Art and Gender

How has visual culture shaped our understandings of gender? How have ideas about gender shaped the production and reception of the visual arts? Can feminist art or feminist art history  effect social or political change? This seminar confronts these questions through the analysis of selected artworks made between 1500 and the present, and through close readings of critical and theoretical texts. We will consider themes such as the visual representation and self-representation of gendered subjects; the sexual politics of vision and the “gaze”; the role of gender in institutional critique; the gendering of media; and the intersection of gender politics with issues of race, ethnicity, class, and the family structure. Works by a wide range of both male and female artists—including Sofonisba Anguissola, Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, François Boucher, Élisabeth Vigée-LeBrun, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, and Shirin Neshat—will be studied alongside readings on or in the histories of feminism, psychoanalytic and queer theory, and gender performativity.