I had a great tutorial today with Linden, giving me further pointers for my essay.
But the important piece of information was about a conversation at a conference that Linden had with Jill Journeaux (our external verifier) who is Professor of ... at Coventry University. Jill's field is the female, the domestic, textile and stitch. Jill has negotiated funding for 3 bursaries for PhD students at Coventry in this field! Wow! What an opportunity! Linden said Jill told her it was not yet advertised.
I have checked the Coventry uni website, and true to form, there is nothing listed there yet. But I will be watching this space ... like a hawk!
Thursday, 30 March 2017
Saturday, 25 March 2017
Theory class left me hacked off.
Our class is at the stage where we are identifying specific fields of interest, forming a question, and identifying some pertinent quotations. When it was my turn, I spoke about my latest reading where I had identified the critical difference between 'value' as a noun, and 'valuing' as a verb. I had just discovered some writing that said 'valuing' was a field in social psychology where there was a gap in the literature. And this is what I am interested - valuing women - by their representation in art.
There was a bit of a discussion where I was advised to look at similar phenomenon in other ares of life, and the inertia of tradition (to value women). To look at the group psychological dimension, social systems and social psychology.
Then Joseph said there were cases where
"Everyone will 'agree' a subject is a 'good idea', but no-one takes action
... because actually it's not a good idea, .... because they don't agree with it."
I was hacked off with this, and gave him one of my withering looks. And noted his comment in my book. And went silent. And resolved to think about how to analyse his comment. And use it to illustrate a point.
Pamela Creedon (Women in Mass Communication, 1993, p3-23) says resistance to the female voice takes 3 forms :
1. Annihilation (ignoring, stereotyping, demeaning)
2. Accommodating (acknowledging, then not using the female voice to advance meaning or understanding)
3. Appropriation (upcoming theories claimed by male theorists when valid sources can be found in feminist literature).
So Joseph's comment to me, fits exactly with Accommodation. From his patriarchal perspective he says 'everyone agrees' and 'no-one takes action' about my feminist subject, and then implies my idea about Valuing Women artworks is not good, precluding even the opportunity to advance meaning or understanding because of his pre-conceived concepts of traditional dominant values. And he has done it by making a general comment about ideas and actions, but in the context of my subject, which I find to be quite snide and undermining.
I think I will use this example in my essay to illustrate how patriarchy operates. He is one of the markers for the essay. I don't care if he marks it harshly on these grounds. It is my work, and I am learning hugely about my position and how I see the world.
I was also advised to:
Find your message in other people's work
Find where your message is absent in other people's work.
Use the phrase "This is interesting because ... " in relation to the above.
Regarding my essay, I have identified 43 quotes, and put them on index cards. Over the next week, I will sort by subject, and put into an order, that makes sense to start writing an essay.
By 6 April, class needs to bring to class: (email to Joseph by 3 April)
Title
Quote
Image
100 words
We have been set to work in pairs to prepare this. Me and Vlad; Na'ama and Gareth; Simal and Margaret; Lieta and Nora.
On 4 May we get tutorials.
There was a bit of a discussion where I was advised to look at similar phenomenon in other ares of life, and the inertia of tradition (to value women). To look at the group psychological dimension, social systems and social psychology.
Then Joseph said there were cases where
"Everyone will 'agree' a subject is a 'good idea', but no-one takes action
... because actually it's not a good idea, .... because they don't agree with it."
I was hacked off with this, and gave him one of my withering looks. And noted his comment in my book. And went silent. And resolved to think about how to analyse his comment. And use it to illustrate a point.
Pamela Creedon (Women in Mass Communication, 1993, p3-23) says resistance to the female voice takes 3 forms :
1. Annihilation (ignoring, stereotyping, demeaning)
2. Accommodating (acknowledging, then not using the female voice to advance meaning or understanding)
3. Appropriation (upcoming theories claimed by male theorists when valid sources can be found in feminist literature).
So Joseph's comment to me, fits exactly with Accommodation. From his patriarchal perspective he says 'everyone agrees' and 'no-one takes action' about my feminist subject, and then implies my idea about Valuing Women artworks is not good, precluding even the opportunity to advance meaning or understanding because of his pre-conceived concepts of traditional dominant values. And he has done it by making a general comment about ideas and actions, but in the context of my subject, which I find to be quite snide and undermining.
I think I will use this example in my essay to illustrate how patriarchy operates. He is one of the markers for the essay. I don't care if he marks it harshly on these grounds. It is my work, and I am learning hugely about my position and how I see the world.
I was also advised to:
Find your message in other people's work
Find where your message is absent in other people's work.
Use the phrase "This is interesting because ... " in relation to the above.
Regarding my essay, I have identified 43 quotes, and put them on index cards. Over the next week, I will sort by subject, and put into an order, that makes sense to start writing an essay.
By 6 April, class needs to bring to class: (email to Joseph by 3 April)
Title
Quote
Image
100 words
We have been set to work in pairs to prepare this. Me and Vlad; Na'ama and Gareth; Simal and Margaret; Lieta and Nora.
On 4 May we get tutorials.
Tuesday, 21 March 2017
Valuing
Joshua Knobe and Erica Roedder. The Ordinary Concept of Valuing. Philosophical Issues 19 (2009): 131-47. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27749927.
Ordinary attributes of valuing actually involve normative judgements: judgements about whether certain actions truly are good or bad. Valuing as a concept is identified by a cluster of psychological and attitudinal features, that:
belief that something is good
motivated to promote something as good
guilt when individual files to promote something, when possible
and
something is truly good.
