Positioning Feminism
Issue 37:4 | December 2017
This issue positions debates around feminism now. An overview essay by Anne Marsh, first presented as keynote at the Feminist Art Renewal Network (FRAN) festival symposium in Adelaide, surveys Australian feminist art over five decades. Feature essays forefront feminist performance and video art, gender equality in the museum, queer feminism and intersectionality, environmental ethics and radical care. Featured artists: Linda Dement, Justine Varga, Jenny Watson, Sera Waters and Jemima Wyman.
In this issue
[I]t is increasingly clear that there are no topics or phenomena to which a feminist analysis is not relevant—at which point it is useful to consider feminist theory ... as a set of techniques, rather than as a fixed set of positions or models.
The state of the art world and of feminism in the twenty-first century ushers in different ways of doing political activism, cultural work and theory. The intergenerational aspects of feminism and how this has been enacted in the visual arts in recent years represents a refreshing change from earlier perceptions of waves of feminist theory that tended to privilege the new. The visual metaphor of the new wave dashing the old against the shore appears to replicate traditional paradigms in what some have called either an Electra or an Oedipal contestation where the new generation kills the old feminist mother in order to please the father (the academy).
