Best of
Feminist-Theory

2007

Shotgun Seamstress Zine Collection: Six Zines by & for Black Punks


Osa Atoe - 2007
    It's punk and life through the lens of Osa, a queer woman of color living in Portland, Oregon. It's got a little bit of everything, including a piece on Go-go music in D.C, which is all wrapped up into a story called the "Black Punk Zine That Never Happened". Osa helps us to understand why we shouldn't dis RuPaul, treats us to a Northwest scene report, and lists bands past and present that feature people of color. We'll be the first to acknowledge that unfortunately, punk today attracts few people of color proportionally, but zines like Shotgun Seamstress will certainly aid a change.

WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution


Lisa Gabrielle Mark - 2007
    WACK! documents and illustrates the impact of the feminist revolution on art made between 1965 and 1980, featuring pioneering and influential works by artists who came of age during that period, Chantal Akerman, Lynda Benglis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Valie Export, Mary Heilmann, Sanja Ivekovic, Ana Mendieta, Annette Messager, and others, as well as important works made in those years by artists whose careers were already well established, including Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Lucy Lippard, Alice Neel, and Yoko Ono.The art surveyed in WACK! includes work by more than 120 artists, in all media, from painting and sculpture to photography, film, installation, and video, arranged not by chronology but by theme: Abstraction, "Autophotography," Body as Medium, Family Stories, Gender Performance, Knowledge as Power, Making Art History, and others. WACK!, which accompanies the first international museum exhibition to showcase feminist art from this revolutionary era, contains more than 400 color images. Highlights include the figurative paintings of Joan Semmel; the performance and film collaborations of Sally Potter and Rose English; the untitled film stills of Cindy Sherman; and the large-scale, craft-based sculptures of Magdalena Abakanowicz.Written entries on each artist offer key biographical and descriptive information and accompanying essays by leading critics, art historians, and scholars offer new perspectives on feminist art practice. The topics, including the relationship between American and European feminism, feminism and New York abstraction, and mapping a global feminism, provide a broad social context for the artworks themselves. WACK! is both a definitive visual record and a long-awaited history of one of the most important artistic movements of the twentieth century.Essays by: Cornelia Butler, Judith Russi Kirshner, Catherine Lord, Marsha Meskimmon, Richard Meyer, Helen Molesworth, Peggy Phelan, Nelly Richard, Valerie Smith, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Jenni SorkinArtists include: Marina Abramovic, Chantal Akerman, Lynda Benglis, Dara Birnbaum, Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Lygia Clark, Jay DeFeo, Mary Beth Edelson, Valie Export, Barbara Hammer, Susan Hiller, Joan Jonas, Mary Kelly, Maria Lassnig, Linda Montano, Alice Neel, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O'Grady, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Orlan, Howardena Pindell, Yvonne Rainer, Faith Ringgold, Ketty La Rocca, Ulrike Rosenbach, Martha Rosler, Betye Saar, Miriam Schapiro, Carolee Schneemann, Cindy Sherman, Hannah Wilke

Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times


Jasbir K. Puar - 2007
    Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. She examines how liberal politics incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, through developments including the legal recognition inherent in the overturning of anti-sodomy laws and the proliferation of more mainstream representation. These incorporations have shifted many queers from their construction as figures of death (via the AIDS epidemic) to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity (gay marriage and reproductive kinship). Puar contends, however, that this tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by homonormative ideologies that replicate narrow racial, class, gender, and national ideals. These “homonationalisms” are deployed to distinguish upright “properly hetero,” and now “properly homo,” U.S. patriots from perversely sexualized and racialized terrorist look-a-likes—especially Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs—who are cordoned off for detention and deportation. Puar combines transnational feminist and queer theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, Deleuzian philosophy, and technoscience criticism, and draws from an extraordinary range of sources, including governmental texts, legal decisions, films, television, ethnographic data, queer media, and activist organizing materials and manifestos. Looking at various cultural events and phenomena, she highlights troublesome links between terrorism and sexuality: in feminist and queer responses to the Abu Ghraib photographs, in the triumphal responses to the Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision repealing anti-sodomy laws, in the measures Sikh Americans and South Asian diasporic queers take to avoid being profiled as terrorists, and in what Puar argues is a growing Islamophobia within global queer organizing.

After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art


Eleanor Heartney - 2007
    Today her insightful critique serves as a benchmark against which the progress of women artists may be measured. In this book, four prominent critics and curators describe the impact of women artists on contemporary art since the advent of the feminist movement. Following a comprehensive essay assessing the changes in the situation of women artists, the authors examine in depth the careers of twelve outstanding artists: Marina Abramowicz, Louise Bourgeois, Ellen Gallagher, Ann Hamilton, Jenny Holzer, Elizabeth Murray, Shirin Neshat, Judy Pfaff, Dana Schutz, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, and Nancy Spero. Each artist's accomplishments and her influence on contemporaries including younger male and female artists is explored. A preface by Nochlin and a concluding essay with extensive statistical documentation frame this essential volume.

The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, Volume 1


Sandra M. Gilbert - 2007
    Now, the much-anticipated Third Edition responds to the wealth of writing by women across the globe with the inclusion of 61 new authors (219 in all) whose diverse works span six centuries. A more flexible two-volume format and a versatile new companion reader make the Third Edition an even better teaching tool."As diversity itself has shaped the evolution of feminist criticism, from its early preoccupation with women's shared experiences to its more recent absorption in the complex issues and assumptions informing English-language texts by women writers of diverse geographical, cultural, racial, sexual, religious, and class origins and influences, so diversity has shaped the revisions of this anthology."

Women's Health Movements: A Global Force for Change


Meredeth Turshen - 2007
    This is an introduction to the women's health movements and what is being accomplished by women organizing to achieve better health care around the world.

Women and the Gift Economy: A Radically Different Worldview Is Possible


Genevieve Vaughan - 2007
    Featuring articles by well-known feminist activists and academics, this book points to ways to re-create the connections, which have been severed, between the gift economy, women, and the economies of Indigenous peoples, and to bring forward the gift paradigm as an approach to liberate us from the worldview of the market that is destroying life on the planet. Shifting to a gift paradigm can give us the radically different worldview which will make another, better, world possible.

Theorizing Empowerment: Canadian Perspectives on Black Feminist Thought


Notisha Massaquoi - 2007
    What does Black feminist thought mean to Black Canadian feminists in the Diaspora? What does it means to have a feminist practice which speaks to Black women in Canada? In exploring this question, this anthology collects new ideas and thoughts on the place of Black women's politics in Canada, combining the work of new/upcoming and established names in Black Canadian feminist studies.

Han Kut: Radical Art and Writing by Korean Canadian Women


Korean Canadian Women's Anthology CollectiveJane G. Kim - 2007
    The anthology features a compelling collection of fiction, creative non-fiction, essays, poetry and art by both newly emerging and established Korean Canadian women artists, writers, activists and educators. It addresses stereotypical and static understandings of Asians by intersecting themes of gender, sexuality, family, race, class, diaspora, nationalism and assimilation. A powerful collection of writing and art, Han Kut interrogates the notion of "Asianness" and exposes the complexities, contradictions and conflicts embedded in what it means to be a "Korean woman" within a Canadian context.