Ordinary attributes of valuing actually involve normative judgements: judgements about whether certain actions truly are good or bad. Valuing as a concept is identified by a cluster of psychological and attitudinal features, that:
belief that something is good
motivated to promote something as good
guilt when individual files to promote something, when possible
and
something is truly good.
"Valuing". - a key point
Values: Reviving a Dormant Concept. Steven Hilton and Jane Allen Piliavin, University of North Carolina, Annual Review of Sociology 2004.
Value based behaviour suggests more cognitive control over one's actions
Traits are enduring dispositions, both positive and negative.
Values are enduring goals, primarily positive.
People refer to values when justifying behaviour as legitimate. Values serve as standards for judging others' (and own) behaviour. (Roccas S, Sagive, LSSH, Knife A, 22002. The five big personality factors and personal values. Pers Soc Psych Bull 28: 879-801)
Values are a group level phenomenon requiring shared agreement ... which are measured as an individual level construct. People acting in accordance with values do not feel pushed as they do when acting under normative pressure.
Values give meaning to action "enduring beliefs that a specific mode of conduct is personally or socially preferable to an opposite mode of conduct". Rokeach M 1973, The Nature of Human Values, NY, Free Press.
Contemporary psychology treats value as a noun. Less attention is paid to valuing as a process. (valuing as a verb). key finding. explore
Look up sociological pragmatist theory.
Williams 1979. "Values are cognitive structures that provide information that gets coupled to emotion and leads to action"
Lydon JE and Zanna MP 1990. Values seem to be related to the commitment individuals maintain in the face of adversity. Commitment in the face of adversity is a value affirmation approach. Journal of Pers Soc Psychol 58: 1040-47
Thursday, 16 March 2017
Helene Cixous - The Body and The Text
Speaking beyond Patriarchy - Shirley Foster - p66-7.
Helene Cixous wrote about the gender binary, where what was defined as female was:
Female
Negative
Inactive
Passive, conceiving, supporting , containing
Conceptual scheme that privileges the male.
Women are deemed to be non-social, non-political, non-human. Half of the living structure. Fate as loss, burial, and relegation thrown on them by patriarchy. Woman as nobody, reduced to other.
Women linguistically marginalised. Need to create a language for woman - somewhere other than silence, the place reserved for her in and through the symbolic.
Xaviere Gauthier - a woman's voice is heard through the blanks, gaps, spaces, silences and fragmentation.
Helene Cixous wrote about the gender binary, where what was defined as female was:
Female
Negative
Inactive
Passive, conceiving, supporting , containing
Conceptual scheme that privileges the male.
Women are deemed to be non-social, non-political, non-human. Half of the living structure. Fate as loss, burial, and relegation thrown on them by patriarchy. Woman as nobody, reduced to other.
Women linguistically marginalised. Need to create a language for woman - somewhere other than silence, the place reserved for her in and through the symbolic.
Xaviere Gauthier - a woman's voice is heard through the blanks, gaps, spaces, silences and fragmentation.
Chris Barker - Cultural Studies Theory and Practice.
Power pervades every social relationship; the glue that holds the social together and a coercive force which subordinates one set of people to another; processes that generate and enable any form of social action, relationship or order. Power constrains and enables. p10
Foucault: the regulated production of knowledge through language which gives meaning to material objects and social practices. Discourse regulates what can be said under determinate social and cultural conditions but also who can speak, when and where. Foucault conceives of the subject as radically historicised i.e. persons are wholly and only the product of history. p10
Values: p294
Men
Naturally domineering
Heirarchically oriented
Power hungry
Spatial, maths and motor skills
Women
Nurturing
Childrearing
Domestic
Verbal, co-operative
Organised.
Men less able to work in right and left brain concurrently. Men have left brain, task focus preference, which correlates with less integration and cross referencing which is what right brain does. Women are more able to multi-task across both sides of the brain. Women connect the emotional and reasoning aspect of the mind.
Carol Gilligan says Men operate with an Ethics of Justice (using abstract thinking), whereas women operate with an Ethics of Care (context specific arguments).
Western cultural norms validated men's understanding of morality and ethics at the expense of women's which has been cast as deficient.
Foucault: the regulated production of knowledge through language which gives meaning to material objects and social practices. Discourse regulates what can be said under determinate social and cultural conditions but also who can speak, when and where. Foucault conceives of the subject as radically historicised i.e. persons are wholly and only the product of history. p10
Values: p294
Men
Naturally domineering
Heirarchically oriented
Power hungry
Spatial, maths and motor skills
Women
Nurturing
Childrearing
Domestic
Verbal, co-operative
Organised.
Men less able to work in right and left brain concurrently. Men have left brain, task focus preference, which correlates with less integration and cross referencing which is what right brain does. Women are more able to multi-task across both sides of the brain. Women connect the emotional and reasoning aspect of the mind.
Carol Gilligan says Men operate with an Ethics of Justice (using abstract thinking), whereas women operate with an Ethics of Care (context specific arguments).
Western cultural norms validated men's understanding of morality and ethics at the expense of women's which has been cast as deficient.
Struggling with my Theory Essay.
I feel as if I am stumbling in treacle. I don't seem to be finding anything in my reading that fits with what I want to say.
I've had another tute with Linden but don't feel any further forward. I'm getting plenty of input, but I'm not making progress. I'm getting so wound up about it, I could absolutely sit and weep.
