Questions of Feminism

AYISHAABRAHAM (Question 2) I wonder if it is possible to demarcatethe 1960s and '80s in termsof clearly distinguishablecategories of "grassroots" and "theory."Would our understanding be where it is without the pathbreaking grass roots-theoreticalwork done by activists/artists/theoristswho have traditionallybelonged to marginalized communities? The issue of formationsand expressionsof subjectivityin and throughart is crucialhere. In the United States,with the help of the popular pressand media, politics tends to be reduced to essentializedand deterministicnotions of race, ethnicity,femininity, otherness, etc. This convenientlycloaks all the othercategories thathave not been legitimizedwithin the classicself/other binary debates. In a recentarticle entitled "Interior Colonies: Franz Fanon and the Politics of Identification,"Diana Fuss locates psychoanalyticdiscourse and the politicsof identificationwithin colonial historyand otherhistorical genealogies: It therefore becomes necessary for the colonizer to subject the colonial other to a double command: be like me, don't be like me; be mimeticallyidentical, be totallyother. The colonial other is situated somewherebetween differenceand similitude,at the vanishingpoint of subjectivity.' While it is stillhard forartists from marginalized communities to negotiatetheir identities within the context of the art world, there are manywho have used strategies such as autobiography to explore a history that has never been interrogatedbefore. The problem only arises when termssuch as "the body," "autobiography,"etc., are taken out of their historical contexts and thrown around like disembodiedand rarefiedconcepts. I findmyself becoming more conscious of the extentto whichmy work has to be informedboth by theoreticalanalyses and directpractical engagement with complex issues of subjectivity,identity, etc. I feel the need to look at the specifics of these issues.It is the politicsof processthat interests me. In mypresent project, which has engaged me for three years,I am attemptingto constructa narrative around a group of nineteenth-centuryphotographs that documented Christian conversionin South India. The intersectionsof faithand identity(through the consumptionof new commoditiesand the use of the camera) duringthis colonial period are some of the issues that have interestedme. The project has trans- formeddramatically from my first attempt to read theseimages visually. 1. Diana Fuss, "Interior Colonies: Franz Fanon and the Politics of Identification,"Diacritics (Summer-Fall1994), p. 23. This content downloaded from 198.40.30.166 on Tue, 8 Oct 2013 12:52:48 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions QuestionsofFeminism 7 In contemporaryIndian art, the mythologicalIndian woman of precolonial India became the archetypalicon of representation.Indian artistsduring the nationalistmovement imbued "her" image withthe purityand idealism of a lost era. Responding to contemporaryevents and the reactionaryappropriation of these images,I feltI needed to findanother method to explore these issueshistor- ically. I wrote to my grandmother asking specificallyabout her memories of Christian conversion/technologicalchange (the advent of the camera, etc., in rural India) at the turnof the century.She wroteme a series of letters,and then later I interviewedher extensively.This "grass roots" involvementbecame an importantanchor forme to ground mywork. The issue of mediation is an important one. The assumption of an "authentic"that can be uncoveredwithout interpretation is naive and apolitical. Unmediated work tends only to compensatefor historicalabsence. It attemptsto celebraterather than interrogatecritically. A one-linersimplifies issues and is then considered more authentic,more accessible,more popularthan worksthat attempt a politics of process to explore complex ideas. Any engagementwith a problem is labeled "elitist"by the mainstreampartly because it mighthave the potential to disruptexisting systems.Theory that is reifiedis acceptable because it is more easilycommodifiable and made intojust anotherformal project. However,what makes one skeptical of antitheoreticalwork is a returnto fairlyold-fashioned formalism and a narcissisticflaunting of the self. Ambling through the recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art ironicallytitled "Sense and Sensibility,"a titlereflecting a nineteenth-centuryvision of femininity, one was struckby the vocabularyof seduction utilized in both the materialsand the concepts. The artistsare women,young, and frominternational backgrounds. The projects,however, seem purelyformal and fail to reveal any criticalengage- mentor disruptiveiconoclasm. There is a tendency in contemporarygroup shows to rely on a series of naughtyone-liners. Despite all the visual appeal and