by Jon Lackman | 20 March 2007 | Books, Theory
In the Fall/Winter 2006 Woman’s Art Journal, Ute L. Tellini reviews Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism, which was edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard: “The problem, the editors state in the introduction to their latest volume, is that postmodernism, grounded in the masculinist principles of Freud, Lacan, and Saussure, benefited the status quo and contributed to a distorted picture of female participation in culture. As feminist art history was absorbed into the postmodern category of ‘gender studies’ (including men’s studies, gay and lesbian perspectives, queer theory), gender became ‘only one of many factors in a constantly shifting and evolving … pattern of power relationships,’ write Broude and Garrard. Women’s agency was endangered. Art historians, they charge, have been ‘deferential to postmodern skepticism about the modernist heroizing of individual artists, [and] have focuses less and less on the work and agency of individual women artists, shying away especially from the idea of a feminist expression grounded in women’s real life experiences’ … The latest volume focuses on women who have exercised agency as artists, partrons, viewers, and tastemakers, and ‘how masculine culture acted and continues to act to negate and neutralize those efforts’ … Like their two earlier anthologies, Broude and Garrard’s Reclaiming Female Agency is another ‘must-have’ volume … [and it] is essential reading for all art history classes.”
