In the early 1970s

In the early 1970s, I was terrified by the idea of becoming a feminist, certain that it meant becoming aggressively plain, alienating men, and giving up on romance and humor. In addition, my critical faculties were offended by images of solidarity and sisterhood with a community of only women who appeared to suspend judgment to support each other's work. Misconceptions all, but nonetheless these ideas held potent sway in my mind in my early adulthood. And I think many of those same negative stereotypes persist today.

In the mid-1970s, when I heard about Womanhouse and the Women's Building through a gay woman friend, I figured they were for someone else. My fear of feminist environments was bound up with a thinly masked anxiety about lesbianism--not so much homophobia as ignorance. At an age when I had very little sexual experience, the idea of having or working through a sexual identity (not merely a gendered one) was mind-boggling. Enough to send me straight back into cocooned introversion. And the work I associated with early 1970s feminism made me queasy: the vaginas and labia and flowers, quilts, weavings, and body art seemed so obvious. I longed for transcendence out of gendered identity through my work, not identification with it.

It took a decade of professional life and attendant subtle and not-so-subtle abuses for me to understand the need for feminist consciousness. It also took that long for me to sort out the difference between the concept of being a woman artist (in which gender had a determining role) and feminist art practice (in which gendered identity becomes a political position within patriarchal structures of power). I now have great respect for the generation(s) of women who set their own aesthetic parameters and demonstrated the possibility and necessity for self-determination in professional and personal terms as artists--whether they used their work to display that agenda overtly or not. But it has always seemed to me that the real triumph of feminism is the moment when women can work without a sense of obligation to overt feminist concerns. To achieve a position maximizing freedom of aesthetic expression has always seemed far preferable to having to put one's aesthetics at the service of an agenda. I'm not suggestin g ignoring the lived realities of feminist politics, but I support the possibility of separating them from artistic expression if one so desires.

This separation of aesthetics and politics has tremendous relevance to academic and critical work and pedagogy, as well as to creative practice. When I was let go from a previous academic position, I reflected on the gender implications. Three other junior faculty were let go at the same time: all women. One was African American, three were Jewish, all were more politically radical than our colleagues, and among us were the only self-identified feminists in the department. Systematic discrimination? Or coincidence? After all, the academic work I do is not overtly feminist. But quite possibly it is precisely my engagement with visual culture, with graphic design, typographic poetry, the history of writing and the alphabet, and the intersection of creative and critical work that does demonstrate a radical feminism, or, at least, an embrace of "difference' and "otherness" within the field of art history. Perversely, it is now the case that recognizably "radical feminist" work in queer theory, lesbian studies, o r straight feminist art history has a defined (not safe, but at least established) academic identity. Therefore, for me the goals of feminism have to include work that does not have overt feminist agendas but by its capacity to challenge received ideas is implicitly feminist.

Within the academy, the politics of gender are played out through social dynamics as well as through academic achievements. Here the pedagogical tenets of feminism also take their toll within the elite academy. For instance, among the sins I committed as an academic were to be generous with my time, provide professional development for graduate students, do assigned tasks without complaint, and never throw a diva fit. I watched numerous male colleagues be rewarded for being too busy to go to meetings, never showing up to office hours, and treating students with arrogant dismissiveness. The terms of gender were absolutely at work. And the tools of feminism? Useful as insight, utterly ineffectual in turning the situation around.

And now? Though I am troubled by the historical amnesia of my students with regard to the political background from which they can assert their gendered, gay, ethnic, or otherwise once-marginalized identities, f have to be glad that they have a self-confidence I could never have imagined at that age. If I want them to be aware of the systemic and systematic nature of power and exclusionary politics, it's not because I want them to pay a tithe of obligation to early feminist (and civil and gay rights) movements. It's because when (as will inevitably occur) they hit the limits of tolerance in the structures of patriarchal capitalist culture, they will need to be able to think beyond their individual identities and into a collective insight into the way they are positioned by those very forces to which they think themselves immune by virtue of their talents, energies, and abilities.