PART 2: rant about art, music, gender, and feminism

The same exact conversation of riot grrrl and punk can be had about feminist art too. In the radical projects of 70s feminist art, the story that gets told is completely white, completely upper-middle class. Not to mention the fact that art history pretty much ignores what was going on outside the US. The same exact thing happens with feminist “waves” in music and art and culture in general. The construction of history and progress as linear is inherently masculinist. We conceive of these moments of singular vision that rise and fall. But why can’t feminism be multiple and multitemporal? Why do we feel the need to separate each decade and melancholically historicize the glory days of feminism that have long since passed?

A feminist today has become this weird stereotype that comes along with a lifestyle. Somehow if you say you’re a feminist you are assumed to be a certain type of person: a radical vegan lesbian anarchist punk who doesn’t shave hates men and believes in conspiracy theories. The reluctance of women, and men, to associate with feminism is frustrating. It should be logical that all women would be feminists…. Why wouldn’t you want yourself to be considered equal? Yet feminism has the threatening potential to pigeonhole you as a creative person or a person in general.

Yeah, it makes sense that female artists don’t want to associate themselves with feminism because people will read that into their work even when it isn’t there. People will find a way to read every motif as sexual, they will find a way to read the artist’s biography into the work. The same thing applies with musicians. Why is every female band that plays punk called riot grrrl? What even is riot grrrl? Is it over? Why shouldn’t female bands be judged based on the merit of their music, rather than compared to other female bands? Just like in art, men write the canon. White men comprise the status quo. Anyone else involved in cultural production is immediately presumed to be talking about their minority whenever they open their mouth.

Not a single guy applied to the art history seminar I am taking called Why Have There Been No Great Female Artists?, a title taken from Linda Nochlin’s seminal 1977 piece of criticism. That makes me sort of mad. But it’s also more productive to have a conversation about these things with just us girls; we don’t have to deal with apologies and guilt before getting to the real meat of the issues. We don’t have to feel tension within the class when we talk about sexual imagery.

It’s really difficult for me to negotiate how I can be radical while also taking effective action. Lee Lozano did an art project where after an extreme and apparently feminist decision, she didn’t talk to women for the rest of her life. She rationalized this by saying that women can’t make meaningful changes in the patriarchal system by only bonding with other women. Riot grrrl took up the cause of women supporting other women, creating networks that circumnavigated men in a sense. I understand how that can be limiting if too insular, but Lozano’s technique seems totally wrong-headed from where I stand. Boycotting the entire system doesn’t change the fact that women exist in male-dominated society. I think they need to form meaningful relationships with one another to support each other. I do understand the impulse to go totally radical and attempt to eliminate all vestiges of sexism from your life. The problem is that it can never be done.