Feminist Art

From Savage to Sensational, from lawyer to hulking beast, from advocate to Avenger and from independent woman to hyper-sexualised feminista – She-Hulk provides a case study in what occurs when ‘great power’ meets the ‘great responsibility’ of the legal professional. This article seeks to fill a gap in the fledgling field of Law and Comics via an analysis of She-Hulk, revealing a character defined by binaries, constructed through real world and imagined patriarchal forces, whose superpowers do not make her immune from the struggles faced by the female voice within the legal system. Yet She-Hulk offers a solution to this exclusion – the realm of the abject, the monstrous, splintering the law to protect her client’s interests. She-Hulk reveals that superhero powers are needed to overcome the challenges of feminist lawyering.

This article aims to reassemble a feminist genealogy of the posthuman in the arts, with a specific focus on the visual works conceived by female artists after the rise of what has been retrospectively defined as first-wave Feminism. Starting with the main avant-garde movements of the first half of the twentieth century—specifically, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism—this genealogy analyses the second-wave Feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, with its integral exploration of the body highlighted by performance art. Following this, it takes into account the third-wave Feminism of the 1990s and its radical re-elaboration of the self: from Cyberfeminism and its revisitation of technology, to the artistic insights offered, on the one side, by critical techno-orientalist readings of the futures, and on the other, by the political and social articulations of Afrofuturism and Chicanafuturism. Lastly, this genealogy accesses the ways contemporary female artists are dealing with gender, social media and the notion of embodiment, touching upon elements that will become of key importance in fourth-wave Feminism.

Ideas of radical feminism, Goddess Spirituality and Feminist Witchcraft— which originated in the United States during the late 1960s and the 1970s before taking root in Britain—were introduced to British Wiccans during the latter half of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s. Several United Kingdom-based radical feminists who combined their newfound political awareness with Goddess Spirituality acted as important conduits for the transference of these ideas. In the case of the artist and Goddess-feminist Monica Sjöö (1938-2005), I show some of the ways in which radical and spiritual feminist religious ideas did, contrary to a commonly held view, influence the British Pagan scene in the 1960s and 1970s.

"This essay analyzes the video essays of Ursula Biemann, which focus on the relations between globalized production processes, the exploitation of women's bodies, and the sexualization of female labor. Showing the interrelation of the flows of transnational economies and information and communication technologies (ICTs) with the performances of gender and space, these video essays work as feminist cartographies. Deploying the video essay format, Biemann creates figurations to delineate an alternative system of navigation. Visual language and visualization technologies become a political instrument to counter women's invisibility behind the displacing and abstracting effects of technoscapes.


Keywords: Ursula Biemann; video essay; ICTs; transnational feminism; feminist cartography; visualization technologies "

This article draws on Walter Benjamin's insights about collecting to consider how the curatorial approach in the Women's Jail museum figures former inmates as collectors who haunt a scene of memory that productively mediates the gaze. In compelling viewers to see how particular women recollect incarceration, this place of diverse and distinct memories invites a new mode of connection with visitorskinship-that avoids problems associated with both identification and affect in museum exhibits.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08949460701688973#.U7aGnP0U_nI
Abstract
This articles discusses the pictures by marginalized Bedouin women moving from nomadic villages to townships. The women's experiences of these shifting inside and outside spaces they live within and the lack of spaces, both inside and outside, both sedentary and mobile, are presented and understood in terms of the interacting oppressions they experience. The use of an arts-based methodology gives access to these spatial experiences, and is discussed in terms of its relevance as an indigenous research method that forms a base for “hearing” the women's concerns according to their own categories, so as to adjust policy in the light of these concerns.