Read Mark Johnson - 'moral imagination'. Everything is embedded in language. Q: how does this impact on language - totally.
What are the stories that enable women to be represented less/worse than men?
Attitudes of senior managers.
Empirical evidence - why?
Analysis of women and values in art.
Irigaray - spoke about the gendered imaginary - i.e. not about sex.
Find one aspect of female imaginary, and one of male imaginary.
Caring - or we don't want to say this. Target driven - falsification of stats.
Feminine not allowed to speak - Spivak
Ongoing project
Focus
'values'
Gender - differences - male/female. Targeted to one sex. Radio 4 Management styles and how senior managers (men) talk differently to M and W.
Collect pertinent quotations - think of them to be strung together like beads on a necklace.
I've had another tute with Linden but don't feel any further forward. I'm getting plenty of input, but I'm not making progress. I'm getting so wound up about it, I could absolutely sit and weep.
Read Mark Johnson - 'moral imagination'. Everything is embedded in language. Q: how does this impact on language - totally.
What are the stories that enable women to be represented less/worse than men?
Attitudes of senior managers.
Empirical evidence - why?
Analysis of women and values in art.
Irigaray - spoke about the gendered imaginary - i.e. not about sex.
Find one aspect of female imaginary, and one of male imaginary.
Caring - or we don't want to say this. Target driven - falsification of stats.
Feminine not allowed to speak - Spivak
Ongoing project
Focus
'values'
Gender - differences - male/female. Targeted to one sex. Radio 4 Management styles and how senior managers (men) talk differently to M and W.
Collect pertinent quotations - think of them to be strung together like beads on a necklace.
Monday, 13 March 2017
Theory essay - I think I have found my conclusion!
I've been thinking about under-representation of women in galleries. I went to NPG for a talk the other day, when the speaker said the NPG had not bought any more female self portraits since she ran an exhibition about 25 years ago, and they are only funded 30% by Government, and 70% by their own efforts. Someone else at another conference said to forget chronology to get women represented - focus on now. Another fact that I am aware of, is that the NPG Collections policy says they are seeking to increase their depiction of under represented groups - women, ethnic minorities etc, and to increase their non-traditional media. Yet the Annual Portrait Awards only accept oils and other conservative media.
So how about a new portrait competition - specifically excluding the media of the Annual Portrait Awards, inviting artists to create portraits of people who are "significant to the life of Britain" or however the NPG policy phrases it. And the artist statement has to explain how the person an under-represented group and why they are significant to life in Britain today.
Now I just need to find the theories to back up the conclusion I want to draw!
So how about a new portrait competition - specifically excluding the media of the Annual Portrait Awards, inviting artists to create portraits of people who are "significant to the life of Britain" or however the NPG policy phrases it. And the artist statement has to explain how the person an under-represented group and why they are significant to life in Britain today.
Now I just need to find the theories to back up the conclusion I want to draw!
Friday, 10 March 2017
NPG Mirror, Mirror, Self Portraits by Women. Liz Rideal and Marsha Meskimmon
Liz Rideal opened by saying the self portraits in any collection were absolutely fascinating. They were about self publicity, developing the artist's own competence, style and branding. She ran an exhibition about 20 years ago at NPG about women's self portraits, and coaxed the NPG to increase the number of women portraits for this event, but since then, no more have been purchased!!! She was interested in the psychological penetration - essence of the person - deemed to be contentious - who they are and what they do. (This is exactly what I am trying to do with my SP).
Of the 1214 self portraits in the NPG collection, only 232 are female. (And of these 232, 49 are by Ottoline Morrell (socialite/photographer) and 42 by Ida Khan!). This leaves 141 female out of 1214!
Images shown were:
Mary Beale, 1665
Angelica Kauffman 1770
Ann Mary Newton1863
Mimi (Elizabeth, Lady) Butler 1869
Beu Martin 1899
Gwen John 1900
Edna Clarke Hall
Jessica Dismore 1929
Sylvia Pankhurst
Olive Edis 1910
Laura Knight 1910 - Pertinence of Red - refers to Van Dyke
Bess Norris 1900-10
Ethel Walker 1925
Eileen Agar 1927
Paule Vesaley
Painting self portraits is done when artists are trying to define self. Once achieved once, the artist may give up portraiture.
Big and Little Zink(risen)
Dorothy Wilding
Ithell Colquhoun
Oriel Ross 1928
Susie Cooper 1933
Madame Yovonde 1925 and 40
Lee Miller 1903 and 43
Gluck1942
Winifred Nicholson 1943
Gertrude Hermes 1949
Hepworth 1950
Ida Khan
Maggie Hambling
Maureen Paley
Liz Rideal
Helen Chadwick 1986
Jo Spence 1990
Ishbel Myerscough and Chantal Joffe 1991
Nancy Honey
Sarah Lucas 1997
Sam Taylor Wood
Tracey Emin
Celia Paul
Mary McCartney
Grace Law
Jane and Louise Wilson
Jackie and Joan Collings.
Self portraits are not always a the top of artists' came. Ambiguous.
Marsha Meskimmon - The Art of Reflection - book.
Women - over represented as objects, under-represented as self portraits (subjects). But the questions about this are still pertinent.
Who makes the images in a selfie/image saturated world? Who circulates them. How are they used and seen? The power of the object/subject.
Autographic turn - Vivian Sobshack Is Any Body Home? Live through, or In the body?
Mirror and present - How to articulate the experience of living in the body.
