Language and Text in Feminist Art Part II: Latin America and the Caribbean, Latinx diasporas

This session examines artworks exploring language from a gendered perspective—a subject that has lacked comprehensive treatment—to inspire new research in feminist art. It will analyze ways in which women (cis or queer) employ text and language as a means of feminist critique, across art mediums.

There is a stubborn belief that feminist art focuses on the image of the body. Yet the core of feminist art is conceptual or social practice; art that is designed not just to be looked at but also to be acted upon. Text or language-based art—including what Hélène Cixous called écriture feminine—has been its crucial component as women investigate language as a tool and locus of their cultural oppression: probing their erasure from historical texts, objectification in law, the experience of speaking a second language as racialized and sexualized subjects, or the male-centrism of language, including AI and the internet.

The session is part of a broader research that seeks to fill a gap in literature about feminist language-based art by privileging transnational, multigenerational, and intersectional comparisons, globally. A sister session in 2024 provided a rare comparative perspective on the Middle East and North Africa. Part II in 2025 seeks scholarly analyses and artists’ presentations with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean as well as Latinx diasporas. Of particular interest are proposals regarding artists who represent cultures where oral expression and poetry may dominate the written (Indigenous, Afro-Latinos, African-Caribbean, etc.); both sound-based and text-based projects.