Olivia Armacost

Beyond the Confines of Categorization:

Essentialism, Post-Structuralism and Intersectionality in Feminist Art History

Abstract

Feminist art history has followed a traditional Western model by categorizing works into smaller subsections for the purpose of appearing to be more easily taught, exhibited, and digested. Due to feminist art’s roots in activism and feminist theory, art historians have tended to categorize works within the school of feminism to which they most closely align historically. While feminism is crucial to understanding the art born of its ideas, this model has made the confines of feminist art history too narrow.

As it stands, the current canon of feminist art history only highlights a small number of works, failing to recognize feminist art that does not fit clearly into a category of feminist theory—such as essentialism, post-structuralism, and intersectionality. Therefore, these nonconforming works are often excluded or examined only on a superficial level. In this way, historians have created limitations for what feminist art can be, and barriers for interdisciplinary feminist thought in feminst art and research. Through the examination of three works of contemporary art by women artists from the late twentieth to early twenty-first century, this thesis seeks to prove that feminist art is too nuanced and multi-dimensional to be confined to strict and fixed categories.