; pretty ladies; we
are the hero for 90 mins because we share his point of view)
Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity
(London: BFI, 1996)
Fetishism provided the “alchemical link” between
Marx and Freud, the two main thinkers with
whom the Left and, subsequently, feminism
negotiated its analytical tools.
In both Marx and Freud, fetishism is called on to
explain a blockage “or phobic inability” “in the
social or sexual psyche”
Instances of fetishism: symptomatic of blindspots
and thus flag them as troubled and potentially
vulnerable areas, where ideology is more likely
to become unstuck
(pp. 1-2)
Linda NOCHLIN
Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?
(1971)
• What/who is ‘great’?
– The modernist cult of originality (cf. Old Mistresses)
– The gender bias of ‘genius’ (ibid.)
• Women art students historically led towards
minor genres of painting, such as portraiture,
landscape and still life
• Female students of painting banned from
attending life drawing sessions as late as the
1890s, to protect their virtue!
– Life drawing = prerequisite for history painting, thus
women confined to the ‘minor’ genres
Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652),
L: Susanna and the Elders (1610)
R: Judith Decapitating Holofernes (c. 1618)
Tintoretto, Susanna and the Elders (1555-6)
Gentileschi, La Pittura (Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, 1630s)
Artemisia Gentileschi: A Feminist
Heroine (?)
• Tragic life story (see Kahlo too)
• English translation of the trial transcripts in Mary
D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi : the image of
the female hero in Italian baroque art (Princeton
University Press, 1989)
• Griselda Pollock, ‘The female hero and the
making of a feminist canon: A G’s
representations of Susanna and Judith’, ch. 5 of
Differencing the Canon, pp. 97-127: on the
dangers of biographism for women artists
What are SEMINARS for?
• Asking questions (from lectures, readings, etc.)
– Two sets of readings & and little overlap between
lectures and readings – connections need to be
forged
– Do (SOME) reading
– Be specific: there are no stupid questions but there
are lazy ones
• Testing out your ideas
• Starting to build your NOTEBOOK through
SEMINAR TASKS
• NB: Seminars start tomorrow, Tuesday 12th
February (9.30am, 10.30am, 12 noon)
Seminar Task (1)
Keeping in mind Griselda Pollock’s
definition of feminism as critique rather
than doxa, select ONE WORK by any
artist or designer (not necessarily
contemporary; not necessarily female) and
be prepared to discuss it in class in
reference to feminist critical and/or
creative practice.
 For inclusion in the NOTEBOOK!