Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy

Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy
Author: Valerie Hedquist
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2019-07-08
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351006843

The reception of Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy from its origins to its appearances in contemporary visual culture reveals how its popularity was achieved and maintained by diverse audiences and in varied venues. Performative manifestations resulted in contradictory characterizations of the painted youth as an aristocrat or a "regular fellow," as masculine or feminine, or as heterosexual or gay. In private and public spaces where viewers saw the actual painting and where living and rendered replicas circulated, Gainsborough’s painting was often the centerpiece where dominant and subordinate classes met, gender identities were enacted, and sexuality was implicitly or overtly expressed.

Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy

Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy
Author: Valerie Hedquist
Publisher:
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2019-07-08
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781351006866

The reception of Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy from its origins to its appearances in contemporary visual culture reveals how its popularity was achieved and maintained by diverse audiences and in varied venues. Performative manifestations resulted in contradictory characterizations of the painted youth as an aristocrat or a "regular fellow," as masculine or feminine, or as heterosexual or gay. In private and public spaces where viewers saw the actual painting and where living and rendered replicas circulated, Gainsborough's painting was often the centerpiece where dominant and subordinate classes met, gender identities were enacted, and sexuality was implicitly or overtly expressed.

Modern Women Artists in the Nordic Countries, 1900–1960

Modern Women Artists in the Nordic Countries, 1900–1960
Author: Kerry Greaves
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2021-04-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000370984

This transnational volume examines innovative women artists who were from, or worked in, Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sápmi, and Sweden from the emergence of modernism until the feminist movement took shape in the 1960s. The book addresses the culturally specific conditions that shaped Nordic artists’ contributions, brings the latest methodological and feminist approaches to bear on Nordic art history, and engages a wide international audience through the contributors’ subject matter and analysis. Rather than introducing a new history of "rediscovered" women artists, the book is more concerned with understanding the mechanisms and structures that affected women artists and their work, while suggesting alternative ways of constructing women’s art histories. Artists covered include Else Alfelt, Pia Arke, Franciska Clausen, Jessie Kleemann, Hilma af Klint, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Greta Knutson, Aase Texmon Rygh, Hannah Ryggen, Júlíana Sveinsdóttir, Ellen Thesleff, and Astri Aasen. The target audience includes scholars working in art history, cultural studies, feminist studies, gender studies, curatorial studies, Nordic studies, postcolonial studies, and visual studies.

Artist-Parents in Contemporary Art

Artist-Parents in Contemporary Art
Author: Barbara Kutis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2020-05-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0429886268

This book examines the increasing intersections of art and parenting from the late 1990s to the early 2010s, when constructions of masculine and feminine identities, as well as the structure of the family, underwent radical change. Barbara Kutis asserts that the championing of the simultaneous linkage of art and parenting by contemporary artists reflects a conscientious self-fashioning of a new kind of identity, one that she calls the ‘artist-parent.’ By examining the work of three artists—Guy Ben-Ner, Elżbieta Jabłońska, and the collective Mothers and Fathers— this book reveals how these artists have engaged with the domestic and personal in order to articulate larger issues of parenting in contemporary life. This book will be of interest to scholars in art and gender, gender studies, contemporary art, and art history.

Feminist Visual Activism and the Body

Feminist Visual Activism and the Body
Author: Basia Sliwinska
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2020-12-30
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000331474

This book examines contemporary feminist visual activism(s) through the lens of embodiment(s). The contributors explore how the arts articulate and engage with the current sense of crisis and political concerns (e.g. equality, decolonisation, social justice, democracy, precarity, vulnerability), negotiated with and through the body. Drawing upon the legacy of feminist art historical critique, the book scrutinises activist strategies, practices and resilience techniques in intersectional and transnational frameworks. It interrogates how the arts enable the creation of civil and political resilience, become engaged with politics as a response to disaster capitalism and attempt to reform and improve society. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, fine arts, women’s studies, gender studies, feminism and cultural studies.

Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960-1985

Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960-1985
Author: Jen Kennedy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2021-04-28
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000380939

Transnational Perspecives on Feminism and Art, 1960–1985 is a collection of essential essays that bring transnational feminist praxis into conversation with histories of feminist art in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. The artistic practices and processes examined within these pages all centre on gender and sexual politics as they variously intersect with race, class, sovereignty, Indigeneity, citizenship, and migration at particular historical moments and within specific geopolitical contexts. The book’s central premise is that reconsidering this period from transnational feminist perspectives will enable new thinking about the critical commonalities and differences across heterogeneous and geographically dispersed practices that have contributed to the complex and multifaceted relationship between feminism and art today. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, cultural studies, visual culture, material culture, and gender studies.

Feminist Subjectivities in Fiber Art and Craft

Feminist Subjectivities in Fiber Art and Craft
Author: John Corso-Esquivel
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2019-07-09
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351187813

This book interprets the fiber art and craft-inspired sculpture by eight US and Latin American women artists whose works incite embodied affective experience. Grounded in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, John Corso-Esquivel posits craft as a material act of intuition. The book provocatively asserts that fiber art—long disparaged in the wake of the high–low dichotomy of late Modernism—is, in fact, well-positioned to lead art at the vanguard of affect theory and twenty-first-century feminist subjectivities.

Plural Feminisms

Plural Feminisms
Author: Sohini Chatterjee
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2023-09-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1350332720

Drawing on different understandings of feminisms, this volume archives the ways in which we engage with feminisms and imagine the mundane as a feminist site of resistance against multiple and intersectional marginalisation and oppression. How individual subjects come to their feminist praxis through autoethnographic and other qualitative accounts, and how they offer resistant and decolonial strategies via reflection on their lived and embodied realities. Plural Feminisms spurs a discussion on how structural violence is identified and resisted, and the invisible and emotional labour that goes on behind this resistance. The book documents the resistance strategies feminists employ on a daily basis to survive, and to form and sustain dissident kinships, that remain unread, unheard, overlooked, and excluded from dominant discourses of being and becoming. Through autoethnography, feminist, queer and/or trans and genderqueer, indigenous, Black and racialised, disabled and neurodivergent scholars in the academy reflect on their engagement with feminisms as well as their unique resistance methods-embracing and exploring complexities and challenges that both entail. It foregrounds the critical importance of first-person narratives in developing an expansive understanding of what it means to be a feminist, the different narratives and forms that resistance takes, and the socio-cultural value of subversion.

Female Body Image in Contemporary Art

Female Body Image in Contemporary Art
Author: Emily L. Newman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2018-05-23
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351859153

Numerous contemporary artists, particularly female artists, have chosen to examine the idealization of the female body. In this crucial book, Emily L. Newman focuses on a number of key themes including obesity, anorexia, bulimia, dieting, self-harm, and female body image. Many artists utilize their own bodies in their work, and in the act of trying to critique the diet industry, they also often become complicit, as they strive to lose weight themselves. Making art and engaging eating disorder communities (in real life and online) often work to perpetuate the illnesses of themselves or others. A core group of artists has worked to show bodies that are outside the norm, paralleling the rise of fat activism in the 1990s and 2000s. Interwoven throughout this inclusive study are related interdisciplinary concerns including sociology, popular culture, and feminism.

Beyond the Closet

Beyond the Closet
Author: Steven Seidman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2013-10-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1135321841

Gay life has become increasingly open in the last decade. In Beyond the Closet , Steven Seidman, a well-known author and leading scholar in sexuality, is the first to chronicle this lifestyle change and to look at the lives of contemporary gays and lesbians to see how their "out" status has changed. This compelling, well-written, and smart account is an important step forward for the gay and lesbian community.