Auto-bio-graphical
Self - life - imagery/narrator
Auto- graphic Subject and Self.
Subject and object - entwined. This is how to reclaim the nude.
How to articulate the self as a subject Not sure who I am. This might tell me.
Joan Semmel - 1974 2nd wave feminism. Avoid the mirror. Look down at self. Self as subject and object.
Claude Cahun. Play out work of other women in their work.
Susan Hauptman 2000 Prima Donna Bitch.
How does self energy Mutuality of subject/object. As mask as much as a person.
Is self about one or in relation to other.
Author/artist collaborates with mirror. Psychology - mirror as other.
Article - Female Old Masters get their Day, The Sun, Telaf Maastricht - all about money.
Of the 1214 self portraits in the NPG collection, only 232 are female. (And of these 232, 49 are by Ottoline Morrell (socialite/photographer) and 42 by Ida Khan!). This leaves 141 female out of 1214!
Images shown were:
Mary Beale, 1665
Angelica Kauffman 1770
Ann Mary Newton1863
Mimi (Elizabeth, Lady) Butler 1869
Beu Martin 1899
Gwen John 1900
Edna Clarke Hall
Jessica Dismore 1929
Sylvia Pankhurst
Olive Edis 1910
Laura Knight 1910 - Pertinence of Red - refers to Van Dyke
Bess Norris 1900-10
Ethel Walker 1925
Eileen Agar 1927
Paule Vesaley
Painting self portraits is done when artists are trying to define self. Once achieved once, the artist may give up portraiture.
Big and Little Zink(risen)
Dorothy Wilding
Ithell Colquhoun
Oriel Ross 1928
Susie Cooper 1933
Madame Yovonde 1925 and 40
Lee Miller 1903 and 43
Gluck1942
Winifred Nicholson 1943
Gertrude Hermes 1949
Hepworth 1950
Ida Khan
Maggie Hambling
Maureen Paley
Liz Rideal
Helen Chadwick 1986
Jo Spence 1990
Ishbel Myerscough and Chantal Joffe 1991
Nancy Honey
Sarah Lucas 1997
Sam Taylor Wood
Tracey Emin
Celia Paul
Mary McCartney
Grace Law
Jane and Louise Wilson
Jackie and Joan Collings.
Self portraits are not always a the top of artists' came. Ambiguous.
Marsha Meskimmon - The Art of Reflection - book.
Women - over represented as objects, under-represented as self portraits (subjects). But the questions about this are still pertinent.
Who makes the images in a selfie/image saturated world? Who circulates them. How are they used and seen? The power of the object/subject.
Autographic turn - Vivian Sobshack Is Any Body Home? Live through, or In the body?
Mirror and present - How to articulate the experience of living in the body.
Auto-bio-graphical
Self - life - imagery/narrator
Auto- graphic Subject and Self.
Subject and object - entwined. This is how to reclaim the nude.
How to articulate the self as a subject Not sure who I am. This might tell me.
Joan Semmel - 1974 2nd wave feminism. Avoid the mirror. Look down at self. Self as subject and object.
Claude Cahun. Play out work of other women in their work.
Susan Hauptman 2000 Prima Donna Bitch.
How does self energy Mutuality of subject/object. As mask as much as a person.
Is self about one or in relation to other.
Author/artist collaborates with mirror. Psychology - mirror as other.
Article - Female Old Masters get their Day, The Sun, Telaf Maastricht - all about money.
Tuesday, 7 March 2017
Collecting Art by Women symposium, Whitechapel Gallery, 4/3/17
Camille Morineau, AWARE (Archives of Women Artists Research and Exhibitions) spoke about the need to disrupt the canon of male oriented art history. Good works starting to be done e.g. Tate Room that juxtaposes Warhol and Guerrilla Girls. There is a role for feminism in collecting (i.e. gathering and giving meaning to) art, and collecting information.
Curators at museums inherit a collection and either have to make the best of it, or bluff. We now need to reconstruct history for women as the hand of cards have changed. Women now need to be represented.
CM put on an exhibition of Garbo Schor - contacted her to buy 1970s work for a retrospective. Her work had never fitted an 'art category' therefore no demand and when she was selling to CM, her prices were too low. CM created a specific category Feminist Avant Garde. In 1970s Male gallery owners were dismissive of doing solo shows for women - e.g. comment to Margaret Harrison (of Homeworkers fame) "Why should you have a show? You're married anyway!"
Iwona Blazwick, Director Whitechapel Gallery
Importance of permanent collections and our (women's) work in them. Feminist forms were difficult to collect - excluded from painting and sculpture for many years, so v little available to collect. However in 1970s when Avant Garde started to use photography and performance -the lens and film became important to feminists. Feminists started to intervene in an institution and a collection. Whitechapel uses guest collections which enables access to worldwide collections.
IB invited Cornelia Parker to use the Government Art Collection - Tudor to modern times. Exhibited at Whitechapel 2011. Richard of York Gave Battle In Vain. Portraits from all ages ranged round room, so significant people faced each other, and colours moved around the rainbow, around the room. There were staged hierarchies of power within it.
Curating is a performance. Now they are commissioning to collect. Many missing histories. Feminism used to be for a bourgeoise elite. Bluestockings -v- trade union movement. Now Whitechapel realises they need to use social media for young women in the area.
When Guerrilla Girls were using the Twitter feed, at the start of their exhibition (Nov 2016) they achieved 200,000 retweets. Second in the world, after Donald Trump!!
