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This roundtable panel facilitates a hemispheric, trans-American dialogue centered on the politics of the body in relationship to the visuality of race and performative gendered imaginaries as subversions of Western patriarchy. Through a set of decolonial feminist critiques, this panel addresses the articulation and slippages of gender roles, including the self-representation of the female body by contemporary Peruvian artists, gender and indigeneity in 19th c. Columbus monuments, and the performance of fe/male drag in U.S. -based performance and post-conceptual art as an incomplete pose that disrupts heteronormative definitions of gender inculcated by first wave feminism.

The format features four panelists: three art historians, one visual artist, and a discussant. Each panelist will introduce their topic through brief introductions and an artistic presentation/performance with dialogue facilitated by Dr. Lesley Wolff, whose research considers the gendered imaginaries of foodways framed by feminist approaches to the body, viscera, and critical eating studies.

The roundtable engages in a critique of gendered subjectivities, social and aesthetic categorizations and the interaction of language, bodies, and images attendant to the complexities of race and gender roles in relation to transnational and transhistorical concerns, rural/urban dynamics, and the movement and slippages of the gendered categories of consumers and producers. These hemispheric critiques of power, gender, and representation provide a vital linkage between decolonial approaches and the Western/Anglo art historical and gendered narratives that such methodologies de-center and destabilize.