Feminist Theory 2011 Meagher 297 316

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Telling stories about feminist art

Michelle Meagher
Feminist Theory 2011 12: 297
DOI: 10.1177/1464700111417669
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Feminist Theory
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DOI: 10.1177/1464700111417669
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Michelle Meagher
University of Alberta, Canada
Abstract
Responding to a recent surge of interest in feminist art, its futures, and its history, this
article considers the nature and function of the dominant narratives that circulate and
structure the field. Specifically, I explore the persistent story of inter-generational strife
in which a first generation of artists and historians is understood to have been naı̈vely
mired in an essentialism of which a second, more theoretically savvy generation has been
subsequently cleansed. Although one would be hard pressed to identify contemporary
scholars who promote this sort of generationally bound progress narrative, the story
persists. Its persistence, I argue, has less to do with its truth telling ability and more to do
with its ability to perform the function of disidentification.
Keywords
disidentification, essentialism, feminist art history, generationality, 1970s feminism,
WACK!
Origin stories about the women’s movement are interested stories, all of them. (Katie
King, Theory in its Feminist Travels, 1994)
Feminist art of the early 1970s has come to be identified (negatively) with essentialist
notions of femininity (i.e., the belief in an innate, fixed, and fundamental sexual identity),
a specious universalism (i.e., the invocation of an ahistorical ‘Woman,’ a term obscuring
all differences between women), and an assumption of the possibility of unproblematic
self-expression . . . (Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘The Woman Who Never Was’, 2007)
In a project that takes a genealogical approach to feminist historiography, Clare

Hemmings has suggested that scholars thinking about the past would do well to
Corresponding author:
Michelle Meagher, Women’s Studies Program, University of Alberta, 1-02C Assiniboia Hall, Edmonton, Canada
T6G 2H4
Email: michelle.meagher@ualberta.ca
298 Feminist Theory 12(3)
replace apparently straightforward questions like: ‘What really happened in the

1970s?’ with more nuanced questions like: ‘How does this story about the 1970s
come to be told and accepted?’ (Hemmings, 2005: 119). In the field of feminist art,
there have been significant attempts on the part of art historians and curators to
answer the former question. For instance, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution
(Butler, 2007), a catalogue and exhibition that travelled from Los Angeles to New
York and Vancouver from 2006 to 2008, was largely organised around an impulse to
produce an historical corrective to the stories conventionally told about art’s fem-
inist 1970s. Structured around the question ‘What really happened in the 1970s?’,
WACK! successfully revealed a diversity and variety of work produced during the
decade, thus challenging preconceptions that the decade was marked by the essen-
tialist and universalist characteristics named by Solomon-Godeau in the opening
quotation to this article. In the face of long-standing assumptions about seventies
art’s essentialism, universalism, and faith in self-expression, WACK! offers a valu-
able corrective. However, insofar as it is structured around the urge to dispel myths
of the feminist past, it remains haunted by those myths, which, as I argue below, are
enduringly appealing for reasons other than their descriptive capacities or truth
value. According to Hemmings, the sort of historical corrective offered by
WACK! ought to be accompanied by a larger set of questions about the story the
exhibition attempts to dislodge. What stories are conventionally told about the
1970s? How are these stories produced and reproduced? What functions do these
stories perform? More generally, I am interested in questions like: How does fem-
inist art history tell the story of its recent past? What sort of cultural work is per-
formed by the currently dominant narrative? And, finally, ‘What is going on in the
present when feminist stories about the recent past are being told?’ (Hemmings,
2005: 119).
Despite a widespread critical recognition that an essentialist first generation fem-
inist art practice is in fact an oversimplification of a much more complicated history,
the story of generational discord predicated upon a wholesale rejection of the essen-
tialist 1970s continues to haunt writing about feminist art and its histories. In what
follows, I am interested to explore the deployment of ‘the essentialist seventies’ and
‘the essentialist feminist’, understood as discursively produced fantasies that gener-
ate a sense of linear progress within the field of art. These are fantasies, I argue, that
have been deployed to confirm a generational break that continues to shape feminist
art history.
Clare Hemmings’ analysis of well-worn stories of the feminist past offers a valu-
able model for thinking about the production, circulation, and reception of domi-
nant narratives within feminist art’s history. Against the impulse to seek an
‘alternative history’, Hemmings suggests that we linger on the stories that have
been created, considering not whether or not they are ‘true’, but rather ‘estab-
lish[ing] what political, epistemological and ontological work they are trying to
achieve’ (2007: 72). Wary of efforts on the part of feminist historians to ‘correct
the record’ (2007: 72), Hemmings’ project is focused less on the past than it is on the
writing of the past in and for the present. In thinking about the story so often told
Meagher 299
about feminist art history, which is, perhaps not surprisingly, similar to the story so
often told about feminism’s past more generally, I consider the ways in which the
persistence of a myth of feminist essentialism shapes contemporary understandings
of feminist art’s histories (and, indeed, feminism’s histories) and, importantly, serves
the construction of an unbridgeable generational divide within the field of art. I offer
not a reclamation of the truth of the 1970s, but an interrogation of the function of a
particular narrative about the 1970s and the essentialist feminist who is so often
made to inhabit that historical moment. The currently dominant narrative of fem-
inist art history persistently evokes her presence in ways that ought to draw our
attention to the constant negotiation with and against a mythic figure that produces
those positions from which one speaks of, writes about, or makes art.
In the first section, I consider the contemporary urge on the part of feminist art
historians, critics, and curators to revisit the history of the Feminist Art Movement
in the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom. Often staged as
interventions, the projects I describe here set out in different ways to rethink the
taken-for-granted narratives that continue to organise the field. This is followed by
an exploration of the presumed origin of a generational model by which feminist art
history is generally organised. I explore the debates incurred by the installation of a
generational model, calling attention to the contested nature of the terms deployed
in the construction of this narrative. I then offer an analysis of essentialism – a key
trope deployed in the construction of a generational model – and an explanation of
the functions performed by narratives predicated upon generational division. I con-
clude by suggesting that the persistent narrative organised around a generational
divide serves a significant disidentificatory function within and for the field of art.
Revisiting the past and imagining the future

