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FEMINIST ART IN A PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY Femininity, masculinity and, indeed, queer theory have, for years, been based on the essentialist binary opposites of male and female inherent in modernism. In today’s ‘Postmodernist’ world these gender definitions are increasingly under attack by feminist theory, gay studies and queer theory. Women are confronting issues of gendered oppression, men are confronting issues of sexism and homophobia, everyone is searching for ‘self’. It is my intention in this essay to concentrate on feminist art, in particular, the art of Judy Chicago and Annie Sprinkle. Feminist thinking today is influenced by the theories of postmodernism, in particular, that of the rejection of a social structure based on bi-polar gender stereotypes rooted in biology with a strong leaning towards patriarchy. It must be understood that feminism is not one thing; it’s a catch-all description of a range of issues, theories and behavioural patterns. Feminism is also split into two main camps: The radical/political which claims equal rights with men on the basis that women are equal and can do anything men can do, given the chance, and a kind of spiritual/earth mother approach which claims that women are different from, and better than, men because they are life givers and in touch with the natural. There have always been independent feminists as far back as the 6th century where Sappho wrote lesbian poetry, but the main problem for feminists in art was that the art world was massively dominated by men. Indeed, it must be remembered that for much of the last century the most influential guides for art theorists were; Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, all born in the 19th Century and all with 19th century attitudes towards women. Jacques Lacan once said of women: The place assigned women is one absence, of ‘otherness.’ Lacking the penis, which signifies phallic power in patriarchal society and provides a speaking position for the male child, woman also lacks access to the symbolic order that structures language and meaning. The role of women is to be spoken at rather than to speak.’ With male attitudes like this it was a long, hard climb for women to be accepted as artists, or feminist artists. ‘From its beginnings, feminist art confronted inherent contradictions. Feminists of colour, and lesbian feminists challenged attempts to identify an inclusive “female imagery” or female experience, arguing that such attempts collapsed female identity into a universalised category that was, in reality, heterosexual and white, not to mention middle class.’ It is the intention of the two artists that I have chosen to alter this anomaly and to give women their rightful place in the art world, that is, on equal terms with men.
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