In literature on modern urban life, a flâneur is a man who wanders seemingly aimlessly but with the intention of observing people or events in urban life and perhaps recording these observations in text or images. This article shows how contemporary women artists in Hong Kong-a city in late capitalism, perform the role of the flâneuse, the female counterpart of the flâneur. The article analyses Stella Tang's series of paintings Sauntering Through My City Series (2009-2016) and Annie Wan's ceramic works Looking For Poetry in Wanchai (2005) and Collecting Moonlight (2017). The article takes a nomadic nondialectical approach to explore how the two women artists practise their flâneurie, and how they transform such experiences into art projects that are different from the conventional flâneur art. I identify three aspects of the alternative representation of urban space in the works of the two flâneuses: reconfiguration of conception, the creative appropriation of alternative art forms and public engagement.

The Umbrella Movement in 2014 drew attention to Hong Kong from across the world and triggered local artists to respond to the current social and political issues through their art. This article discusses three socially engaged projects created in response to the Umbrella Movement by two women artists: Birthday Cakes (2014) and Love China Love Hong Kong Thick Toast (2015) by Phoebe Man, and Singing Under the Moon for Today and Tomorrow (2015) by Jaffa Lam. This article investigates how the aesthetic regime of these projects is realized from a feminist perspective. It argues that women artists can intervene in the male-dominated representations of borders and spatial politics in Hong Kong art to create an alternative by adopting feminist art tactics. Moreover, women artists can take a step further to reconsider the mechanism of identity politics and pay close attention to relational forms in socially engaged art to achieve the dissensus of aisthesis. After all, it is the construction of a community of dissensus that resonates with the spirit of the Umbrella Movement.

The article explores the subject of contemporary Jewish identity through the case of young immigrant women artists from the former Soviet Union in Israel, with particular emphasis on an analysis of the gendered aspects of their religious identity. Drawing on an interdisciplinary method, the research is based on in-depth interviews with artists, artwork analysis, and various theories from the social sciences and humanities. The article's main argument is that an analysis of the artistic practices of this and similar understudied social groups, particularly those practices undertaken in moments of conflict or times of deep social change, produces a more subtle understanding of the shifting modes of Jewish identity in the age of globalization and transnationalism, whose phenomenon of mass migration has led to the construction of new multi-hyphenated, hybrid identities.

Neste trabalho, observamos a utilização da imagem do corpo feminino como uma estratégia recorrente em ações ativistas em diferentes partes do mundo. Os elementos estético-políticos do corpo, historicamente utilizados pelas artes, tais como o nu, a dor, o erotismo e a identidade (ou o anonimato) são reconduzidos para um projeto de cultura ativa e participativa dentro das redes de comunicação digital. Nossa análise insere-se no campo da biopolítica e faz uso de três exemplos recentes: os autorretratos da egípcia Aliaa Magda Elmahdy e as ações dos coletivos Pussy Riot (Rússia) e Femen (Ucrânia).


In this work, it is observed the use of female body image as a repeated strategy in activist actions in different parts of the world. The aesthetic-political elements of the body, which have historically been used by the Arts, such as nudity, pain, eroticism and identity (or anonymity), are redirected to an active and participative culture project in the digital communication networks. The analysis is located in the biopolitics field and makes use of three recent examples: the Egyptian Aliaa Magda Elmahdy self-portraits and the actions of the collectives Pussy Riot (Russia) and Femen (Ukraine).

At the launch of the twenty-first century, the online pornographic photographs of Natacha Merritt, a young American woman (twenty-three years old at the time of her rise to fame), were categorised as art in two publications by art publisher Taschen, precipitating a critical acceptance of her work as such. This particular foray of pornography into an art context was briefly contested by one art critic (Mey, 2007), however, this relatively rare example of misclassification warrants further investigation in order to better understand the role played by what had, by the late twentieth century, become a pervasive postfeminist culture.

Drawing on feminist media studies writing (Diane Negra, 2009; Angela McRobbie, 2007; Melanie Walters, 2007), that analyses postfeminist modes of ‘self-exploration,’ and feminist art criticism (Lucy Lippard, 1976; Whitney Chadwick, 2013; Amelia Jones, 2010) on women’s body art, this paper argues that Merritt’s ‘adult-oriented’ online digital photographs of herself and others, which claim to portray authentic sexual encounters in Merritt’s real life are more persuasively situated within the increasingly prevalent online genres of the intimate blog and amateur porn.  In addition, it seeks to analyse the role of postfeminist rhetoric, in the media and increasingly in criticism, in legitimising women’s engagement with pornography.