The first decade of the twenty-first century has been marked by a surge of interest in
feminist art, its futures, and its histories. 2007 saw the opening of the Elizabeth A.
Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, which became the per-
manent home of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974–79), one of the most
recognisable examples of twentieth century American feminist art. In celebration
of the Center’s opening, the Brooklyn Museum presented Global Feminisms (Reilly
and Nochlin, 2007), an exhibition featuring internationally produced feminist art.
Including the work of more than 80 artists from 50 countries born after 1960, Global
Feminisms reflects upon the international impact of feminism on art-making while
attending to the distinct ways in which feminist politics develop in specific national
and cultural contexts. It was an exhibit committed to forging new directions and,
significantly for the current project, to beginning to tell new kinds of stories about
feminist art. Also in 2007, New York’s Museum of Modern Art hosted The Feminist
Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts, a landmark symposium that exam-
ined the myriad of ways that ‘gender is currently addressed by artists, museums and
the academy, and its future role in art practice and scholarship’ (MoMA webpage
http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/events/5 (last accessed 21 June 2011)).
The forward-looking approach of Global Feminisms and The Feminist Future has
been complemented by a related proliferation of feminist writing on the history of
the feminist art movement, understood as an assemblage of art practices as well as a
set of institutional challenges and politicised intellectual activities. Consider After
the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art (Heartney et al., 2007),
a collection that identifies the work of a dozen artists in order to take stock of the
last 25 years of feminist activism in art. After the Revolution explores the ways that
feminist art has shaped contemporary art more generally, a goal that compels its
authors to explore the wide variety and complexity of art made by women in the
wake of the feminist art movement. Like After the Revolution, Women Artists at the
Millennium (Armstrong and de Zegher, 2006) explores the legacies of the revolutions
in art spurred by women’s activism and feminist art-making. The product of a 2001
conference of the same name at Princeton University, Women Artists at the
Millennium reflects upon what Armstrong terms the ‘different world of art’ (2006:
xiii) in which contemporary artists – women and men – now exist. Each of these
projects makes the case for a renewed examination of feminist art’s past and/or
future.1
Perhaps the most monumental and far-reaching contemporary exploration of
feminist art’s recent past is the aforementioned WACK! Art and the Feminist
Revolution (Butler, 2007). While the stated goal of WACK! was ‘to make the case
that feminism’s impact on art of the 1970s constitutes the most influential interna-
tional ‘‘movement’’ of any during the postwar period’ (Butler, 2007: 15), the larger
effect of the exhibition was to draw attention to the wide variety of work that was
produced between 1968 and 1980 under the banner of feminism. Featuring the work
of 120 artists and artist groups, the installation combines canonical feminist art
objects with less widely recognised work that was equally shaped by the commit-
ments of feminist art movements and activism. It makes strong efforts to represent
feminist art as a global movement, including artists from Central and Eastern
Europe, Latin America, Asia, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia alongside
those from Western Europe, the United States and the United Kingdom. The instal-
lation’s efforts to expand the geographical boundaries of feminist art of the period
work toward what Marsha Meskimmon describes as a ‘conceptual decolonization’
that provides the basis, she explains, ‘for questioning the assumed categories and
tropes that have come to define 1970s feminist art’ (2007: 331).
Without doubt, WACK! successfully argued for the diversity and plurality of
work produced during what is now conventionally referred to as the ‘first genera-
tion’ of feminist art (discussed below), thus working toward the expansion of stories
that might be told about the history of feminist art. Reviewer Helen Molesworth
describes WACK! as ‘nothing short of a Herculean (or maybe Sisyphean) attempt to
write and rewrite the history of the notoriously underrepresented and heterogeneous
feminist art movement’ (2007: 101). Elissa Auther’s review in Women’s Review of
Books celebrates WACK! for its potential to intervene in a history that has been
stalled – ‘stalled’, she writes, ‘by a reduction of the field into an early phase devoted
to the search for an authentic imagery of female experience in the 1970s, followed by
Meagher 301
a post-structuralist inflected critique of representation in the 1980s’ (2007: 3).

