The Feminism
and Visual Culture Reader. Amelia Jones, Editor. (Routledge: 2003).
This
text assembles an important collection of writings addressing visual fields
such
as art, film,
popular culture, and new media from
a feminist perspective, combining now-classic essays with provocative
new pieces. Complicating the notion of feminism as a unified discourse, the
volume
explores
how issues of race, class, nationality and sexuality
enter into debates about feminism in the field of the visual. Included are
stakeholders from across the spectrum of feminism including academics, critics,
artists and activists. It includes six previously unpublished texts written
specifically
for this volume and introductory essays to each of the thematic sections: Representation;
Difference; Disciplines/Strategies;
Mass
Culture/Media Interventions; Body; and Technology. The "Feminism and Visual
Culture Reader" provides an overview of major feminist approaches to the
visual and supplies a framework
within
which
to
analyze
shifts
and new developments in feminist theorizing about visual culture over the period
of the past thirty years. It will be an anchor text in this course for the
identification of feminist epistemologies with respect to the visual
and will
serve as a
point
of departure
for the production of pedagogical practices for the teaching of visual
culture.
The
Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and
Impact. Norma Broude and Mary Garrard, Editors. (Harry N. Abrams: 1996).
This
anthology assembles an important collection of essays addressing the
history of the
feminist
movement in the art world of the United States, and its subsequent impact
on both feminism and art. Included as authors are representatives from
across the
spectrum
of American feminism including academics, critics, and the artists themselves.
Divided into
thematic sections, each of which proceeds according to an approximate
historical chronology, the introduction by the editors is followed by: Seeds
of Change:
Feminist Art and Education in the Early Seventies; Building a Network:
Feminist Activism in the Arts;
Challenging Modernism: The Facets of Feminist Art; and Beyond the Seventies:
The Impact of Feminist Art. The "Power of Feminist Art" provides
an overview of major feminist developments within and around U.S. visual
culture from the inception of the so-called second wave feminist movement,
tracing and contexualizing the contours and trajectories of its manifestations
in art, a movement in feminism that had not
yet
been documented.
It will
complement
"The Feminism and Visual Culture
Reader" as an important additional source of
theory about a specific feminist moment in the arts. It will provide
a rich source of
more
particularlzed
information, including visual reproductions, with which to ground our
thinking about how to develop a vocabulary and set of practices for looking
at representation
through the lens of feminist pedagogy.
Guerrilla Girls and publications by The Guerrilla Girls:
Talking
Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age. Ella Shohat, Editor.
(MIT Press: 1998).
This anthology
originated out of the New Museum of Contemporary Art's Documentary Sources
in American Art series. Convened as a sequence of panels and discussions
entitled Cross Talk: A Multicultural Feminist Symposium, the original
papers from the July 1993 event were adapted by the authors and editor for
this
publication. Presenters -- academics as well as visual and performance
artists -- include bell hooks, Adrian Piper, Coco Fusco, Tricia Rose, Caren
Kaplan,
Inderpal
Grewal, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Carmelita Tropicana. The volume is generously
illustrated.
Joyce
J. Scott: Kitckin' It with the Old Masters. (The Baltimore Museum
of Art/Maryland Institute, College of Art: 2000).
This exhibition,
curated by George Ciscle, is handsomely reproduced in a folio edition that
includes Scott's images, a community album, exhibition checklist, artist
chronology and essays by Leslie King-Hammond, Mel Watkins, Mary Jane Jacob,
and Keith Morrison.
National
Gallery of Art, Washington (Cd-Rom: ©2003).
This
digital text will be read equally for its emergent and reductive pedagogical
practices.
The user
has more than 1,500 works of art drawn from the permanent collection of
the National
Gallery of Art, Washington at her disposal in an interactive program based
on the Gallery's onsite multimedia Micro Gallery. High quality reproductions
of the work of more than 600 artists are represented in technologies that
permit variant formats and closely observed studies of the images. Additional
features include a subject index, a timeline, an atlas and a dictionary
of art terms.
A multi-user
platform, this version (1.2) of the Cd-Rom is formatted for both Microsoft
Windows® and Apple® Macintosh®. These selected works will
be excellent comparative material for reading against and in
conjunction with the Guerrilla Girls' texts. At the same time, the technology
can be studied for its multiple knowledge delivery systems and the resulting
enrichments available in the learning and teaching
environment.