Tendo em vista o ativismo dos feminismos, tanto nos movimentos sociais quanto nas artes, na promoção de novos modos de subjetivação e modos de existência múltiplos e voltados às práticas de liberdade, propomo-nos a refletir sobre os fazeres artísticos feministas em passagens políticas que se valem de uma força inventiva/afirmativa do corpo enquanto estratégia de subversão e resistência para propor outras formas de viver, inclusive, a pesquisa em Psicologia.

This text approaches Teresa Margolles's textile works through the lens of gore capitalism, a concept theorized in Sayak Valencia's important 2018 book. Gore capitalism, according to Valencia, is the inevitable extension of globalization leading to the use of extreme violence in order to gain economic power and status. In 2009, Margolles was chosen to represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale, and her installation included a number of large cloths that had been used to clean up scenes of narco-violence in northern Mexico. In 2012 and 2015, Margolles gave bloody textiles to groups of embroiderers who embroidered directly onto the cloths. In these and other works, Margolles's stained textiles index violent death in a range of global contexts, staging "soft interventions" that I interpret as political acts of resistance against gore capitalism, violent crime related to narco-empowerment, and femicide. The modernist framing of textiles as excessive is also interrogated, and it is argued that what Margolles's textile artworks unveil is not the innate excessiveness of textiles, but rather the excessiveness of violence.

Catherine Hoffmann's Free Lunch with the Stench Wench is a performance of abjection and self-abjection through poverty with an apotropaic aspiration: to shed the shame through sharing, and to create opportunities for a common social subjectivity that refuses to be silent about the struggle of its own creation and maintenance. Despite its title, Free Lunch does not come with a free lunch for the audience but creates an olfactory situation, through the onstage cooking of hot chocolate and the presence of a dead rat, which complements Hoffmann's narration and stage presence into a synaesthetic portrait of poverty and its psychosocial fallout. Drawing on the psychological foundations of shame studies, sociological approaches and social-theoretical responses to austerity and social division, I propose to examine the gendered embodiment of shame and its exorcism in Hoffmann's performance, focusing on its physical codification in and beyond the visual. I explore the potential of shame to be re-weaponized against those who originally inflict it, and consider the shame that haunts every creative act, especially those with high political stakes: the failure to make a connection, the fear of being misunderstood.

This article is a reflection on the potential of craftivist pedagogies to disrupt the neoliberal university model and work towards building international solidarity networks. It offers a case study centered on the incorporation of the craftivist collective Bordeamos por la Paz into two distinct US-based classrooms and disciplines: Art History and Latin American Studies. Part of a nationwide, yet grassroots movement in Mexico, Bordeamos works to memorialize victims of disappearance and violence through the collective creation of hand embroidered panels. Reflecting on the shared experience of crafting a community-engaged service-learning (CESL) curriculum with Bordeamos, we advocate for the ways these courses enabled a space of civic responsibility rooted in embodied knowledge and "being with" in order to resist replicating problematic power dynamics.

