To See the Entire Forum on the M/E/A/N/I/N/G website, go to: http://writing.upenn.edu/pepc/meaning/04/forum.html

Here below, excerpts from the introduction to the Forum:

Feminist Art: A Reassessment

Introduction

by Susan Bee and Mira Schor

The feminist movement in America of the late 1960s and early 1970s seems to be a particular contentious and problematic part of our history, even among women. It is forgotten or demonized, and yet there are constant efforts to memorialize, revitalize and continue its legacy within new generations of women…

…there are a number of undercurrents to current efforts to regenerate feminist consideration of art... Many of these are familiar tensions within feminism and the feminist art movement since its early days: tensions over racial representation and the perception of the predominance of heteronormative tendencies, generational tensions and rifts over the social meaning of the word feminism itself: at the MoMA conference one younger woman in the audience described identification with the word feminism as the “kiss of death.” There seems to be a continued disconnect between the current efforts at retrospection, historical reiteration, and recuperation, and the younger generation of women artists, who the older, “70s-era” generation wishes to inspire and also be recognized and honored by…

There is the frustrating reality that once the feminist canon of 70s feminist art was in place, it has been seemingly as fixed as the first (male) art historical canon had been. The efforts to enrich the established history by inserting many artists working inventively and with a feminist agenda of some kind in those years has been frustrated by the general atmosphere of limited commodification of the art market as a whole. The slice of the market and art historical canon pie is ever smaller while the price paid for being a feminist artist has often been substantial, sometimes leading to bitterness. These emotional undercurrents take place against a background of general cultural conservatism and the dominance of market values over social critique and nonconformist collaborative political activism...