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Monday, June 22 at 6 p.m. (JST)
Women Artists in Action: Visualizing the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movements
Kanako Tajima (Columbia University)
This paper focuses on the work of transnationally active women artists whose feminist engagement with artmaking served an integral role in negotiating the intersecting currents of the Japanese and American Women’s Liberation Movements. As part of the global feminist movement of the 1970s, the Japanese Women’s Liberation Movement (Ūman Ribu) engaged in dialogue with the U.S. Women’s Liberation Movement. Public events, women’s spaces, alternative magazines (mini comi), feminist meetings, and intimate gatherings served as a productive discursive arena for cross-regional networking and transnational information exchange between women. As a strategic means for building solidarity across borders, women’s visual practice played an operative role in elaborating women’s issues as locally specific yet globally resonant, and staking their position in this moment of feminist radicalism. In this paper, I highlight how the video work of women artists, who have engaged with both movements through their transnational experience, unfolded within and alongside the discussions in feminist publications and photographs. Read through the narrative specific to the discourses of the Women’s Liberation Movements, their expansive feminist activity reveals an underexplored yet critical global interconnectivity between art and activism, artists and activists, and aesthetic method and feminist strategy that surfaced in 1970s Japan.
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