Auther optimistically declares that by offering a diverse collection of work,
WACK! tells a story that puts to rest the caricature of the essentialist feminist
1970s. The exhibition includes those artists and artworks most regularly associated
with and, indeed, accused of essentialism, but it places their work in conversation
with a wider compendium of feminist art practice. In the catalogue, Hannah Wilke’s
delicate vaginally shaped latex sculptures and photographs of Shigeko Kubota’s
performance of vagina painting are placed under the theme of abstraction, set
alongside brightly coloured abstract paintings by Joan Snyder and Harmony
Hammond’s ladder-shaped soft sculptures, Hunkertime (1979–80). Yoko Ono’s
Cut Piece (1964), a performance in which the artist sits passively while audience
members cut away pieces of her clothing, is placed alongside artists exploring the
theme of the body as medium. Also included here are video documentations of
Rebecca Horn’s Performances II (1970–73) and selections from Valie Export’s
Korperkonfigurationen (1972–76). Export’s self-images integrate her body into
urban settings; in Horn’s performances, the artist dons body extension sculptures
and walks through forests and fields. Other themes deployed here to both organise
and re-organise feminist art include: social sculpture; collective impulse; knowledge
as power; and gender performance. Clearly, in the hands of curator Cornelia Butler,
WACK! describes feminist art produced before 1980 as immeasurably more than an
‘early phase devoted to the search for an authentic imagery of female experience’
(Auther, 2007: 3). By placing attention upon a wide range of practices, Butler sets
out to intervene in the dominance of Western European and North American fem-
inist art and, as a result, sets the stage for the telling of new histories potentially
cleansed of old clichés. Although WACK! challenges persistent misconceptions
about the theoretical assumptions that grounded early feminist art, I do not believe
that it adequately intervenes in what Auther calls feminist art’s ‘stalled’ history. It
might attempt to change the terms used to describe early feminist art (essentialist,
universalist, and so on), but it does not ultimately disrupt the generational narrative
within which such terms have been made to circulate.
The narrative – described by feminist art historian Amelia Jones as ‘the most
damaging division in feminism’ (2002: 172) – tells of a first generation of artists and
historians who were naı̈vely mired in an essentialism of which a second, more the-
oretically savvy generation has been subsequently cleansed. In the telling of this
story, the ‘smart British social constructivist, psychoanalytic, Brechtian feminist’ is
pitted against the ‘dumb essentializing American ’70s feminist’ (Jones, 2002: 172),
the latter being ultimately rejected and replaced by the former. In an exhaustive
compilation of feminism’s impact upon late-twentieth century art, aptly titled Art
and Feminism, Peggy Phelan describes the ‘well-rehearsed story’ as a battle between,
on one side, theoretically savvy British artists with strong allegiances to Marx,
Althusser, and Lacan, and on the other side, Americans ‘allergic to theory’ (2001:
22). Also in Art and Feminism, Helena Reckitt points further to the ways that the
division between theory and practice was rehearsed in descriptions of American
feminist art history which held that ‘all the conceptual (read: smart) work was
made on the East coast, and all the intuitive and activist (read: non-intellectual
[read: essentialist]) work on the West coast’ (2001: 12). The divisions thus described
by Jones and by Phelan and Reckitt are posed as geographical rather than theoret-
ical: essentialist art practice is located in America (as opposed to the UK) or on the
American west coast (as opposed to the east), while work produced in other sites is
elided. Moreover, what was initially posed as a geographical division came quickly
to be inserted into a generational model, which held that the ‘earlier’ essentialist
work was supplanted by the ‘later’ theoretically grounded art practice.
As Phelan points out, two of the main characters in this narrative are Judy Chicago
and Mary Kelly.2 Judy Chicago is an American visual artist who directed the first
feminist art programme in North America, and her The Dinner Party (1974–79) is
regularly deployed as a prime example of the earlier ‘essentialist’ approach.
Employing conventionally feminine arts (porcelain painting, embroidery), and pro-
duced collaboratively in a studio run by Chicago, The Dinner Party is a triangular
table with 39 place settings, each representing a famous woman from western history.
After it was completed in 1979, The Dinner Party toured widely in North America
and, in many ways, became the public face of feminist art. Its controversy – both in the
popular mainstream and within feminist art circles – centres on the vaginal forms
suggested by the plates set at each place setting. For mainstream viewers, vaginal
forms were surprising and potentially pornographic; for feminist critics, representing
women through the depiction of (their) vaginas was linked to essentialism. If Judy
Chicago stands for American feminist art that smacks of essentialism, Mary Kelly has
been positioned as a key representative of British feminist art practice. Ironically an
American artist working and living in London in the 1970s, Kelly’s most celebrated
work is her Post-Partum Document (1973–79). Produced at almost precisely the same
time as Chicago’s The Dinner Party, and also over a period of several years, Post-
Partum Document displayed Kelly’s son’s stained cloth diapers, transcripts of her
conversations with him as a toddler, plaster casts of his hands, and samples of his
early writing to explore ‘visual traces of the continuity and discontinuity between
mother/creator and child/object’ (Phelan, 2001: 22). Explicitly anti-essentialist,3
Kelly’s work drew on psychoanalytic feminist film theory and drew feminist art
into what Phelan describes as an ‘explicit conversation’ with Freudian and
Lacanian theories of sexual difference (2001: 22).
Given that key players in this battle were making work at the same time, the
narrative predicated upon development must be viewed here as an invented story
rather than as an accurate description. Moreover, as Phelan rightfully points out,
assertions that ‘early’ feminist art was ‘insufficiently savvy’ about theories of repre-
sentation were deployed to deal with an increasing discomfort with representations
of female bodies and body parts (2001: 23). In a 1980 article in the British journal
Screen (a key site for the proliferation of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist
theory), Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman distinguished four different categories
of feminist art and assert that much of it suffered from a lack of attention to theory.
Though not explicitly bound to a generational model – the artists they describe are
working at the same time and in similar contexts – Barry and Flitterman’s argument
Meagher 303
against under-theorised art that valorises ‘female experiences and bodily processes’
or that glorifies ‘an essential female power’ (1980: 37) deploys essentialism as a
retrograde and potentially damaging tendency in feminist art. Their article speaks
to the sort of anxieties that were circulating in the field of art in the 1980s. Centrally,
they speak to an anxiety about essentialism that may only be remedied, they pre-
sume, by a strong dose of theory. Against this argument, Phelan insists that art that
came to be associated with essentialism, especially body art, did in fact have a
theory. What it did not have was an acceptable ‘academic language’: ‘As critical
writing became more theoretical, it also became (unwittingly) more monolingual in
its approach to art; work that did not easily lend itself to established paradigms of
poststructuralist thought was often dismissed as naı̈ve’ (Phelan, 2001: 23).
Against the proclivity to understand the past ‘as the history of ideas or the suc-
cession of social movements, or an unfolding of generations’ (Pollock, 1996: 16),
Griselda Pollock (regularly aligned with the ‘smart British social constructivist,
psychoanalytic, Brechtian feminist’ crowd) suggests that feminist artists, critics,
and historians would do well to attend to the ways in which feminist practice is
marked by ongoing political, theoretical, and methodological struggle. According to
such a view, it is not adequate to suggest that an earlier essentialist moment has been
superseded; on the contrary, Pollock’s approach suggests that the battle between
essentialism and its other (conceptual, smart, constructivist. . .) is an ever-present,
though shifting, struggle. Clare Johnson similarly questions the demands of linear
and teleological trajectories of influence, insisting that ‘cross-generational under-
standings’ (2006: 313) and ‘multi-directional dialogue’ (2006: 323) across and
through time have much to offer feminist art analysis. Influenced by Pollock, she
argues against interpretive models that limit the mobility of a work of art by placing
it in a ‘reductive linear chronology’ (Johnson, 2006: 312). This is not to say that an
art object may be cut entirely loose from its temporal and geographic sites of pro-
duction, but rather that it ought not be resigned to or limited by that site. Thinking
about art in this mobile fashion permits Johnson to articulate valuable and initially
surprising relationships between works of art that seem, at first glance, to be at odds.
More importantly, it permits her to work outside and beyond teleological narratives
in ways that reveal how they work to limit the stories that are told about feminist
art’s recent past.
Despite Pollock’s and Johnson’s criticisms, and despite welcome and valuable
interventions like that offered by WACK!, the ‘discursive separation’ (Solomon-
Godeau, 2007: 344) between generations persists. Indeed, notwithstanding
WACK!’s significant challenge to the myth of the essentialist 1970s, the curatorial
decision to explore art produced over a dozen years (1968 to 1980) sustains a
broader – and to use Jones’ term, more damaging – narrative of generationality
that continues to structure stories told about feminist art. One would be hard
pressed to locate a serious contemporary defender of the distinction between ‘an
earlier ‘‘essentialist’’ and simplistic feminist art and a later, more nuanced and crit-
ically sophisticated one’ (Solomon-Godeau, 2007: 337, fn 2). And yet, the story of
linear progress based on generational shifts continues to structure feminist art
history. Likewise, the caricature of the essentialist feminist and the fantasy of an
essentialist 1970s continue to haunt the stories feminist art historians and critics tell
of the recent past. Like feminist scholar Astrid Henry, who has thoughtfully
explored generational thinking in contemporary feminism, I suggest that ‘it is vitally
important that feminists critically examine the metaphors and tropes we use to
describe our ideological and political debates’ (Henry, 2004: 12). As I suggest
above and further articulate below, the key metaphor deployed within feminist
art history is generational.
Telling stories
The most influential articulation of the generational model for thinking about
debates in the practice, criticism, and history of feminist art was written by
Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews in 1987. Their review article, ‘The
Feminist Critique of Art History’ was a significant piece for a number of reasons,
not the least of which is its inclusion as part of The Art Bulletin’s State of Research
series, confirming the presence of feminist art history and historians in mainstream
art discourses. It was significant for the sorts of debates it incurred (specifically from
art historians Norma Broude and Mary Garrard, who felt slighted by the descrip-
tions offered in the article, and Griselda Pollock, who challenged its theoretical
rigour, as I discuss below). It was, and indeed remains, significant for the ways in
which it told a story of feminist art and feminist art criticism organised around an
overstated generational division. ‘The Feminist Critique of Art History’ is predi-
cated upon the observation that feminist art history, which had been spurred on by
the 1971 publication of ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ by Linda
Nochlin, took on ‘fundamentally new directions’ around 1981 (Gouma-Peterson
and Mathews, 1987: 328). In making sense of this apparent shift, they begin by
cataloguing feminist art and artists from the mid 1960s to mid 1980s and identifying
a number of themes around which such work has been broadly organised: arts
versus craft; female sensibility and images by women; female sexuality; female imag-
ery as prescriptive and proscriptive; images of women as sources of history; and the
reinterpretation of history. The article then turns to an analysis of the critical fem-
inist scholarship that has accompanied, interpreted, and promoted this work,
describing a first generation of art historians who set out to document the worlds
of women and to give wider recognition and exposure to women artists, both con-
temporary and historical. Additionally, they suggest that a first generation of fem-
inist critics who worked toward producing a separatist mode of criticism would be
capable of dealing with art by women, itself understood as fundamentally distinct
from and at odds with mainstream art institutions.
In opposition to this first generation, Gouma-Peterson and Mathews describe a
second generation of feminist art, criticism, and history that was less focused on
celebrating women than it was on drawing on art to produce comprehensive ideo-
logical critiques of society. Relying heavily on arguments offered by British art
historian Lisa Tickner, the second generation art criticism is described as deeply
Meagher 305
informed by postmodern and poststructural suspicion of categories like ‘woman’