Dünyanın son dönemde geçirdiği pandemi süreci karantina koşullarını gerektirmiş, insanlar için ev hayatı ve evdeki rutin daha önemli hale gelmiştir. Bu ise toplumsal cinsiyet ayrımıyla çoğunlukla kadınların sorumluluğu olarak belirlenmiş ev içi gündelik emeğin daha fazla sarf edilmesi gereğini ortaya çıkarmıştır. Makalede ev içi emek, görünmez emek olarak tanımlanan fiziksel işler ile sorumluluk almaya bağlı zihinsel yük olarak iki biçimde ele alınmıştır. Mevcut durum, özellikle entelektüel üretim yapan kadının bütün bu sorumluluklar içinde yaratıcı faaliyetinin nasıl mümkün olabileceğini düşünmeyi gerekli kılar. Bu makale, kişisel olarak ev ve gündelik hayatta kadınların sorumlulukları ile üretimi üzerine düşünme pratiğinden yola çıkarak sanatçı kadınların üretim pratiklerine, ayrıca feminist teori ve feminist sanatın evi, gündelik hayatı ve bakım terimiyle formüle edilen işleri nasıl sorunsallaştırdığına odaklanan bir araştırmadır. Makale, sanatçı kadının söz konusu üretiminin tanımlanan koşullarda ne şekilde olabileceğini, edebiyat alanındaki yaklaşımları da ele alıp tartışarak, hiyerarşik biçimde “yukarı” yerleştirilen yaratıcı üretim ile “aşağı” yerleştirilen gündelik hayat zorunluluklarını birleştirebilmenin önemini işaret etmektedir. Bunu yapmak için öncelikle ev içi gündelik emeğin kadının “doğal” görevi olduğu ezberini tartışmak gerekmiştir. Böylece entelektüel üretimin maskülen, gündelik sorumlulukların ise feminen kalıplara hapsedildiği toplumsal cinsiyet eşitsizliğine dikkat çekilmiş, sanat üretiminin en ideal modeli olarak sunulan deha-erkek sanatçı tanımına, entelektüel üretim için “erkekleşme”nin dayatılmasına itiraz edilmiştir. Kadınların kendilerini bu modeli benimseme zorunluluğunda hissetmeleri Virginia Woolf’un “evdeki melek” kavramlaştırması üzerinden tartışılmıştır. 1970’lerden itibaren Batı’daki feminist sanat örneklerine bakılmış, özellikle Türkiye’de gündelik hayatı sorunsallaştıran feminist bir kolektif olan KRE’nin üretimleri incelenmiştir. Böylece sanatta gündelik yaşamı yadsımayan yaratıcı bir yöntemi hem teorik tartışmalar hem de sanattan seçilen örnekler üzerinden öne çıkarmak amaçlanmıştır.

The pandemic and the quarantine conditions created a confined space where people comply with everyday home routines. This space reiterated the reproductive labour designated mostly as the responsibility of women by the social gender order. As the social reproduction in women’s everyday life has become more salient during the pandemic, this widened the gap between the different forms of masculinities and femininities of social hierarchy both in society and art scenery. Drawing on the work of Virgina Woolf, Rozsika Parker and Iris Marion Young, this article looks at the ways in which social reproduction and intellectual production of women is entangled at home. The article approaches the domestic labour from a twofold perspective: the physical burden it creates, and the mental & emotional burden associated with taking responsibility. It attempts to explain the historical reasons for the physical burden expected from women and their responsibility for the unpaid reproductive labour, but at the same time fleshes out the mental & emotional burden it creates on women. Upon presenting the complexities with these terms, the paper questions how the creative activity of women aligns with their everyday responsibility and to what extent it creates intellectual spaces for the emergence of women as public intellectuals and artists. With reference to writings of Parker and Iris, the study takes up a feminist theorisation and quest to problematise art and looks at the production of feminist art through a triad of home, everyday life and care work. In doing so, it brings these concepts with the debates of hegemonic masculinity operating in the art environment and creating a femininity and masculinity divide in the ways women artists produce or the extent to which they are valued as professionals whose value is assessed in relation to male artists. This surely creates a high and low art divide where the former is attached to men’s domain of production. The article points out the importance of combining creative production which is placed “high” and the necessities of daily life which are placed “low” in a hierarchical manner by discussing how the production of the female artist can be made in the defined conditions. In doing this, the article discusses the everyday labour at home to draw attention to social gender inequality where intellectual production is represented as a masculinity norm. Thus, it challenges the definition of the genius-male artist presented as the ideal model of art production, arguing how it becomes a product of hegemonic masculinity in the art landscape. The paper offers a critique of this art space creating a gender hierarchy, producing the dynamics of masculinities and the processes creating social embodiment of the art production. The fact that women feel obliged to adopt the masculinity and femininity division of intellectual production and social reproduction is discussed through the “angel at home” conceptualisation of Virginia Woolf. This conceptualisation gives us a unique perspective to focus on the art production at home and analyse the limits of art production. Taking KRE as an example of Turkish feminist collective who use home as the new emerging space for intellectual art production and space for resistance to patriarchal norms in art, the paper highlights changing contemporary art canon, dynamics and forms of production.