What gets shown at a gallery, depends on who is directing the museum. Whitechapel publications - art history will show 50/50 men/women. Once this decision is made, editors will rise always rise to the challenge. This is a really bold move. This is the first time I have heard of a Museum clearly giving an equal target - previously large organisations have fiercely resisted quotas. Key finding.
Also, let people take photos. They will anyway. View it as free publicity, with the benefit that it leads to deeper research.
Susan Fisher Sterling. National Museum of Women in Art. USA
3/4 of handprints in cave art are made by women. Shift in cultural thinking. Joint or separate museums for gender Must we choose? Do both. 19-25% of USA solo exhibitions are female.
Get away from chronology - this reduces the representation of women and ethnic minorities. Women need to drive this discourse.
Anne Gallagher, Tate.
Tate has 4 sites, 1 collection. Running costs are 30% Government funding, 70% self funded. What they show/collect complements other galleries in UK. Currently has a European/west european/US bias. Tring to make international. Bring in international, and more diverse media - photography, film and video. British collection has few women. In British Museums, Whitechapel and Camden Arts Centre show women more than any other museum. Tate to prioritise women. First female gift received from Janet Wolfson the Botton. They aim to get women artists from all periods. Currently collecting the repeatedly overlooked.
Look at Paul Mellon Still Invisible.
Curators at museums inherit a collection and either have to make the best of it, or bluff. We now need to reconstruct history for women as the hand of cards have changed. Women now need to be represented.
CM put on an exhibition of Garbo Schor - contacted her to buy 1970s work for a retrospective. Her work had never fitted an 'art category' therefore no demand and when she was selling to CM, her prices were too low. CM created a specific category Feminist Avant Garde. In 1970s Male gallery owners were dismissive of doing solo shows for women - e.g. comment to Margaret Harrison (of Homeworkers fame) "Why should you have a show? You're married anyway!"
Iwona Blazwick, Director Whitechapel Gallery
Importance of permanent collections and our (women's) work in them. Feminist forms were difficult to collect - excluded from painting and sculpture for many years, so v little available to collect. However in 1970s when Avant Garde started to use photography and performance -the lens and film became important to feminists. Feminists started to intervene in an institution and a collection. Whitechapel uses guest collections which enables access to worldwide collections.
IB invited Cornelia Parker to use the Government Art Collection - Tudor to modern times. Exhibited at Whitechapel 2011. Richard of York Gave Battle In Vain. Portraits from all ages ranged round room, so significant people faced each other, and colours moved around the rainbow, around the room. There were staged hierarchies of power within it.
Curating is a performance. Now they are commissioning to collect. Many missing histories. Feminism used to be for a bourgeoise elite. Bluestockings -v- trade union movement. Now Whitechapel realises they need to use social media for young women in the area.
When Guerrilla Girls were using the Twitter feed, at the start of their exhibition (Nov 2016) they achieved 200,000 retweets. Second in the world, after Donald Trump!!
What gets shown at a gallery, depends on who is directing the museum. Whitechapel publications - art history will show 50/50 men/women. Once this decision is made, editors will rise always rise to the challenge. This is a really bold move. This is the first time I have heard of a Museum clearly giving an equal target - previously large organisations have fiercely resisted quotas. Key finding.
Also, let people take photos. They will anyway. View it as free publicity, with the benefit that it leads to deeper research.
Susan Fisher Sterling. National Museum of Women in Art. USA
3/4 of handprints in cave art are made by women. Shift in cultural thinking. Joint or separate museums for gender Must we choose? Do both. 19-25% of USA solo exhibitions are female.
Get away from chronology - this reduces the representation of women and ethnic minorities. Women need to drive this discourse.
Anne Gallagher, Tate.
Tate has 4 sites, 1 collection. Running costs are 30% Government funding, 70% self funded. What they show/collect complements other galleries in UK. Currently has a European/west european/US bias. Tring to make international. Bring in international, and more diverse media - photography, film and video. British collection has few women. In British Museums, Whitechapel and Camden Arts Centre show women more than any other museum. Tate to prioritise women. First female gift received from Janet Wolfson the Botton. They aim to get women artists from all periods. Currently collecting the repeatedly overlooked.
Look at Paul Mellon Still Invisible.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory and Psychoanalytic Discourse
All direct quotes. In Feminism/Postmodernism ed Linda Nicholson.
We refer not only to women as a social category - as a felt sense of self, a subjective identity. Women's … historical situation … requires a common identity … in their embodied resistance to abstract and objectifying modes of thought and experience. … What… characterises the world of women (is that it) is marginalised, distorted, or negated within various masculinist practices. Is there… a set of values … that can be associated with women as a group. When the category represents a set of values it becomes normative in character, and exclusionary in principle. This excludes various women. The category reflects the restricted location of its theoreticians,… and fails to recognise intersection…. This leads to… feminists … either redefining and expanding the category of women … or challenging the place of the category as part of a feminist normative discourse. … Gayatri Spivak has argued for … operational essentialism, … women as a universal in order to advance a feminist political programme … for strategic purposes.
Is there an alterative … for feminist theory that does not require the rendering visible of a female subject who fails to represent …. the array of embodied beings culturally positioned as women? … Psychoanalysis is… a patriarchal culture as a trans historical and cross cultural force. It conforms to the feminist demand for a theory which can explain women's subordination across specific cultures and different historical movements. … The paternal law is a masculine prerogative within the terms of culture. Luce Irigaray maintains .. the autonomous subject is a masculine cultural prerogative from which women have been excluded. The subject is always already masculine, that it bespeaks a refusal of dependency required of male acculturation, and that 'autonomy' is founded on repression of its early … helplessness … - a repudiation of the feminine. The construct of the subject that necessitates relations of hierarchy, exclusion and domination. There is no subject without an Other.