and ‘the feminine’. Quoting Tickner, Gouma-Peterson and Mathews explain the
focus of second generation criticism to be on ‘the problematic of culture itself, in
which definitions of femininity are produced and contested and in which cultural
practices cannot be derived from or mapped directly onto a biological gender’ (1987:
347). If the first generation of feminist art – and criticism – was ‘buoyed not only by
anger, but by a new sense of community, the attempts to develop a new art to
express a new sensibility, and an optimistic faith in the ability of art to promote
and even engender feminist consciousness’ (Gouma-Peterson and Mathews, 1987:
332), the second generation of feminist art – and its historians and critics – was
buoyed by deconstructive and psychoanalytic methods that permitted ‘an interro-
gation of an unfixed femininity produced in specific systems of signification’ (Tickner
quoted in Gouma-Peterson and Mathews, 1987: 347; original emphasis). By the mid
1980s, they contend, scholars influenced by poststructuralist challenges to subjec-
tivity were interested to think about the discursive and political constructions of
gender. The underlying assumption informing this narrative is that feminist art
practice of the 1970s was fundamentally at odds with theoretical models that
would come to be associated with poststructuralism.
Shortly after the piece was published, established (that is to say, ‘first generation’)
feminist art historians Norma Broude and Mary Garrard wrote a scathing response
in which they accused the Art Bulletin article of being ‘ahistorical’; ‘biased and
polemical’; ‘puzzling and insulting’ (1989: 124); and, finally, sloppy (1989: 126).
Not the least of their concerns was the construction of ‘the history of feminist
art-historical scholarship. . . [as] polarized, artificially and divisively, into two gen-
erations’ – and their own placement in the first, more conservative generation
(Broude et al., 1989: 124). Gouma-Peterson and Mathews responded by arguing
that they ‘did not intend to present a polarized and divisive construction’ (Broude
et al., 1989: 127). Although they thus temper their characterisation of inter-genera-
tional strife, they maintain the distinction’s analytic usefulness; the generational
divides introduced in the paper ‘are the often unacknowledged basis of so much
art-historical debate and scholarship’ (Broude et al., 1989: 127). As Griselda Pollock
explains, however, the generation gap described by Gouma-Peterson and Mathews
‘seems political’ (1996: 12) rather than purely descriptive. Like Hemmings, Pollock
makes it clear that the way stories are told and the way that histories are constructed
are never neutral; they are always the product of larger ‘struggles on the battlefield
of representation for power’ (Pollock, 1996: 12). Pollock – who admits to liking the
article insofar as it treats her work favourably – is critical of the article’s capitulation
to ‘dominant discursive formations of an academic narrative’ (1996: 16). Such a
narrative demands, she points out, ‘pigeon-holing, labeling and neat classification’
(Pollock, 1996: 16). While this might make feminism ‘easier to digest’ (Pollock,
1996: 16) and to incorporate into mainstream art histories, it also yields to fantasies
and caricatures in ways that flatten out and obscure the voices and practices –
artistic and political – of feminist art, artists, historians, and critics. As Lucy
Lippard put it in a 1980 article, it is vital to recognise that feminist art of the
past, present, and future ‘consists of many styles and individual expressions’
(Lippard, 1980: 362). Both Pollock and Lippard would insist that feminist art is
complex and that part of its critical strength is bound to that complexity. When
Gouma-Peterson and Mathews organise the wide diversity of feminist art practices
according to a generational logic that suggests unidirectional progress and irresolv-
able discord, they deflect attention away from the diversity of feminist art practices
within and across both generations. Indeed, in telling the story of contemporary
feminist art and its histories according to a generational model, productive intra-
generational struggles are elided and replaced with broadly stated inter-generational
strife. Despite Lippard’s call for feminist art to be viewed as something other than a
movement – or on Gouma-Peterson and Mathew’s view, a series of generationally
distinct movements – a linear model of generationality persists as the key metaphor
through which the story of feminist art is told. Below, I consider essentialism – or the
accusation of essentialism – as a trope that has been effectively deployed in the
service of generationality. I hope to make clear the ways that essentialism has
been made to contribute to the construction of a seemingly unbridgeable genera-
tional divide within the field of art. In the final section of this article, I then turn to
an examination of generationality itself, considering both the ongoing allure of a
generational tale and functions performed by this mode of storytelling.
Essentialism in art: circles, domes, and eggs
The dominant and most familiar attribution to the feminist seventies is of course
essentialism, an accusation so frequently repeated, that it can actually stand as justi-
fication for not reading texts from the feminist seventies at all. (Hemmings, 2005: 120)
The stories circulated in feminist art history ought to be positioned against the relief
of a broader set of feminist discourses around the questions of essentialism. In the
opening paragraph of a 1994 article on what she calls ‘methodological essentialism’,
Jane Roland Martin describes the ways that threats of essentialism hung over fem-
inist scholarship of the 1980s. ‘At meetings, workshops, and conferences’, she
explains, ‘feminist scholars became accustomed to hearing women accuse one
another of essentialism. In the literature of that period, one regularly read of sightings
of feminists in or near the essentialist trap’ (Martin, 1994: 630). Not only a trap, an
accusation of essentialism was a ‘seal of disapproval’ (Martin, 1994: 630) to be
avoided at all costs. Invoking the sage observation of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
however, Martin suggests that it is anti-essentialism – understood as an act of self-
positioning through which one disidentifies with the hazy bogeyman of essentialism –
that really ought to raise our suspicions (Martin, 1994: 630; see Spivak, 1989).
As Hemmings points out, feminisms (and feminists) of the 1970s are habitually
associated with a coarse essentialism characterised by an apparently naı̈ve faith in
concepts like sisterhood, experiential knowledge, and complemented by an uncrit-
ical acceptance of the category of ‘woman’, while those of the 1980s are just as
Meagher 307
frequently associated with a knowing suspicion of ahistorical propositions and a