The
Critical Pedagogy Reader. Antonia Darder, Rodolfo D. Torres and Marta Baltadano,
Editors. (Routledge:
2002).
This reader includes selections
from major theorists in the field of critical pedagogy, including Paolo Freire,
Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, bell hooks, Michelle Fine and Michael Apple.
The essays are arranged thematically around the issues of racism, class,
gender and sexuality, language and literacy and social change. A case study
is offered at the beginning of each section to connect the theory to a practical
classroom situation and each section concludes with a number of critical
questions for analysis. Students will read selections from this text as
an introduction to key pedagogical concepts and to the range of issues
to be considered when implementing new pedagogies.
Working
the Ruins:
Feminist Poststructural Theory and Methods in Education. Elizabeth
A. Pierre and Wanda S. Pillow, Editors. (Routledge: 2000).
This
anthology, which contains essays by Patricia Hill Collins, Wendy Brown,
Patti Lather and
Lubna Nazir
Chaudhry, among others, is concerned with the effect of poststructuralism
on feminist approaches to research and pedagogy. Theorizing from a variety
of disciplinary spaces, topics include ethnography, black feminist thought,
Latina writing, identities, and the use of technologies, discourses and
bodies as potentially destabilizing sites of deconstructive practice.
The
Visual Culture Reader. Nicholas Mirzoeff, Editor. (Routledge: 1998).
Three introductory essays by Nicholas Mirzoeff, Irit Rogoff, and Ella Shohat
and Robert Stam open this anthology. The body of the text is organized in six
major parts (each with an introduction by Mirzoeff): A Genealogy of Visual
Culture: From Art to Culture; Visual Culture and Everyday Life; Virtuality:
Virtual Bodies, Virtual Spaces; Race and Identity in Colonial and Postcolonial
Culture; Gender and Sexuality; and Pornography. This and the Hall/Evans anthology
which follows will be useful texts to compare and contrast with the feminist
approach to visual culture analysis taken by Jones in the Feminism and
Visual Culture Reader.
Visual Culture: The Reader. Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, Editors. (Sage Publications:
1999).
The sectional headings in this anthology are: Cultures of the Visual; Regulating
Photographic Meanings; and Looking and Subjectivity.
Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought.
Beverly Guy Sheftfall, Editor. (New Press: 1995).
This anthology
documents the continuous, evolving, feminist presence in the nonfiction
writing of African American women from the early nineteenth century to
the present. Most of these texts are previously published but not widely
available, particularly in anthology form. Black Feminism is defined and
illustrated across seven sections, each introduced by editor Sheftall.
The seven chapters are: Beginnings: In Defense of our Race and Sex; Triumph
and Tribulation, Defining Black Womanhood; Civil Rights and Women’s
Liberation; Beyond the Margins: Black Women Claiming Feminism; The Body
Politic: Sexuality, Violence and Reproduction; Reading the Academy; and
Discourses of Resistance: Interrogating Black Nationalist Ideologies.
Visibly
Female: Feminism and Art: An Anthology. Hilary Robinson, Editor.
(Camden Press: 1987).
An excellent
supplementary source of writings by and about feminist artists in the 70s
and 80s U.S. movement, this anthology is a part of the larger Women on
Art series. Organized into four sections, the selections include: Personal Statements,
Interviews, Reviews and Overviews, and Theory.
Daughters
of the Dust (1991: 113 min.) and Illusions (1983: 34 min.), Julie Dash,
writer, producer and director.
These two films will allow
us to focus on how visual culture produced by
women of color is constructed within traditional discourse by looking at
how critics and audiences respond to the circulation of images
of women of color by women of color.
Dash's
work will
also be analyzed by students for emergent forms of knowledge claims and knowledge
production. Students will collaborate to create pedagogical strategies
for teaching this material.
Gender
and Education, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2002). "Does the Use of Journals
as a Form of Assessment put into Practice Principles of Feminist Pedagogy?" by
Valerie A. Clifford. (pp. 109-121).
Journal writing has become
a popular form of assessment in some disciplinary fields, particularly those
that are informed by feminist pedagogies. The author of this article analyzed
the learning journals
of
a class of teaching students to determine what pedagogical
practices they reflected. The journals and the processes surrounding their
use were
found to embrace many of the principals of both critical and feminist pedagogy.
