Art and Gender Politics

This book is a glossary, a toolbox for coming to terms with the new modes of interaction between art and politics in Latin America in a period that extended from Pinochet´s coup d´état to the Zapatista uprising -a period hallmarked by brutal repression and the emergence of the neoliberalism, but which also gave rise to a host of creative practices initiated by the human rights´ movements, new forms of urban youth culture brought on by the outbreak of punk and the underground scene, an outburst of sexual dissidence and travestism, and subterranean networks and ties of solidarity that spanned the continent. A vast set of experiences that contributed to the reinvention of political action and fostered the new lifeforms that welled up between terror and fiesta.

El artículo  reconstruye la conformación y circulación del retrato de la heroína brasileña Maria Quitéria en el marco de los procesos de independencia y consolidación nacional. En su narración, se cruzan aspectos vinculados con la caracterización de la retratada como mujer y militar en relación con las tensiones suscitadas en torno a su representación problematizada mediante el concepto de “actos performativos” de Judith Butler.

Hasta la explosión volcánica de la artista Débora Arango (1907-2005) en los años 40, a las mujeres colombianas solo las había mirado un ojo masculino que las concebía a imagen y semejanza de la Virgen María. Incluso la obra de otras artistas mujeres  anteriores a ella o coétaneas,  se plegaba al sistema visual patriarcal. Débora, al contrario, se convierte en sujeto de la mirada y construye el continente inédito del cuerpo femenino. Después de ella, nuevas perspectivas se abren como el erotismo, la etnicidad y la política. Mujeres con órganos sexuales,violentas, mestizas, nocturnas, callejeras, vitales, fuertes, arrojadas físicamente a la historia.

Palabras clave: Artistas mujeres, género, arte político

Nuestro estudio propone un recorrido que muestre la compleja y desaventajada si-tuación del sujeto homosexual en la Cuba del siglo XXI. Como interesante contra-punto, pondremos en valor la importancia de determinadas manifestaciones artís-ticas contemporáneas a la hora de visibilizar la homosexualidad en la Isla fuera del estigma y la desigualdad. Abstract Keywords Cuba; Homosexuality Contemporary Art Our study focuses on the homosexual collective and its disadvantaged situation in revolutionary Cuba. As an interesting counterpoint, we will highlight the important role of Cuban contemporary art in removing sexual prejudices against homo-sexuality.

La presente relatoría tiene como objetivo general sistematizar los discursos sobre las desigualdades de género de que han sido objeto en el teatro las personas involucradas en la dirección teatral, la dramaturgia, el diseño, la gestión cultural, la actuación y la formación, quienes participaron en el simposio internacional «Las hermanas de Shakespeare. Perspectiva de género en el teatro».
Para dar cuenta de los discursos se sistematizarán las principales ideas
trabajadas en las mesas y diálogos durante el simposio, y se incluirá la
participación del público en las discusiones. Como punto de partida es
necesario destacar que los diálogos y las mesas no constaron de ponencias académicas, sino que en la mayoría de los casos se expuso un relato desde la vida cotidiana, el hacer teatral y la subjetividad de quienes presentaron.
Esto le dio una enorme riqueza, en la medida en que emergió una gran diversidad de miradas y percepciones sobre la temática.
Finalmente, se reflexionará sobre los principales aspectos de género
trabajados durante las dos jornadas, la especificidad de las relaciones
de género en el ámbito cultural y la necesidad de generar información
sistemática y científica que ponga el foco en las desigualdades de género en el teatro, con el propósito de develar desigualdades naturalizadas y de orientar la creación de políticas culturales.

This article focuses on environmental work by artists and filmmakers that attempts
to visually address new forms of art, seeing, feeling and sociality that are coming into being in the age of the Anthropocene. In what follows, I bring together issues in ›critical climate change‹ scholarship to examine aspects of feminist and environmentalist art from Chernobyl to Polar landscapes in the work of Swedish artist Lina Selander and US artist Amy Balkin.

The Algerian War of Independence, an eight-year war of decolonization between France and its colonial subjects in Algeria, began on November 1st, 1954. Six weeks later, on December 13, Pablo Picasso began a series of fifteen paintings, two lithographs, and a vast number of drawings inspired by Eugène Delacroix’s two versions of his classic nineteenth-century Orientalist painting, Les Femmes d’Alger dans leur Appartement (The Women of Algiers) [Fig. 1]. Reports of the conflict in Algeria appeared in the French press from its inception and intensified over the next three months while Picasso was working on the series, which he finished on February 14, 1955. The extent to which Picasso’s choice of subject and its timing may have been influenced by the war has been considered by several scholars, including Susan Grace Galassi and Zeynep Çelik. The question appears ultimately unresolvable, but other factors connecting Picasso’s paintings to the Algerian conflict and its aftermath are wor...

2015 Exhibition

Looking Forward, Looking Back

The Looking Forward Looking Back theme developed organically out of a number of beautiful discoveries as we planned and met with community partners over the last year.

The first of these discoveries was the Women’s Kit at the Centre for Women’s Studies in Education (CWSE) at OISE.The Women’s Kit was a box of feminist resources that its curators distributed to secondary and postsecondary institutions in the early 1970s.  In a meeting about a panel partnership with the CWSE, the Women’s Kit was literally pulled out of a closet and placed on a table.

"While we went through the gorgeous pamphlets, slides, records and films out of the box, themes of media representation, beauty standards, economic disparity, and erasure of women’s art emerged from the colourful archives of posters, poetry and recorded conversations between artists like Joyce Wieland and Vera Frenkel.