savvy familiarity with the theoretical project of postmodernism and its deconstruc-
tive methods. Although this may read as a rather simplified caricature of a gener-
ational battle, like Hemmings, I would hold that some version of this ‘important
structuring debate for feminism’ (Fuss, 1989: 1) continues to inform the way that
feminist histories are told. Although questions about the constructed nature of
femininity and recognition of the diversity of women’s experiences were certainly
raised by second wave or 1970s feminism, the complexity of these conversations has
been overshadowed by persistent accusations of essentialism.
Philosopher Cressida Heyes points out that, in the hands of contemporary or
third wave feminist scholars, ‘essentialism’ in the field of feminist theory is often
approached as a ‘vice in itself’ (1997: 145). Writing as a self-declared third wave
feminist theorist, Heyes confesses that ‘we often approach particular authors with
the attitude that if essentialism can be discerned in the text, then the theorist’s entire
project can be discarded’ (1997: 145). Hemmings recounts a similarly troubling
approach to writing of the 1970s – as a student in the 1990s, she had been so
easily convinced of the univocality of 1970s feminist theory and thinking that she
felt justified in simply not reading scholarly work of that decade. ‘Part of this intel-
lectual trend’, writes Heyes, ‘involves the fetishization of the dangers, pitfalls, and
evils of essentialism and the demonization of texts considered ‘‘essentialist’’’ (1997:
145). This trend was an effect of the ubiquity of postmodern and poststructural
modes of analysis, which were erected against the apparently self-evident category
woman presumably at the heart of essentialism. From the postmodern perspective,
the articulation of this subject position collapses differences between women, reifies
rather than disrupts femininity, and participates in the reproduction of ahistorical
universalisms. Reflecting back, Hemmings, like Heyes, writes of the shock that came
with her eventual recognition of the diversity of views, opinions, and theoretical
approaches taken by theorists in the 1970s. As she rightfully points out, the demo-
nisation of ‘essentialist’ arguments and theorists has led to sloppy readings of earlier
thinkers (Heyes’ example is Carol Gilligan), has led to a refusal to engage with the
work of these thinkers, and has, importantly, contributed to the construction of a
seemingly unbridgeable divide between generations of feminist scholars.
Debates over essentialism in the field of feminist art are primarily organised
around discussions of a so-called ‘feminine sensibility’ in art. Art critic Lucy
Lippard offered an early description of the female sensibility expressed in work
by women artists in her important book, From the Center (1976). ‘If art comes
from inside, as it must’, she writes, ‘then the art of men and women must be different
too. And if this factor does not show up in women’s work, only repression can be to
blame’ (Lippard, 1976: 49). For Lippard, it is ‘a woman’s experience in this society –
social and biological’ (1976: 49) that gives rise to the presence of recurring motifs
that she takes as indicating a shared female sensibility. Qualities associated with the
feminine include, she explains, a proclivity for fragmentation and nonlinearity, a
preoccupation with corporeality, and a penchant for circles, domes, and eggs
(Lippard, 1976: 81–82). Whereas the preoccupation with corporeality and
fragmentation would continue to mark feminist art into the second and even third
generation of the feminist art movement, the representation of circles, domes, and
eggs, which Judy Chicago (in)famously described as central core imagery, emerged
as the leitmotif for an essentialism that would come under an almost undifferen-
tiated attack in the 1980s. In her influential articulation of central core imagery in an
article called ‘Female Imagery’, co-authored with Miriam Schapiro, Chicago
explores the articulation of a specifically female experience in the work of women
artists including Georgia O’Keeffe, Lee Bontecou, Barbara Hepworth, and Louise
Nevelson (Chicago and Schapiro, 1973). What this work shares, they suggest, is the
(largely unconscious) visual expression of the experience of being ‘formed around a
central core’ and having ‘a secret place which can be entered and which is also a
passageway from which life emerges’ (Chicago and Schapiro, 1973: 11).
Anticipating simplistic (that is, essentialising) readings of their argument,
Schapiro and Chicago insist that the deployment of central core imagery ‘allows
for the complete reversal of the way in which women are seen by the culture’ (1973:
14). Expressions of the central core are, they argue, expressions that place women in
the position of subject, rather than object; they are expressions that take the female
body, and perhaps more importantly, women’s embodiment, as primary rather than
derivative. Although Chicago and Schapiro were careful to insist upon the social
and cultural levels of their analysis, it is a less nuanced articulation of central core
imagery – more frequently referred to as vaginal iconography, vulviform imagery,
or cunt art – that has continued to permeate discussions of 1970s art and 1970s
essentialism. Indeed, vaginal art has often been placed as representative of the fem-
inist 1970s – a metonymic slippage that has had lasting implications for the ways
that feminist 1970s art has been understood and for the stories that are told about it.
It is worthwhile to note, however, that a vaginally based female aesthetic was
certainly not universally accepted by feminist artists and critics during the 1970s.
For instance, in a scathing review of the ‘cunt art’ emerging in the early 1970s, Cindy
Nemser takes Chicago to task for promoting work that ‘made a case for an intrinsic
female imagery created out of round, pulsating, ‘‘womb-like’’ forms’ (Nemser,
1973–4: 9). Similar reservations have been expressed by artist and critic Faith
Wilding, who had been a student of Chicago’s and a participant in Womanhouse.
Like Nemser, Wilding is critical of the suggestion that the experience of a central
core (i.e., vagina) was unconsciously expressed in the art of women. She instead
described cunt art as the product of a shared feminist desire to ‘analyze, confront,
and articulate our common social experiences’ (Wilding, 1996: 35). Wilding insists
that the representation of female sexual organs was not an unconscious expression
of feminine bodily experience but rather part of a larger effort to express and explore
female sexuality. In writing about the emergence of cunt art, she explicitly rejects the
suggestion that it was essentialist: ‘because there was no understanding of how and
why this imagery emerged, and of the historical place it occupied in the interroga-
tion of the representations of female sexuality and identity, many 1970s feminist
artists were falsely categorized as ‘‘essentialists’’ by 1980s feminist theorists’
(Wilding, 1996: 35). Although it is tempting to take Wilding at her word – if her
Meagher 309
work was not ground in essentialist assumptions about femininity, then perhaps the
work of Judy Chicago, and by extension the entire first generation of feminist art
was not simplistically bound to such assumptions – it is also important to consider
the extent to which her defence is shaped by the rhetorical and political demands of
the moment in which she makes it. In other words, her defence might be read as a
sign of her capitulation to the force of anti-essentialism in the moment at which she
was writing. She may, to invoke Hemmings’ language again, be telling her own
feminist story about the recent past. Absolving her work of any link to essentialism
serves to rescue it from the oblivion to which an essentialist moniker would send it.
It is important to note, however, that like everyone else participating in this debate,
Wilding is not working with any clear definition of what essentialism is or might
look like.
By the 1980s, the complex nature of feminist engagements with circles, domes,
and eggs had been erased; the debates that surrounded the pursuit of female sensi-
bility were replaced with a fantasy of harmony; and arguments for feminine sensi-
bility (including the production of vaginal iconography and cunt art) were almost
entirely dislodged from their political exigency and judged as inescapably, inexcus-
ably, unwaveringly essentialist. Moreover, feminine sensibility in art came to be
construed as old-fashioned. Eleanor Heartney writes that by 1987, ‘suddenly noth-
ing seemed more passé than pattern and decoration, vaginal imagery, body art,
ritual and all other forms pioneered by women in response to their particular expe-
rience’ (1987: 140). By 1989, Lucy Lippard could describe the feminist art movement
as organised according to a seemingly unbridgeable divide. ‘Now’, she writes, ‘we
have the ‘‘essentialists’’ versus the ‘‘deconstructionists,’’ or old-fashioned versus
postmodern feminists, a confrontation that has too often been simplistically
boiled down to practice versus theory’ (Lippard, 1995: 266; emphasis added).
Lippard’s use of the term ‘old-fashioned’ here points to her recognition that the
confrontation between the ‘essentialist’ and the ‘postmodern’ had been interpreted
according to a chronology in which the former (old-fashioned approach) was to be
superseded by the latter, a tendency that was further solidified by the deployment of
a generational logic that associated essentialism, cultural feminism, and experience
with a first generation and deconstruction, poststructuralism, and theory with a
second.
Writing of the generational divide that was entrenched in feminist art by the end
of the 1980s, Amelia Jones describes the ways in which anti-essentialist poststruc-
tural feminism of the 1980s was predicated upon a concerted rejection of essential-
ism, itself predicated upon a concerted overstating of essentialism’s place in feminist
art (Jones, 1996). Even those most fully responsible for articulating the generational
divide into which the accusations of essentialism have been so securely inserted
recognise that it was in the midst of new theoretical and methodological ‘develop-
ments’ of the 1980s that first generation feminist work was saddled with essential-
ism. Gouma-Peterson and Mathews, for instance, suggest that first generation
feminist artists and historians have been pushed into ‘a biologically deterministic
camp, which they by no means all occupy’, by second generation critics (1987: 347;
emphasis added). Moreover, they identify the accusations of essentialism lodged at