Carol Gilligan and others have called for a reintegration of conventional feminine virtues, such as care and relational attitude, a reintegration of the human personality. The integration of nurturance and dependency into the masculine sphere and the … assimilation of autonomy in the the feminine sphere suggests a normative model of a unified self which tends toward the androgynous solution.
The failure to historicise the account of … sexual difference institutes that difference as the reified foundation of al intelligible culture, with the result that the paternal law becomes the invariant condition of intelligibility, and the variety of contestations, not only can never undo that law but … required the abiding efficacy of that law in order to maintain any meaning at all.
Standards of narrative coherence must be radically revised …. in order for gender coherence to be understood as the regulatory fiction it is.
We refer not only to women as a social category - as a felt sense of self, a subjective identity. Women's … historical situation … requires a common identity … in their embodied resistance to abstract and objectifying modes of thought and experience. … What… characterises the world of women (is that it) is marginalised, distorted, or negated within various masculinist practices. Is there… a set of values … that can be associated with women as a group. When the category represents a set of values it becomes normative in character, and exclusionary in principle. This excludes various women. The category reflects the restricted location of its theoreticians,… and fails to recognise intersection…. This leads to… feminists … either redefining and expanding the category of women … or challenging the place of the category as part of a feminist normative discourse. … Gayatri Spivak has argued for … operational essentialism, … women as a universal in order to advance a feminist political programme … for strategic purposes.
Is there an alterative … for feminist theory that does not require the rendering visible of a female subject who fails to represent …. the array of embodied beings culturally positioned as women? … Psychoanalysis is… a patriarchal culture as a trans historical and cross cultural force. It conforms to the feminist demand for a theory which can explain women's subordination across specific cultures and different historical movements. … The paternal law is a masculine prerogative within the terms of culture. Luce Irigaray maintains .. the autonomous subject is a masculine cultural prerogative from which women have been excluded. The subject is always already masculine, that it bespeaks a refusal of dependency required of male acculturation, and that 'autonomy' is founded on repression of its early … helplessness … - a repudiation of the feminine. The construct of the subject that necessitates relations of hierarchy, exclusion and domination. There is no subject without an Other.
Carol Gilligan and others have called for a reintegration of conventional feminine virtues, such as care and relational attitude, a reintegration of the human personality. The integration of nurturance and dependency into the masculine sphere and the … assimilation of autonomy in the the feminine sphere suggests a normative model of a unified self which tends toward the androgynous solution.
The failure to historicise the account of … sexual difference institutes that difference as the reified foundation of al intelligible culture, with the result that the paternal law becomes the invariant condition of intelligibility, and the variety of contestations, not only can never undo that law but … required the abiding efficacy of that law in order to maintain any meaning at all.
Standards of narrative coherence must be radically revised …. in order for gender coherence to be understood as the regulatory fiction it is.
Monday, 6 March 2017
Tute with Linden
I'm starting to feel the pressure now.
Preparation for Theory Essay.
Identify : Book List
Title of Essay
Key Themes.
Gender: Cognitive Science: Gender difference
Compare to Helen Cixous (theorist) and Guerrilla Girls (artists)
Ask Linden for paper of women and making
Johnson Laird
Debate gender difference and effect on valuing the overlooked and under-rated.
Perspective - why do people need to be undervalued (by the onlooker?)
Need to understand the male view. A vehicle to understand their perspective
Look at male studies on value. Negotiation on value.
Power - look at Foucault.
Luce Irigarary - male and female gendered imaginary. Look at Margaret Whitfield.
…………..
Research:
3 key issues. Maybe questions
10 books.
Create a 1 page synopsis
By 16 March lunchtime.
Email synopsis to Linden beforehand.
……….
Look up Girl as mere thing - Carol Duncan
Fear/aggression/power - male imaginary
Characteristics of women as equal
Men - achievement values
Women - in male imaginary.
Preparation for Theory Essay.
Identify : Book List
Title of Essay
Key Themes.
Gender: Cognitive Science: Gender difference
Compare to Helen Cixous (theorist) and Guerrilla Girls (artists)
Ask Linden for paper of women and making
Johnson Laird
Debate gender difference and effect on valuing the overlooked and under-rated.
Perspective - why do people need to be undervalued (by the onlooker?)
Need to understand the male view. A vehicle to understand their perspective
Look at male studies on value. Negotiation on value.
Power - look at Foucault.
Luce Irigarary - male and female gendered imaginary. Look at Margaret Whitfield.
…………..
Research:
3 key issues. Maybe questions
10 books.
Create a 1 page synopsis
By 16 March lunchtime.
Email synopsis to Linden beforehand.
……….
Look up Girl as mere thing - Carol Duncan
Fear/aggression/power - male imaginary
Characteristics of women as equal
Men - achievement values
Women - in male imaginary.
Friday, 3 March 2017
Susan Bordo, The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity
Once again, all direct quotes.