The contents of this box begged the questions: What has happened within the feminist art movement since the 1970s? What inroads have been made? What victories, if any, have been won? Are we still speaking about the same issues in our work? Are we repeating the same messages, making the same mistakes, saying the same thing? What is different between then and now?

At that table was Frieda Forman, professor, writer and activist, now 77. She talked about organizing the first feminist art conference at OCA in 1973 called Women’s Work. She urged us to go to the archives at OCADU to see if there was any record of the event happening."

La creación de Duchamp de su alter ego femenino, Rrose Sélavy, forma parte de un juego sobre la arbitrariedad del significado de las palabras y de los géneros. Valiéndose de la polisemia de los títulos de sus obras, Duchamp desafía la fijeza de los papeles femenino-masculino y activa lo erótico en una dimensión que va más allá de los estereótipos de género.

Teresa Bermúdez Montes & Mônica Heloane Carvalho de Sant’Anna (eds) (2016). Letras escarlata. Estudos sobre a representación da menstruación. Berlin: Frank & Timme
(iBroLiT – Ibero-Romance Studies in Literature and Translatology/ Studies in Contemporary Literature, vol. VI).
ISBN 978-3-7329-0241-5

El cuerpo femenino ha sido protagonista del arte figurativo de occidente. Ha sido protagonista históricamente como una construcción objetual, en la que las mujeres quedaban determinadas por la mirada de los varones que disponían una identidad controlada, precisa y homogénea. En el siglo XXI, asistimos a un repunte de la presencia masiva en los medios de comunicación de la imagen de la mujer. Se muestra de nuevo el cuerpo femenino como objeto observable, dándole una identidad externa que queda a merced del sujeto dominante y que propone imágenes femeninas hipersexualizadas. Cuando las mujeres se fotografían recrean estas contradicciones, generando inseguridades y situaciones alienantes que rompen la propia identidad. La fotografía saca a la luz las dificultades de las mujeres en situarse frente a si mismas y definir su propia identidad. Hemos preguntado a mujeres de distintas edades y procedencias y las hemos fotografiado pidiéndoles que muestren aquello que quieren exponer de su cue...

Following the turmoil of the French Revolution, a new type of history painting appeared in the Salons of the early Empire—one that turned away from the austere antique subjects of Neoclassicism towards anecdotal scenes taken from Medieval and Renaissance history. The Troubadour Style, as this trend has come to be known, cast a largely nostalgic eye on the pre-revolutionary past and much of this nostalgia was aimed at women. Nearly one third of the troubadour paintings exhibited at the Salon from 1802 to 1814 depicted specific women from French national history or chivalrous themes in which women played a central role. The Revolution had, of course, disrupted traditional notions of femininity: aristocratic women were blamed for all the failings of the Ancien Régime, lower class women left their homes to take part in revolutionary political activism, and all women gained the right to divorce and equal inheritance. Although many of these political gains were dialed back by the Napoleonic Code, women continued to participate in the post-Revolutionary public sphere as writers and artists in unprecedented numbers, fueling a passionate public debate on their proper role in society. This paper will consider several early innovative works by the pioneer troubadour painter Fleury Richard in light of such debates. Richard’s paintings typically reject the Revolutionary discourse on ‘bad queens’ and instead emphasize historical women’s roles as mothers, devoted wives, and grieving widows within compact interior spaces. In this they reflect the Empire’s renewed celebratory discourse on women’s virtues and reinforce the separation of spheres that would the rest of the long nineteenth century. Yet Richard’s works are far from consistent in this. At times, historical figures resisted the constrains of the present and contemporary responses to them reveal anxieties about and contradictions inherent in the ideal, such as maternal domination.

This article focuses on environmental work by artists and filmmakers that attempts to visually address new forms of art, seeing, feeling and sociality that are coming into being in the age of the Anthropocene. In what follows, I bring together issues in ›critical climate change‹ scholarship to examine aspects of feminist and environmentalist art from Chernobyl to Polar landscapes in the work of Swedish artist Lina Selander and US artist Amy Balkin.

This dissertation examines the gender politics of the troubadour style, also known as the genre anecdotique. Following the turmoil of the French Revolution, this new form of history painting turned away from the heroic antique subject matter, monumental proportions, and grand manner of Neoclassicism, in favor of scenes from Medieval and Renaissance history, an intimate scale, and a highly finished illusionism characteristic of seventeenth-century Dutch Masters. With their focus on the private lives and passions of historical figures and their relationship to certain historiographic traditions that favored women, I argue that troubadour style paintings were sites of a feminine historical consciousness within the wider historicism of the post- revolutionary period.

At the same time, these paintings’ precisely rendered archaeological details, carefully observed effects of light, and sentimental themes were often said to “transport” viewers into the past. Expanding on Stephen Bann’s notion of Romanticism’s “desire to live the past,” I further argue that the material and narrative qualities of these pictures encouraged viewers, especially women, to fashion their own identities historically. Operating within a dynamic cross-pollinating cultural arena, this historical self-fashioning was not limited to a single medium or practice. Thus, each of my three chapters examines how an individual collector—Empress Joséphine, Queen Hortense, and the Duchesse de Raguse—used the troubadour style and another mode of historical self-fashioning—portraiture, amateur art, and architectural space—to negotiate, manipulate, and subvert contemporary gender conventions for her own personal and political advantage.