the first generation: ‘although first-generation feminists often investigate specific
traits that belong to the female, such traits are generally seen as culturally deter-
mined and changing through history as those determinates change’ (Gouma-
Peterson and Mathews, 1987: 347). Thus, embedded within their analysis of feminist
art is the recognition that the first generation has been mis-characterised by a
second generation eager to produce a ‘singular progress narrative’ (Meskimmon,
2007: 327).
Jones insists that the work of the so-called first generation of the feminist art
movement has been mis-characterised and deserves a second look. ‘We would ben-
efit’, she concludes, ‘from respecting these important ‘‘mother figures’’ for the
chances they took at a time when no one took women artists or women’s issues
seriously and, perhaps especially, for the mistakes they weren’t afraid of making’
(1996: 109). Jones calls for serious engagement with feminist work produced during
the 1970s. By producing valuable correctives to the mis-characterisations and car-
icatures of what are really a diverse and often contradictory set of artistic practices,
an installation like WACK! certainly contributes to the sort of serious engagement
desired by Jones and Lippard. However, I would argue that it is vital to pair this sort
of corrective with a more careful analysis of the way that the currently dominant
stories work, and the reasons why they persist. Jones asks her readers to approach
feminist art history’s foremothers (‘mother figures’) with respect; it is just as impor-
tant to come to an understanding of how a widespread disrespect or, to use Laura
Cottingham’s term, ‘contempt’ (2000: 93) was born of a general willingness on the
part of a ‘younger, cooler, and sometimes more cynical generation’ to condemn
1970s women’s art ‘somewhat unfairly as biologistic, reductionist, simplistic, or
essentialist’ (Lippard, 1995: 24). In the next and final section of this article, I turn
to recent scholarship on feminist generationality in order to make sense of how the
persistence of mother/daughter metaphors in the field of art is fuelled by disidenti-
ficatory struggles.
Generations
The logic of generationality is certainly not new to feminist historiography. In
response to the deployment of generational models for making sense of the past,
feminist scholars and historians have offered trenchant critiques of ‘matrophor’, a
term coined by Rebecca Dakin Quinn to describe ‘the persistent nature of maternal
metaphors in feminism’ (Quinn quoted in Henry, 2004: 2). Judith Roof, for instance,
points out that ‘generation is neither an innocent empirical model nor an accurate
assessment of a historical reality’ (Roof, 1997: 71). Part of a collection of feminist
scholars who promote ‘jettisoning generational thinking’ (Richmond, 2010: 60), she
points out that the very notion of generation is a product of patriarchal narratives.
Roof persuasively argues that the familial paradigm installed by generational logics
and languages is overdetermined by notions of debt, legacy, rivalry, recrimination,
and property. Accordingly, relationships between feminists placed in subject
Meagher 311
positions of ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ are interpreted through an economy that

