Reclaiming Female Agency

'Reclaiming Feminine Agency' identifies female agency as a central theme of recent feminist scholarship & offers 23 essays on artists & issues from the Renaissance to the present, written in the 1990s & after.

Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts interrogates the politics of space expressed via womxn's artistic practices, which prioritise solidarity and collaboration across borders, imagining attentive geographies of difference. It considers belonging as a manifestation of processes of becoming that traverse borders and generate new spaces and forms of difference. In doing so, the book aims to catalyse mutual social relations founded upon responsibility and response-ability to each other. The transnational framework activates concerns around belonging at a time of intensified divisions, partitioning global narratives, unequal trajectories and increasing violence against bodies of the most vulnerable, largely founded on Eurocentric paradigms of political, economic and cultural superiority. The contributors engage in a conversation signalling transversal thinking and artmaking in order to articulate and activate 'in-between' spaces. This is to welcome co-affective models of belonging that question versatile embodiments of subjectivity as both agentic and as interrelational. Organised around the triangulation of modes of belonging: spatial, affective and collective, overarched by a transnational lens that acknowledges non-hierarchical, local and socially relevant genealogies against universalising politics of globalisation, these essays consider afresh ways in which female agency disrupts borders and activates concerns around different forms of belonging, citizenship and transnationalisms. Cover Image credit: Keren Anavy, Garden of Living Images (2018), general installation view (detail). Courtesy of the artist and Wave Hill. Photographer: Stefan Hagen

A sequel to the pioneering volume, Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, published in 1982, The Expanding Discourse contains 29 essays on artists and issues from the Renaissance to the present, representing some of the best feminist art-historical writing of the past decade. Chronologically arranged, the essays demonstrate the abundance, diversity, and main conceptual trends in recent feminist scholarship.

Based on close readings of both public and private documents – court records, churchwarden accounts, depositions, diaries, letters and pamphlets – this collection of essays presents the largely untold story of non-elite women and their dealings with the law.

A novel and female empowering interpretive approach to these artistic archetypes in her analysis of Imaging Women of Consequence in the Dutch Golden Age.

Much of our understanding of the world, our societies, and ourselves rests on theories and knowledge generated predominantly by men of certain nationalities and economic classes. This male-dominated and culturally specific theorizing and knowledge have generally resulted in the exclusion of women and other groups from the process of formal theorizing and knowledge building. Feminism argues that the male-dominated knowledge represents a skewed perception of reality and is only partial knowledge. Feminism is a generalized, wide-ranging system of ideas about social life and human experience developed from a woman-centered perspective. It treats women as the central subjects in the investigative process and seeks to see the world from the distinctive vantage points of women in the social world. The best way to empower women and better the situation for women is to take women’s daily experiences and their informal theorizing into account and, on this basis, adopt feminist approaches to building theory and knowledge. Philosophising Experiences and Vision of the Female Body, Mind, and Soul: Historical Context and Contemporary Theory provides an overview and introduction to the study of feminist theory and practice in the social sciences. This book provides a starting point for further and more advanced study of the nexus of feminism, gender, and development and translates feminist theory and concepts into practice. The chapters investigate, in a historical context, mainstream and contemporary theories of feminism and gender studies. This book is ideal for post-graduate students of social science; researchers of development management, business management, public governance, and gender and development; activists; feminists; and practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students interested in feminist theory and knowledge building.

In this major book, Griselda Pollock engages boldly in the culture wars over `what is the canon?` and `what difference can feminism make?` Do we simply reject the all-male line-up and satisfy our need for ideal egos with an all women litany of artistic heroines? Or is the question a chance to resist the phallocentric binary and allow the ambiguities and complexities of desire - subjectivity and sexuality - to shape the readings of art that constantly displace the present gender demarcations?

An exploration of women?s contributions to visual culture in major urban centres between the wars (1918-1939), this collection sheds new light on women?s relationships with the processes of modernism and modernization. Women?s work in a variety of mediums is explored, including design, print, illustration, murals, poster art, and costume design, as well as more conventional forms of painting and sculpture. International in scope, the volume discusses artists and exhibitions from the United Kingdom, Greece, Mexico, France, Ireland and the United States. The contributors place a strong emphasis on archival research yet each addresses contemporary concerns in feminist art history. By focusing on a very specific time period, the essays place a central concern on the history and theory of art and gender and are united by their coherent focus on women?s role in the agency and mediation of artistic production in the interwar period.