A  primeira  secção  deste  artigo  incide  num  estudo  representativo  dos  feminismos artísticos praticados em Portugal. Grande parte das referências de artistas, activistas ou grupos foi pesquisada e acedida on-line, num processo de trabalho que combinou a consulta e pedidos
de depoimentos às/aos artistas sobre as suas obras e imagens. A segunda secção pretende mensurar as condições de produção de arte feminista. Tal foi possível sobretudo através do levantamento de dados on-line relativos à representatividade de artistas homens e mulheres
em  algumas  das  principais  instâncias  artísticas.  Adicionalmente,  foram  articulados  alguns testemunhos de agentes artísticos que documentassem alguns dos obstáculos presentes no sistema  artístico  português  impostos  às  mulheres  artistas,  assim  como  à  produção  de  arte feminista.

In response to the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes by police in London in 2005, artist Monica Ross decided to try and learn the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by heart. She first attempted to publicly recite the Declaration from memory in the performance rights repeated – an act of memory at Beaconsfield, London, 2005. This has since become the series Anniversary – an act of memory, beginning with a solo recitation by Ross to mark the 60th anniversary of the Declaration in 2008. The series approaches performance as a live and generative medium, with recitations recorded using photography and video, edited in consultation with the co-recitors and posted on you tube as an open archive. Resisting the impulse to foreground the content of such an explicitly political work, I argue that it is in the structure of this performance in sixty acts and its temporal unfolding in time and place, across different contexts and communities, that its political and ethical significance lies. The inevitable pauses in each recitation find their counterpart in the patient, discreet and sympathetic waiting of the co-recitors and the artist herself, who are assigned the double role of performer and audience. I turn to the critical apparatus of psychoanalysis, not only because it elaborates the links between remembering and repetition, which are viewed as not simply connected but as part of a dialectic, but also because, in its practice (analysis), it both requires and values a great deal of waiting. Anniversary is contextualised among other works by Monica Ross and others, with particular reference to the impact of feminism on art practice.

"Is gender implicated in how art does its work, or even is defined as work, in global space? Is a global imperative exclusive to capitalism’s planetary expansion or also animating oppositional practices in art and curating? And what is new in the gendered paradigms of art after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in a persistently divided Europe and elsewhere?

The study addresses these questions through interwoven analyses of travel as artistic labour, the sexualisation of migration as a relationship between Eastern and Western Europe, the post-documentary aesthetic of the feminist video essay, the rise of female art and curatorial collectives, the spectral re-appearance of the male working class in the museum and globalisation’s ‘bad boys’ as well as the need for a renewed materialist feminism. A central aspiration of the book is to demonstrate that contemporary art and theory’s turn to labour and economic relations, around 2000, compels a reviewing of feminism’s attachment to the cultural subject, practices and methodologies privileged by postmodernism. Artists and collectives discussed in the book include, among others, Marina Abramovic, Ursula Biemann, Tracey Emin, Andrea Fraser, Kuratorisk Action, Lin+Lam, Malmö Free University for Women (MFK), Jenny Marketou, Renzo Martens, Dani Marti, Steve McQueen, Mujeres Públicas, Tanja Ostojić, Ann Sofi Siden, Mare Tralla, WHW, Artur Żmijewski.

The book seeks to offer a theoretically astute overview of key developments in art and its contexts since the 1990s and contribute to a critical refocusing of feminist politics in art history in the wake of globalisation as capitalism’s biopolitical arena. It will be of interest to researchers in art history, gender, feminist and globalisation studies, curatorial theory, cultural studies and beyond."