Bourdieu and Foucault argue the body is a practical, direct locus of social control. Banally, through table manners and toilet habits, … culture is 'made body', … converted into automatic, habitual activity. Foucault reminds of the primacy of practice over belief. Not via ideology, but through the organisation and regulation of the time, space and movements of our daily lives. For women… are spending more time on the management and discipline of our bodies than we have in a long, long time. …In fashion - female bodies become docile bodies … focussed on self-modification. Through these disciplines we … memorise … the feel and conviction of lack, of insufficiency, of never being good enough.
The discipline and normalisation of the female body has to be acknowledged as an amazingly durable and flexible strategy of social control. … Contemporary preoccupation with appearance affects women far more than men.
Foucault says we must first abandon the idea of power as something possessed by one group and levelled against another … but think of the network of practices, institutions and technologies that sustain positions of dominance and subordination in a particular domain.
We need an analytics … to describe a power whose central mechanisms are … constitutive, a power bent on generating forces, making them grow and ordering them. Particularly in the realm of femininity, where so much depends on the seemingly willing acceptance of various norms and practices, we need an analysis of power from below. Of the mechanisms that shape and proliferate desire, generate and focus our energies, construct our conceptions or normalcy and deviance.
We need a discourse… that insists on … objective analysis of power relations, which will allow us to confront the mechanisms by which the subject becomes enmeshed …. with forces that sustain her own oppression. … Our culture still widely advertises domestic conceptions of femininity, ideological moorings that cast woman as chief emotional and physical nurturer. The rules for this construction of femininity require that women learn to feed others, not the self, and to construe any desires for self-nurturance as greedy and excessive. [This type of femininity] develops a totally other-oriented emotional economy. … That female hunger - for public power, for independence, for sexual gratification - be contained and the public space that women b allowed to take up, be circumscribed.
Young women today .. are taught traditionally 'feminine' virtues, … that the professional arena is open to them, they must also learn to embody the 'masculine' language and values of that arena. - self conrol, determination, cool, emotional discipline, mastery etc. Female bodies now take on their slender spare shape, and the currently fashionable men's wear look. ... The new Macho Woman - the young hero falls in love with the heroine - "she has all the best things I like in girls, and all the best things I like in guys - she's tough and cool, but warm and alluring. … The result is a parody. In our image bedazzled culture, we find it increasingly difficult to discriminate between parodies and possibilities for the self.
In the late 60s/70s the objectification of the female body was a serious political issue. All the cultural paraphernalia of femininity, of learning to please visually and sexually, … were seen as crucial in maintaining gender domination. (By whom?) … Feminist study of cultural representations of the female body has flourished … but, … divorced from consideration of their relation to the practical lives of bodies, can obscure and mislead. (I think it's not about what we look like, it's about what we do!).
Bourdieu and Foucault argue the body is a practical, direct locus of social control. Banally, through table manners and toilet habits, … culture is 'made body', … converted into automatic, habitual activity. Foucault reminds of the primacy of practice over belief. Not via ideology, but through the organisation and regulation of the time, space and movements of our daily lives. For women… are spending more time on the management and discipline of our bodies than we have in a long, long time. …In fashion - female bodies become docile bodies … focussed on self-modification. Through these disciplines we … memorise … the feel and conviction of lack, of insufficiency, of never being good enough.
The discipline and normalisation of the female body has to be acknowledged as an amazingly durable and flexible strategy of social control. … Contemporary preoccupation with appearance affects women far more than men.
Foucault says we must first abandon the idea of power as something possessed by one group and levelled against another … but think of the network of practices, institutions and technologies that sustain positions of dominance and subordination in a particular domain.
We need an analytics … to describe a power whose central mechanisms are … constitutive, a power bent on generating forces, making them grow and ordering them. Particularly in the realm of femininity, where so much depends on the seemingly willing acceptance of various norms and practices, we need an analysis of power from below. Of the mechanisms that shape and proliferate desire, generate and focus our energies, construct our conceptions or normalcy and deviance.
We need a discourse… that insists on … objective analysis of power relations, which will allow us to confront the mechanisms by which the subject becomes enmeshed …. with forces that sustain her own oppression. … Our culture still widely advertises domestic conceptions of femininity, ideological moorings that cast woman as chief emotional and physical nurturer. The rules for this construction of femininity require that women learn to feed others, not the self, and to construe any desires for self-nurturance as greedy and excessive. [This type of femininity] develops a totally other-oriented emotional economy. … That female hunger - for public power, for independence, for sexual gratification - be contained and the public space that women b allowed to take up, be circumscribed.
Young women today .. are taught traditionally 'feminine' virtues, … that the professional arena is open to them, they must also learn to embody the 'masculine' language and values of that arena. - self conrol, determination, cool, emotional discipline, mastery etc. Female bodies now take on their slender spare shape, and the currently fashionable men's wear look. ... The new Macho Woman - the young hero falls in love with the heroine - "she has all the best things I like in girls, and all the best things I like in guys - she's tough and cool, but warm and alluring. … The result is a parody. In our image bedazzled culture, we find it increasingly difficult to discriminate between parodies and possibilities for the self.
In the late 60s/70s the objectification of the female body was a serious political issue. All the cultural paraphernalia of femininity, of learning to please visually and sexually, … were seen as crucial in maintaining gender domination. (By whom?) … Feminist study of cultural representations of the female body has flourished … but, … divorced from consideration of their relation to the practical lives of bodies, can obscure and mislead. (I think it's not about what we look like, it's about what we do!).
Judith Butler - Performative Acts and Gender Constitution
All these notes are direct quotes.
