Wark brings together a wide range of artists, including Lisa Steele, Martha Rosler, Lynda Benglis, Gillian Collyer, Margaret Dragu, and Sylvie Tourangeau, and provides detailed readings and viewings of individual pieces, many of which have not been studied in detail before. She reassesses assumptions about the generational and thematic characteristics of feminist art, placing feminist performance within the wider context of minimalism, conceptualism, land art, and happenings

Performance art was finally recognized as an art form in its own right in the 1970s. In Radical Gestures Jayne Wark situates feminist performance art in Canada and the United States in the social context of the feminist movement and avant-garde art from the 1970s to 2000. She shows that artists drew from feminist politics to create works that after a long period of modernist aesthetic detachment made a unique contribution to the re-politicization of art.

Postmodernism has been a buzzword in contemporary society for the last decade. But how can it be defined? In this Very Short Introduction Christopher Butler challenges and explores the key ideas of postmodernists, and their engagement with theory, literature, the visual arts, film, architecture, and music. He treats artists, intellectuals, critics, and social scientists 'as if they were all members of a loosely constituted and quarrelsome political party' - a party which includes such memb...

A pioneer of LGBTQ studies dares to suggest that gayness is a way of being that gay men must learn from one another to become who they are. The genius of gay culture resides in some of its most despised stereotypes—aestheticism, snobbery, melodrama, glamour, caricatures of women, and obsession with mothers—and in the social meaning of style.

In Hold It Against Me, Jennifer Doyle explores the relationship between difficulty and emotion in contemporary art, treating emotion as an artist's medium. She encourages readers to examine the ways in which works of art challenge how we experience not only the artist's feelings, but our own. Discussing performance art, painting, and photography, Doyle provides new perspectives on artists including Ron Athey, Aliza Shvarts, Thomas Eakins, James Luna, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wo...

Seeing Differently offers a history and theory of ideas about identity in relation to visual arts discourses and practices in Euro-American culture, from early modern beliefs that art is an expression of an individual, the painted image a "world picture" expressing a comprehensive and coherent point of view, to the rise of identity politics after WWII in the art world and beyond.The book is both a history of these ideas (for example, tracing the dominance ...

Art is always ambiguous. When it involves the female body it can also be erotic. Erotic Ambiguities is a study of how contemporary women artists have reconceptualised the figure of the female nude. Helen McDonald shows how, over the past thirty years, artists have employed the idea of ambiguity to dismantle the exclusive, classical ideal enshrined in the figure of the nude, and how they have broadened the scope of the ideal to include differences of race, ethnicity, sexuality and ...

In her first book since the critically acclaimed Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam examines the significance of the transgender body in a provocative collection of essays on queer time and space. She presents a series of case studies focused on the meanings of masculinity in its dominant and alternative forms’especially female and trans-masculinities as they exist within subcultures, and are appropriated within mainstream culture.In a Queer Time and Place

In this landmark collection, world-renowned theorists, artists, critics, and curators explore new ways of conceiving the present and understanding art and culture in relation to it. They revisit from fresh perspectives key issues regarding modernity and postmodernity, including the relationship between art and broader social and political currents, as well as important questions about temporality and change. They also reflect on whether or not broad categories and terms such as modernity, ...

The Feminist Spectator as Criticbroke new ground as one of the pioneering books on feminist spectatorship, encouraging resistant readings to generate feminist meanings in performance. Approaching live spectatorship through a range of interdisciplinary methods, the book has been foundational in theater studies, performance studies, and gender/sexuality/women's studies. This updated and enlarged second edition celebrates the book's twenty-fifth anniversary with a substantial new int...

The grotesque - the exagggerated, the deformed, the monstrous - has been a well-considered subject for students of comparative literature and art. In a major addition to the literature of art, cultural criticism and feminist studies, Mary Russo re-examines the grotesque in the light of gender, exploring the works of Angela Carter David Cronenberg Bahktin Kristeva Freud Zizek. Mary Russo looks at the portrayal of the grotesque in Western culture and by combining the iconographic and the his...

It would be difficult to exaggerate the worldwide impact of postmodernism on the fields of cultural production and the social sciences over the last quarter century—even if the concept has been understood in various, even contradictory, ways. An interest in postmodernism and postmodernity has been especially strong in Canada, in part thanks to the country’s non-monolithic approach to history and its multicultural understanding of nationalism, which seems to align with the decentralized, pl...