During the 1970s, Spanish comics began to reflect gender
questioning as a consequence of the Spanish Feminist
Movement that arose after the death of Francisco
Franco. This gender questioning lead to several transformations
in the female characters, until that moment
mostly subaltern, passive and sexually objectified. In
the first part, this article investigates the position of
women in the comic before the Feminist Movement,
focusing on Francoism and the Democratic Transition
and revealing the cultural construction behind themes
and stereotypes. Secondly, I consider the work of pioneer
women authors who broke with misogynist stereotypes
and were open to innovation both in terms of
graphics and content. Research for this paper is based
on the analysis of original comics, both published and
unpublished illustrations, interviews and private
archives.

SPANISH VERSION

Durante los años setenta, el cómic español empieza a reflejar
un cuestionamiento de género como consecuencia del
movimiento feminista español que se había hecho visible
después de la muerte de Francisco Franco. Este cuestionamiento
de género determina una serie de transformaciones
en el personaje femenino hasta entonces relegado a un rol
subalterno, pasivo y como objeto sexual. El presente
artículo investiga, en su primera parte, el papel de la mujer
en el cómic antes de la eclosión del movimiento feminista,
centrándose en el franquismo y en la Transición, estudiando
la construcción cultural de sus tópicos y estereotipos.
En su segunda parte se estudia la obra hecha por las dibujantes
españolas que rompen los estereotipos machistas del
cómic y abren a una innovación gráfica y de contenido.
Para llevar a cabo esta investigación se han empleado
revistas de cómics originales, ilustraciones ya publicadas y
algunas inéditas, entrevistas y archivos privados.

Over the past decade, feminists born during and after the rise of women's liberation have become increasingly preoccupied with the movement's past – its documents and artefacts. This is evident in publications such as Elizabeth Freeman's Time Binds and Victoria Hesford's Feeling Women's Liberation, as well as artistic interventions by artists such as Sharon Hayes and Allyson Mitchell. In different ways, these theorists' and artists' projects each enact a longing for and reassessment of 1970s feminisms. At the same time, a younger generation of feminists comprising women born since 1980 has begun to look back to 1990s feminism as a site of longing and an object of critique. While both generations continue to distance themselves and their projects from nostalgia, this article suggests that rather than reject nostalgia entirely, these projects in fact bring feminist nostalgia into relief, pointing to both its dangers and possibilities.

Purpose. The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of women in the field of photography after the second wave of feminism in Europe. Design/methodology/approach. The grounded theory on the position of women in contemporary photography has been contrasted with the information collected by the authors in previous research studies on the presence of women photographers in the main museum collections in Europe. Findings. Gender inequality in the various artistic disciplines is a current sociopolitical problem Western countries have been fighting against for several decades. After the resurgence of social movements in the USA and Europe in the 1960s, an artistic movement called feminist art emerged whose significance should be assessed. Research limitations/implications. The paper proposed a general approximation, a foundation on the state of art, which may be implemented in the future with more data coming from other collections. It should be taken into account that this aim is a work in progress in a large scale of the research.
Practical implications. This paper includes implications for the development of a more efficient strategy to create a balance situation in the number of men and women photographers at the museum collections. Originality/value. The paper identified a lack of practical analysis on the current averages of female photographers in art institutions.
Reference: Muñoz-Muñoz, Ana M.; González-Moreno, M. Barbaño (2018). Women photographers in Europe: a fresh, feminine approach. Collection and Curation, 37 (4): 141-145. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/CC-03-2018-0007

This article contains a brief introduction to the work of the Italian concrete poet and visual poet Mirella Bentivoglio, followed by a series of images and artist's statements organized under the headings Women, Architecture, Religion, and The Book.

