Seminar in Modernist Art and Theory: Before and After Gender

If the future is, or was, female, whither feminist art history? Taking its name from the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern's 1974 book, this seminar revisits major approaches to feminist art history from the 19th century to the present while considering how queer, trans, masculinity, and decolonial studies have transformed the landscape of art historical analysis. What does it mean, now, to write art history under the sign of gender? How is gender assigned to works of art? How have art historians applied contemporary thinking about gender to the art of the past, and how might historical works and archives inform art history in the present?