requires that women disavow their attachments to one another in the service of
paternal lineage and patriarchal power. Roof calls on her readers to take steps
toward making generation ‘an insignificant term in the creation, re-creation, sharing
and proliferation of feminist knowledges’ (Roof, 1997: 86).
Against those, like Roof, who insist that these metaphors/matrophors serve
mainly to emphasise division, Astrid Henry suggests that, rather than reject or
capitulate to generational metaphors, it is important to understand their enduring
appeal and significance. In this, she follows Susan Fraiman who, against Roof,
argues that ‘family metaphors do not exacerbate tensions so much as they help to
get a handle on them’ (Fraiman, 1999: 527). Additionally, Henry is inspired by
Devoney Looser’s concern that scholars ‘continue to examine what are already
quite entrenched and perceived feminist generational differences and alliances’
(Looser, 1997: 33; emphasis added). In Not My Mother’s Sister (2004), Henry
explores the deployment of generational logic in the conceptualising of feminist
relations, with an emphasis upon the relationships between second and third
wave feminists and their apparent disagreements over topics like sexuality and
raciality. She points to the implications that such metaphors have – on not only
how stories of the past are told, but how contemporary relationships between
women are lived or experienced. What does it mean, Henry ponders, ‘for ‘‘younger’’
feminists to view ‘‘older’’ feminists – whether they are their friends, lovers, teachers,
colleagues, or adversaries – as mothers?’ (2004: 182). A pervasive mother-daughter
metaphor reproduces what Henry describes as an ‘impoverished model of genera-
tional relations’ (2004: 181) that limits female homosociality to positions available
within patriarchal family dramas. The matrophor, Henry argues, reduces ‘potential
relationships to a single relationship’ (2004: 3; original emphasis) at the same time
that it requires what Richmond calls ‘temporal fidelity’ (2010: 59), or commitment
to the identity position ostensibly shared by one’s generational cohort. All mothers
are grouped together; all daughters are grouped together; while intra-generational
distinction is downplayed; inter-generational strife is highlighted.
If Astrid Henry’s initial question concerned the impact of generational thinking
with an eye on producing a corrective, her more interesting question – and one that
is in line with the sort of questioning pursued by Hemmings and of interest to me
here – concerns the fears, desires, and fantasies that continue to fuel matrophobia
or, what Phyllis Chesler provocatively terms ‘psychological matricide’ (Chesler
quoted in Henry, 2004: 11). When Chesler describes the second wave of the women’s
movement in North America, she writes of disaffected young white middle class
women who refused the feminine subject positions they saw modelled in their
mothers. Women involved in this second wave, she argues, imagined themselves
to be motherless: ‘When we stepped out onto the stage of history we did so primarily
as motherless daughters/sisters/sibling rivals. Psychologically, we had committed
matricide’ (Chesler quoted in Henry, 2004: 9). On some important level, then, in
order to establish a contemporary feminist subject position, participants in the
second wave’s ‘sibling horde’ (Chesler quoted in Henry, 2004: 10) found it useful
to deploy a matrophor in ways that facilitated a radical break from and disidenti-
fication with a symbolic mother. Madelyn Detloff describes the ways in which this
tendency to erect radical generational breaks, which served the self-constitution of
feminist women of the second wave, has led to disappointment and hurt feelings in
these now ‘older’, motherly even, women’s encounters with younger women who
associate themselves with a third wave. The younger generation of feminists is
accused by those it rejects of having ‘forgotten the multi-faceted political struggles
of its second wave foremothers and is swayed to ingratitude by a stilted vision of the
second wave’ (Detloff, 1997: 77). Describing the uneasy confrontation between
second and third wave feminists specifically in scholarly contexts, Detloff points
out that this form of inter-generational conflict ‘rarely gets to the level of weighing
and considering the potential constructiveness of a particular criticism’ (1997: 86).
Instead, discussions are shaped by defensiveness and self-protection, by mis-char-
acterisation and misunderstanding.
Thinking through the signification of generational metaphors – metaphors of
inheritance and legacy, but also, debt, rivalry, and recrimination – means to think
about the social, psychological, and cultural functions performed by the persistent
return to the language of mothers and daughters. Henry argues that the daughterly
third wave emerged by way of a widespread refusal of earlier versions of feminism.
Although characterised by some as a sign of ingratitude born of ‘a stilted vision of
the second wave as a privileged, homogenized movement typified by the National
Organization for Women’ (Detloff, 1997: 77), it may be equally understood as an
active process of disidentification through which a generation of young women
raised with feminism in the water, like fluoride (see Baumgardner and Richards,
2000) set out to ‘disconnect themselves from the generation of women who came
before them’ in the hopes of stepping onto the stage of history in their own terms
(Henry, 2004: 9). Cathryn Bailey similarly describes the third wave as an emerging
tradition that identifies itself largely by way of a self-distancing from an earlier
feminism. An articulation of the third wave as an identity category within feminism
was embraced by many, she argues, ‘as a means of stressing what are perceived as
discontinuities with earlier feminist thought’ (Bailey, 1997: 18; emphasis added). In
her analysis of third wave texts produced in the mid 1990s, Bailey argues that a
break from the second wave is accomplished by way of disidentification with those
‘values it associates with the second wave and finds disagreeable or irrelevant’
(Bailey, 1997: 20–21). Here, Bailey, like Henry, points to the ways in which daugh-
terly fantasies (perceived discontinuities, perceived generational differences) contrib-
ute to the production of distinct and discontinuous subject positions.
The logic of generation not only transforms complex and multifaceted political
engagements into a singular ‘definable phenomenon’ associated with ‘a more or less
coherent set of values and ideas’, it additionally sets up the conditions under which
an entire generation can be mis-characterised and rejected or, to use Bailey’s term,
‘transcended’ (Bailey, 1997: 23). As Henry argues in reference to feminist politics
and scholarship more broadly, the third wave position is established in opposi-
tion not only to ideas and arguments, but to a powerful figuration: ‘However
Meagher 313
second-wave feminism is described – puritanical, dated, dowdy, asexual, to name