wit,work that relies only on the accoutrements of femininity-the pink plastic, the corset, the eye shadow (as in the "Bad Girls" show at the New Museum of Contemporary Art)-are disturbinglyessentialist expressions, even though that work parades in the garb of the "impure." AYISHA ABRAHAM is a visual artist.She has studiedat the Facultyof Fine Arts,Baroda, India, and at the WhitneyIndependent Study Program and holds an M.F.A.from Rutgers University. This content downloaded from 198.40.30.166 on Tue, 8 Oct 2013 12:52:48 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions EMILYAPTER Essentialism'sPeriod Nineties feminismseems to be worried about periodizing essentialism, worried,that is, about essentialism'speriods (its shameless emissionsof bodily fluids,menses, and tears), as well as its own historicalperiodicity from the 1960s and '70s throughthe '80s. Seventiesessentialism has impingedon the 1990s in the formof a fashion revival-the ideationalequivalent of platformshoes, oversized collars, small T-shirts. Seventiesessentialism, like these "period"items retrieved from the recessesof the closet,was already"back" in the '80s, but insteadof going awayin the '90s, itjust continuedto assertitself more and more. MaryKelly tells me that her workfrom the 1970s (Post-PartumDocument) is increasinglyrequested in the '90s forshows dedicated to reexaminingwomen's art of the '70s. Post-PartumDocument deployed a Lacanian psychoanalyticalframework mediated by feminismto inventnew strategiesfor representingmaternal desire. The workwas anythingbut essentialist(the '70s was,after all, the heydayof theory), but the reasons for interestin it now seem to smackof essentialismnonetheless. The 1990s view appears focused less on Post-PartumDocument's exposure of the social constructednessof maternityand more on its formaland thematicrefer- ences to "dirtynappies," infant scrawl, feminine leakages of love and feeling,and the social/psychicseams and lesionsconnecting female bodies to the workforce- see, forexample, the lexical progressionfrom labia to labor to lubricantin entry L7. Index L, Homo sapiens (F), whichreads: LABIA MAJORA,LABIA MINORA, LABOUR-falselabour, length of labour,normal labour (firststage, second stage,third stage), LABOUR PAINS, PROLONGED LABOUR, RAPID LABOUR, LACERATION, LACTATION, LEVATORS, LIFTING, LIGHTENING, LIE OF BABY, LINEA MIGRA,LITHOTOMY, LOOP, LUBRICANT. It is perhaps no accident that during the 1980s-a decade of nostalgia,power feminism,and race/classdivision-Mary Kellymade "Historia,"part threeof the four-partproject Interimdocumenting the utopian collectivism and fervent egalitarianismof the 1960s and '70s. It is, however,paradoxical that this move seemed to parallel a mode of historicizingfeminism that has become increasingly pronounced in the "backlash,""grunge," "postfeminist" era of the 1990s.Adjacent, on one side, to academic seminarson "FutureDeconstructions" and, on the other, to Woodstock '94, a minor boom in commemorativebooks, special issues, and exhibitionshas erupted,each in differentveins concerned to measureand evalu- ate "wherewe are" visa vis1970s essentialismand 1980s theoreticalfeminism. This content downloaded from 198.40.30.166 on Tue, 8 Oct 2013 12:52:48 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions QuestionsofFeminism 9 A heightened awarenessof such periodicityis echoed in Chantal Mouffe's introductionto the republicationin 1990 of selected essaysfrom m/f a preemi- nent Britishfeminist theory journal that ran from1978 to 1986. Mouffediscerns the "common challenge to essentialism"as "the central theme of the otherwise diverse interventionsmade in the journal during its nine years of existence." Mouffethen makes the case thatit is preciselym/f's antiessentialism that renders its argumentsrelevant to the "postmodernfeminism" of the 1990s. This maybe a fair and useful assessment,but not surprisingly"postmodern feminism" already sounds dated in the mid-1990sinsofar as postmodernityhas been severelydiscred- ited forlending itself to antimodernist,politically enervated aesthetic ideologies. Nineties feminismendorses antiessentialismby jettisoning gender stereo- types,theorizing the body,queering sexual difference,and pluggingthe ears to the maternalrecidivism of friends("But now thatyou have a boy ... "). But 1990s feminism,lesbian and straight,white and postcolonial,also suspectsthat its theories and self-consciousperiodizations mask a kind of gynophobia-an aversionto the spectersof femalenessand femininitythat will not go away.Perhaps thisexplains the present attractionof 1970s essentialistfeminism, which, embarrassingas it may be, desublimated the female body's unconscious. In retrospect,despite its sororal idealism,biologism, and blinkeredexperiential credo, 1970s essentialism

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