Gender is not stable … it is .. a stylised repetition of acts. .. Gender is instituted through the stylisation of the body … understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements and enactments … constitute … an abiding gendered self. … The appearance of substance, … a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience… come to believe and to perform. Gender identity is the stylised repetition of acts … a different sort of repeating in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style.
Constituting acts … create the identity of the actor .. as … a compelling illusion, an object of belief. Gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo. In its very character as perforative resides the possibility of contesting its reified status.
Physiological and biological causalities structure meanings that embodied existence assumes in the context of lived experience. The existence … of the material … dimensions of the body are not denied by distinct from the cultural meanings. .. The body is … a continual and incessant materialisation of possibilities.
Gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences. Those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished. Gender is not a fact - the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender and without those acts, there would no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis. The tacit collective agreement to perform and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fiction is obscured by the credibility of its own production.
Phenomenology shares with feminist analysis a commitment to grounding theory in lived experience. Feminist theory has sought to understand… systematic or pervasive political and cultural structures are enacted and reproduced through individual acts and practices, [using} analysis of ostensibly personal situations to clarify through situating the issues in a broader and shared cultural context. ... [This analysis] delimits me in a shared cultural situation which in turn enables and empowers me.
Latent in the personal is political formulations of feminist theory, a supposition that the life-world of gender relations is constituted, through … the historically mediated acts of individuals. … The body becomes its gender through a series of acts … consolidated through time … : a legacy of sedimented acts rather than.. predetermined. … This is a sedimentation that … has produced a set of corporeal steles which, … appear as the natural configuration of bodies into sexes which exist in a binary relation to one another.
Feminist cultural anthropology and kinship studies have shown how cultures … regulate and guarantee the production, exchange and consumption of material goods, but also reproduce bonds of kinship itself, which require taboos and a punitive regulation of reproduction to effect that end. Compulsory heterosexuality is reproduced…. through the cultivation of bodies into discrete sexes with 'natural' appearances and 'natural' heterosexual dispositions.
There are nuanced and individual ways of doing one's gender, in accord with certain sanctions and proscriptions. … Gender is an act which has been rehearsed. Complex components that go into an act must be distinguished in order to understand the kind of [repeated performance] … which acting one's gender invariably is. Repetition … is the mundane and ritualised form of their legitimation. Performance is effected with the strategic aim of maintaining gender within its binary frame. … The gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted space and enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives.
Genders then can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent. Gender is stabilised, polarised, rendered discrete and intractable. … Performing one's gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all. … There is social knowledge that the truth or falsity of gender is only socially compelled and in no sense ontologically necessitated.
Gender is not passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by nature, language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of patriarchy. Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure, but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or linguistic given, power is relinquished to expand the cultural field bodily through subversive performances of various kinds.
Gender is not stable … it is .. a stylised repetition of acts. .. Gender is instituted through the stylisation of the body … understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements and enactments … constitute … an abiding gendered self. … The appearance of substance, … a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience… come to believe and to perform. Gender identity is the stylised repetition of acts … a different sort of repeating in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style.
Constituting acts … create the identity of the actor .. as … a compelling illusion, an object of belief. Gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo. In its very character as perforative resides the possibility of contesting its reified status.
Physiological and biological causalities structure meanings that embodied existence assumes in the context of lived experience. The existence … of the material … dimensions of the body are not denied by distinct from the cultural meanings. .. The body is … a continual and incessant materialisation of possibilities.
Gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences. Those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished. Gender is not a fact - the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender and without those acts, there would no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis. The tacit collective agreement to perform and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fiction is obscured by the credibility of its own production.
Phenomenology shares with feminist analysis a commitment to grounding theory in lived experience. Feminist theory has sought to understand… systematic or pervasive political and cultural structures are enacted and reproduced through individual acts and practices, [using} analysis of ostensibly personal situations to clarify through situating the issues in a broader and shared cultural context. ... [This analysis] delimits me in a shared cultural situation which in turn enables and empowers me.
Latent in the personal is political formulations of feminist theory, a supposition that the life-world of gender relations is constituted, through … the historically mediated acts of individuals. … The body becomes its gender through a series of acts … consolidated through time … : a legacy of sedimented acts rather than.. predetermined. … This is a sedimentation that … has produced a set of corporeal steles which, … appear as the natural configuration of bodies into sexes which exist in a binary relation to one another.
Feminist cultural anthropology and kinship studies have shown how cultures … regulate and guarantee the production, exchange and consumption of material goods, but also reproduce bonds of kinship itself, which require taboos and a punitive regulation of reproduction to effect that end. Compulsory heterosexuality is reproduced…. through the cultivation of bodies into discrete sexes with 'natural' appearances and 'natural' heterosexual dispositions.
There are nuanced and individual ways of doing one's gender, in accord with certain sanctions and proscriptions. … Gender is an act which has been rehearsed. Complex components that go into an act must be distinguished in order to understand the kind of [repeated performance] … which acting one's gender invariably is. Repetition … is the mundane and ritualised form of their legitimation. Performance is effected with the strategic aim of maintaining gender within its binary frame. … The gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted space and enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives.
Genders then can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent. Gender is stabilised, polarised, rendered discrete and intractable. … Performing one's gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all. … There is social knowledge that the truth or falsity of gender is only socially compelled and in no sense ontologically necessitated.
Gender is not passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by nature, language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of patriarchy. Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure, but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or linguistic given, power is relinquished to expand the cultural field bodily through subversive performances of various kinds.
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