but a few common traits attributed to this mother – she has become an easy figure to
reject’ (2004: 11). Certainly, the sort of description Henry offers here has little to do
with the articulation of political disagreement and much to do with the circulation
of a subject position against which an emerging subjectivity can be established. Put
another way, the caricatured second wave feminist is a fantasy object against which
a ‘new’ feminist identity position was constituted. Moreover, the description Henry
offers of the second wave feminist resonates with the sorts of descriptions of the
beleaguered first generation essentialist feminist that circulate in the field of feminist
art: she is naı̈ve, earnest, zealous, and perhaps worst of all, ‘old-fashioned’ (Lippard,
1995: 266). This caricatured second wave feminist and her parallel in art, the first
generation essentialist, are fantasies produced in the service of disidentification.
Diana Fuss, upon whom Astrid Henry draws in her articulation of disidentifica-
tion, points out that identification ‘invokes phantoms’ (Fuss, 1995: 1). Writing at the
intersection of Freudian and Lacanian theory, Fuss describes identification as a
process by which one clings to a lost love-object by ‘incorporating [its] spectral
remains’ so that it ‘vampiristically comes to life’ (1995: 1). In her examination of
psychoanalytic models of identification and their capacities and limitations as a
foundation for feminist politics, Fuss points out that identification is more than
simply the ‘internalization of the other’ (1995: 4). She reveals that identification is a
complex and often contradictory process that turns on fantasy, substitution, and
displacement. Disidentification is just as complex. More than simply the external-
isation or rejection of the other, disidentification is understood by Fuss as a process
through which ‘an identification that has already been made [may be] denied in the
unconscious’ (1995: 7). Here, Fuss relies upon Judith Butler’s articulation of a
disidentification as ‘an identification that one fears to make only because one has
already made it’ (Butler, 1993: 112).
Butler writes of the ways in which a logic of repudiation governs what she terms a
‘normativizing heterosexuality’ (1993: 112), but her description of disidentification
as disavowal might well be applied to understanding the ‘exclusionary moves’ (1993:
112) through which a myriad of subject positions are produced and assumed.
Disidentification, she argues, is established not simply through refusal, but rather
through a disavowal of an abjected identity that ‘must never show’ (Butler, 1993:
112). In the context of hegemonic sexual subject positions, this is to say that het-
erosexuality is established not so much against as through abjected queer identifica-
tions. Applied to the dominant narrative of feminist art history, Butler’s argument
would suggest that a so-called second generation position is not simply predicated
upon a rejection of an earlier first generation practice rendered abject by its pre-
sumed affiliation with essentialism. To use her language, within the dominant nar-
rative of feminist art history, the essentialist feminist occupied with domes, circles,
and eggs has not been repudiated by a subsequent generation so much as she has
been disavowed. The logic of disidentification and disavowal, particularly as they
are overlaid onto the matrophors circulating in feminist stories, may help to make
sense of the persistence of a story that has, for all intents and purposes, been
revealed to be a ‘vastly oversimplified as well as prejudicial view’ (Solomon-Godeau,

2007: 338) of what might otherwise be understood as a complex and multilayered
tale.
The dominant narrative about western feminist art’s history, in which an essen-
tialist first generation is displaced by a poststructuralist second generation, persists
not because it is true (it’s not) but because it performs the function of disidentifica-
tion. It constructs two subject positions (a first generation, a second generation) as
‘mutually exclusive phenomena’ (Butler, 1993: 111–112), which, as Butler puts it,
means that the assumption of one ‘is purchased at the expense of another’ (1993:
112). The establishment of a second generation subject position, in other words, is
predicated upon a rejection of first generation artists and art. However, to the extent
that this rejection may be said to be structured around disavowal, it is vital to
recognise the integral role that first generation art and artists – and, more specifi-
cally, caricatures of that art and those artists – continue to play in the field. That
said, as valuable as it may be to offer alternatives to the conventional story that
circulates through the field of feminist art, it is equally as valuable to interrogate
those that persist. The haunted nature of stories about the past and the ways we find
of living with and living amongst our ‘ghosts’ in order to learn from them about
ourselves might engage art historians and critics in a highly reflective process of
storytelling, one closely attuned to the presence of ghosts, of desires, of identifica-
tion and disidentifications.
Notes
1. These are offered only as exemplary of a wider proliferation of exhibitions, colloquia, and
conferences in the first decade of the twenty-first century. As Mira Schor points out, many
of the feminist art events of this decade were coordinated by the Feminist Art Project and
were held to celebrate anniversaries of: the Feminist Art Program at California State
University and its 1972 installation project, Womanhouse; the ‘Where We At’ exhibition
of African American art organised by Faith Ringgold; the publication of Linda Nochlin’s
ground-breaking essay, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’; the formation
of A.I.R., a cooperative feminist gallery in New York city; the foundation of the Woman’s
Building in Los Angeles; and the inauguration of the Women’s Caucus for the Arts at the
College Art Association. See Mira Schor (2009: 273, fn 1).
2. Mira Schor similarly describes these artists, and in particular the works described here as
‘the most significant (though dramatically opposite) major works of 1970s feminist art’
(2009: 49).
3. Linda Theung’s note on Kelly in the WACK! catalogue records the following assertions
from the artist on Post-Partum Document: ‘there is no preexisting sexuality, no essential
femininity . . . to look at the processes of their construction is also to see the possibility of
deconstructing the dominant forms of representing difference and justifying subordination
in our social order’ (Butler, 2007: 253).
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Telling stories about feminist art

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In a project that takes a genealogical approach to feminist historiography, Clare

replace apparently straightforward questions like: ‘What really happened in the

Revisiting the past and imagining the future

a post-structuralist inﬂected critique of representation in the 1980s’ (2007: 3).

informed by postmodern and poststructural suspicion of categories like ‘woman’

Essentialism in art: circles, domes, and eggs

frequently associated with a knowing suspicion of ahistorical propositions and a

emphasis added). Moreover, they identify the accusations of essentialism lodged at

positions of ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ are interpreted through an economy that

second-wave feminism is described – puritanical, dated, dowdy, asexual, to name

revealed to be a ‘vastly oversimpliﬁed as well as prejudicial view’ (Solomon-Godeau,

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