Cet article retrace le succès précoce d’une artiste grecque ottomane, Eleni Iliadis, dans le monde artistique d’Istanbul pendant la Première Guerre mondiale et son éviction de l’histoire de l’art turque après la fondation de la République en 1923. En s’inspirant des nouvelles approches féministes de l’histoire de l’art, cet article rend visible l’histoire cachée d’Iliadis : son éducation artistique à Munich, les expositions auxquelles elle participe, les récompenses et le patronage de l’État qu’elle reçoit pendant la guerre à Istanbul, en particulier pour sa peinture récemment redécouverte, Le Joueur de Guitare. J’examine les politiques genrées d’éducation artistique, de production et de réception dans le monde de l’art des débuts des années 1920 et analyse en quoi l’identité d’Iliadis en tant qu’artiste femme et non-musulmane a représenté un défi pour la nouvelle histoire nationale de l’art turque, dominée par les hommes, qui l’a finalement éradiquée de la mémoire culturelle.

El pensamiento occidental ha sido históricamente un instrumento de legitimación, naturalización y perpetuación de las relaciones desiguales de poder entre hombres y mujeres. Dentro de un contexto patriarcal, la llamada “identidad femenina” suele entenderse a partir de una concepción martirológica del amor, el apego a los estereotipos de belleza y la maternidad; configurándose la culpa en las mujeres a partir del sentirse en incumplimiento ante las expectativas sociales desarrolladas desde la masculinidad dominante. Visto esto, uno de los objetivos de toda terapia psicológica ha de ser el desmonte de los roles estereotipados de género, el desmonte de la masculinidad dominante y el empoderamiento de las mujeres. Igualmente, la incorporación de lo artístico permite recrear la vida, sanar el alma, y re-inventar lo humano con amplio sentido simbólico, así como hacer de las terapias psicológicas procesos también espirituales.

Ugliness or unsightliness is much more than a quality or property of an individual’s appearance—it has long functioned as a social category that demarcates access to social, cultural, and political spaces and capital. The editors of and authors in this collection harness intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches in order to examine ugliness as a political category that is deployed to uphold established notions of worth and entitlement. On the Politics of Ugliness identifies and challenges the harmful effects that labels and feelings of ugliness have on individuals and the socio-political order. It explores ugliness in relation to the intersectional processes of racialization, colonization and settler colonialism, gender-making, ableism, heteronormativity, and fatphobia. On the Politics of Ugliness asks that we fight against visual injustice and imagine new ways of seeing.

This paper argues that women's mobilization of 2016-18 in Poland (Women's Strike) can be understood as ‘populist feminism’ - a gendered version of what Chantal Mouffe (2018) has called ‘left populism’. Protesters rejected the ethnonationalist and moralist frames of right-wing populism (the assumption that ‘ordinary people’ are conservative and must be defended against ‘liberal elites’). At the same time, the movement reiterated the binarism of ‘people vs. elites’, which is central to populist mobilizations. It positioned angry women (and the men who supported them) as ‘the people’ in a struggle against ultra-conservative ‘elites’. The text offers a chronology of key events, examines the transnational connections of the movement and examines selected works of feminist art produced during the protests, arguing that profound cultural change accompanied the women’s rebellion – the so called Black Protests led to the articulation of ‘angry women’ as a new collective in the public sphere.
(FULL TEXT will be sent by author upon request)

Resumen

Este artículo estudia la inclusión de las armas en el lenguaje de las mujeres artistas, la mayor parte de ellas plenamente integradas en las corrientes del arte feminista. Tras una breve síntesis de las representaciones de mujeres armadas a través de la historia (entre la cuales necesariamente hay que mencionar a las amazonas), nos situaremos en las últimas décadas del siglo XX y en el siglo actual. En estas décadas, numerosas artistas han utilizado en sus performances, acciones, fotografías y otras muchas disciplinas, numerosas armas, desde pistolas a rifles o cuchillos. Cada elección y cada acción conlleva un discurso que nos conduce, inevitablemente, a la reflexión sobre la violencia de género.
Abstract

This article studies the inclusion of weapons in the language of women artists, most of them fully integrated into the currents of feminist art. After a brief synthesis of the representations of armed women throughout history (among which we must necessarily mention the Amazons), we will look at the last decades of the twentieth century and the present century. In these decades, numerous artists have used in their performances, actions, photographs and many other disciplines, numerous weapons, from pistols to rifles or knives. Each choice and every action carries a discourse that inevitably leads us to reflect on gender violence.