Navigating the Perils of Teaching Feminist Art History Today

The last five decades have seen dramatic attempts to carry out a systematic rethinking of the art historical field in terms of gender politics. The result of this work has been a wholesale reassessment of the role women played in artmaking and the names of many female artists are now much more well known. But what will the future of this work look like given the fact that colleges and universities across the U.S. are facing extraordinary challenges as a result of legislative actions aimed at limiting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives? Many public universities, including my own, have eliminated their DEI offices and administrators have begun challenging the idea of offering courses devoted to highlighting women as artistic practitioners. Can we still teach feminist art history in a world where faculty research bios are being scrubbed of words like “women,” “discrimination,” and “inequality” because they are no longer acceptable terms according to the Trump administration? This talk will explore subversive techniques for continuing to teach art history courses that are decidedly anti-sexist even in these perilous times. I will explore mechanisms which will allow us to foreground the production of women, including shifting away from traditional “Women and Art” courses to instead move to a model centered on “Single-Artist Seminars.” I will also explore options for renaming courses, altering course goal descriptions, and transferring the focus of specific lectures within traditional “Survey” and “Art Appreciation” courses to highlight patriarchal oppression subversively.