In addition, they were found to be a useful vehicle for the development
of a reflexive educational practice. Social justice issues, on the whole,
however, were found to surface primarily in the journals of teachers whose
classes were explicitly involved the discussion of these topics, reflecting
a tension between respecting the rights of learners to construct their own
knowledge and the desire to guide their attention more explicitly to issues
of equity and equality. This article, in combination with journal writing
requirements for the course, will allow students to consider the implementation
of this pedagogical practice and the implications of journal writing/teaching
practices in the feminist oriented visual
arts classroom.
Women's
Studies Quarterly. Vol. 24 (Fall/Winter 1996). "Curriculum
Transformation: a brief overview" by Elaine Hedges. (pp. 16-22).
As part of a special issue
on curriculum mainstreaming of women's studies scholarship in community colleges,
the writer offers an overview of curriculum transformation, as defined in
this
instance
by
the
process
of faculty incorporating new scholarship on women into their courses. She
discusses the effects of such projects on faculty -- including changes in
the courses, changes in pedagogy, and professional change -- as well as the
effects on students. This article will be used to help students conceptualize
the
parameters of undertaking such a project in teaching within the visual arts.
Women's
Studies Quarterly. Vol. 24 (Fall/Winter 1996). "Feminist Pedagogy
and techniques for the changing classroom" by Shirley C. Parry.
(pp. 45-54).
As part of a special issue
on curriculum mainstreaming of women's studies scholarship in community colleges,
the writer discusses how feminist pedagogical techniques can be used effectively
in traditional as well as computerized classroom environments (a special
interest of mine). She describes exercises and techniques used in feminist
pedagogy, including group collaboration techniques, that encourage students
to apply principles of feminist group processes in large class discussions
and small group collaborations alike.
Teachers
College Record. 101.1 (Fall 1999). "Progessive Education and
Feminist Pedagogies: Issues in Gender, Power, and Authority" by
Frances A. Maher. (p. 35-39).
This article explores several
problems with the application of progressive, student-centered educational
theory to gender issues in the classroom, including the construction of the
female
teacher's
authority.
Review
of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies. 24.3 (July/Sept. 2002). "Just
Discourse: The Limits of Truth for the Discourse of Social Justice" by
Lee Quinby. (pp. 235-49).
Taking a cue from the current
popularity of reality television, the author theorizes its implications for
and influence on the increasing denigration of modern cultural discourse,
definining it as a space that is empty
of social justice rhetoric. Quinby argues for the possibilities of considering
and discussing social justice in these mediated cultural spaces, asserting
that such alternative formats can actually facilitate more
equitable ways of thinking, speaking and acting. The limits of truth, the
development of freedom and the role of feminism in a freedom-based concept
of justice are discussed in ways that facilitate the consideration of contemporary
cultural and artistic production as part of a creatively emergent/resistant
emancipatory discourse.
Canadian
Journal of Education. Vol. 24, No. 1 (Winter 1999). "Beyond dualism:
toward a dialogic negotiation of difference" by Rishma Dunlop. (pp.
57-69).
Abstract: The author
explores the development of a critical pedagogy that interrogates commonly
held assumptions about identity and culture in social, political, and historical
perceptions of cultural difference. She attempts to deconstruct dichotomizing
tendencies of thinking about differences, with the aim to position thinking
instead along the borderlands or on the fault line between cultures, a 'third
space' in which to live critically. She examines the perspectives of critical
consciousness,
third-space positionings, and dialogic negotiations of differences through
the lenses of feminist theory, narrative enquiry, and literary theory to
suggest how these perspectives may lead to cross-cultural identification
or understandings in the post-secondary classroom.
Educational
Theory. Vol. 46 (Summer 1996). "Feminist pedagogy theory: reflections
on power and authority" by Carmen Luke. (pp. 283-302).
Abstract: The writer
explores some of the tensions and contradictions within feminist pedagogy
and examines feminist work in the academy. She argues that the conceptual
logic and political practice of opposition in feminist pedagogy to the male
legacy of authority, power, and knowledge have consequences for women that
are potentially self-invalidating and politically disabling. It is time to
develop a kind of anti-confessional pedagogy that would seek theoretically
to bring together the seductive dynamics of knowledge, the engendered embodiment
of teacher and student, and the performativity of teaching with an ethics
grounded in the resistance to abusive power and social injustices. It is
necessary for feminists to disengage from their anxieties about authority
and power. It is necessary to take authority, to acknowledge and theorize
the power that is variously exercised and to resist the hidden hegemony of
feminism itself -- that which keeps feminists from constructively criticizing
some of feminism's most cherished tenets.