Roundtable Presentation/NWSA Conference, Summer 2000

I view the divisions between women's studies and art history as stemming from a set of intellectual issues related to the political potential of art and the rise of cultural studies as a major new discipline of the humanities. Before I elaborate let me describe my own academic background, which straddles these two disciplinary locations.

Presently, I am a Ph.D. candidate in modern and contemporary art in an art history department. I also hold a graduate certificate degree in women's studies with a focus on the theory and activism of the American second-wave movement. Between 1996 and 1998 I regularly taught an introductory, interdisciplinary arts and humanities course titled Women, Art, and Culture in a women's studies department. Alternately, I have taught feminist art and theory in upper division surveys of American and European art of the post-1945 era offered within art history departments.

Much of the evidence set out in the proposal for this roundtable regarding the marginal status of art history within women's studies reflects my own experiences studying and teaching in both disciplinary locations. This would include a lack of art historians hired as core women's studies faculty, a lack of course offerings in the visual arts within women's studies, and, I would add, a general lack of knowledge of the important contributions of feminist artists on the part of most art history and women's studies faculty. In the course I regularly taught, Women, Art, and Culture, a rare nod toward art in a women's studies department, the lack of connection between art history and women's studies hit home in very practical ways as well. For instance, there are no appropriate introductory, interdisciplinary texts for women's studies courses focusing on women in the "fine" arts. A number of very good texts, such as Gender, Race, and Class in Media, were utilized by most of my colleagues, but in their version of this course the analysis of popular culture replaced the art component. Secondly, women's studies departments often lack the equipment one needs to teach art--slides, projectors, lights on dimmer switches, shades on classroom windows, etc.

In part, I think the general lack of support for the visual arts in women's studies is related to a deep-rooted, often unspoken belief that art is essentially non-political. The commodity status of art, its relative non-portability, its exclusivity, or perceived distance from everyday life has long compromised the critical role of art in the transformation of society. And to the extent painting, sculpture, video, photography, installation, and performance, those practices currently categorized as "high" art, continue to be practiced, interpreted, and acquired by an elite, this will continue to be a difficult suspicion to dispel. In the history of the second-wave feminist movement, the suspicion of abstraction as a male Western patriarchal device, on the part of some early radical feminists, is a particular manifestation of this attitude. More recently, the ambivalence regarding the use of the female body in feminist art on the part of activists and scholars both within and without the anti-pornography movement reveals a serious divide amongst feminists regarding the relationship of images to the extra-aesthetic world. 

This is not to say that all "high" art forms face rejection or marginalization within the women's movement. For instance, Kim Whitehead, in her very interesting book The Feminist Poetry Movement, persuasively demonstrates how poetry has functioned as the medium of the women's movement since the early 1970s. Feminist poets ensured their central place within the feminist and women's studies community by building a devoted audience through the mass circulation of poetry, the invention of new, accessible poetic form, and public performance. The success of feminist poetry points to the major difficulties feminists in the visual arts face in attempting to build and sustain a mass audience.

With the rise of cultural studies and its subdiscipline, visual culture, it seems to me that the analysis of art in women's studies has been further marginalized in favor of the analysis of the political or subversive potential of popular culture. Sadly, art historians have been slow to respond to the call for an expanded field of inquiry in regards to the visual in culture. Neither is it helpful that the art historians to whom contemporary or popular culture should matter most (in my view, specialists in modern and contemporary art) are often the first to reject it in favor of a very tired belief in the revolutionary potential of radical art. Consequently, as even a cursory glance at the recent catalogs of major humanities presses will attest, scholarship collected under the rubric of cultural studies or even visual culture has been defined as a field separate from the study of art proper and remains the province of departments of anthropology, American studies, women's studies, and gay/lesbian studies, among others. This suggests to me the persistence of cultural and aesthetic hierarchies of the "high" and the "low" defining the field of art history as external to other fields concerned with cultural production, despite predictions to the contrary by some art historians and cultural theorists committed to interdisciplinary scholarship in the pursuit of breaking down disciplinary boundaries.

As for redressing the marginalization of art within women's studies--I believe panels such as this one are an important first step, and I'm sure continued pressure at the institutional level will be necessary. Additionally, to the extent graduate students in art history have access to graduate women's studies programs, they ought to be urged to more fully participate. Based on my own experience, very few graduate students in art history have the credentials to teach in a women's studies department, which is an obstacle on the job market. Conversely, I'd like to see women's studies departments take active steps to integrate the study of visual culture (broadly defined to include the "fine" arts) into their core curriculum. That this might require feminist scholars of modern and contemporary art to broaden the range of their expertise to include forms of visual culture excluded from the art historical canon, is something I would welcome. Having the ability to move between the disciplines of art history and women's studies or visual culture will necessarily demonstrate that the study of art is, in fact, not external to other fields in the humanities concerned with the study of culture.