Charlotte Sometimes

Tag: feminist

  • Revisionist/Feminist Art History

    I love finding new labels for myself. My latest muse has been revisionism and revisionist theory. I like to try labels on, wear them for a bit and see if they fit. I also like long new words and revisionism has a satisfying ring to it that makes my tongue get tied up when I try and say it too quickly. Anyway.

    There is a problem with calling yourself a feminist art historian. The problem is that you say it to most people and their eyes begin to roll back and glaze over. They’re seeing the militant revolutionists telling them to burn their bras and grow their armpit hair.

    Feminist art history has never been a term that quite works for me. I am a feminist and I’m an art historian. I have a particular interest in female artists throughout history. However feminist art history implies something about striving for equality in the history of art that is blatantly not there. Yes it’s an appropriate term for going forwards, but it doesn’t necersarily work for looking backwards. We can’t suddenly make men and women equal in the Italian renaissance, history doesn’t work that way and I don’t have a TARDIS.

    I like Revisionist Art History. This is a more accurate description for the things I’m interested in a historical context. But as the video said the real problem comes when you try to work out how to fit women into the canon of dead white guys. I have books on women and their place in society, I have books on women war artists, I even have books writing about women’s approaches to art history. But it doesn’t feel right, it feels like we’re singling them out as special and they weren’t special. Well they were, but no more special than their male counterparts.

    Grouping women artists into a group called ‘women artists’ seems so crude. It’s like displaying a Hirst next to a Rembrant just because they were born with a penis. These women don’t belong in the same books as each other, their art is so different.

    I don’t know what to do about this big old mess of wrongness. But I’m going to revisionism my way into feminism and possibly some more isms and see what I can do about it.

  • Sexism again

    So today I was accused of being a bit of a hypocrite. A new online magazine has been launched by someone on a forum I use with the content of ‘cars and girls’. Fair play, launching an online magazine and finding content for it can’t be the easiest thing in the world and must take up a fair amount of time. I have to admit I doubt I’d ever attempt a project like this because my design skills are simply not up to it.

    The thing is, I object to this format. Cars and girls. Girls and cars. Apparently picked because the two ‘subjects’ go together. The way I see it though it’s just more encouragement for certain types of men to think about women in a material possession kind of way. By associating something which is a highly prized material possession (modified cars in this context) and showing naked chicks alongside on many of the pages it creates a link between the two. You’re saying to the impressionable “Hey you, buy this amazing car and you’ll get this chick as well”. It’s reducing a woman to a possession to be owned in the same way as a car and that isn’t a nice way to be thought of.

    The justification for accusing me of being a hypocrite is that I shoot naked men and portray them as sexual objects. Well quite frankly I try to avoid portraying them as sexual objects and would be quite upset if any model thought that this is the way that I had portrayed them. But I wouldn’t ever make a connection between one of the guys that I’ve shot and a material possession. Because guys aren’t just a possession to have. They’re beautiful, if mysterious, creatures that I need in my life. I’d like to think I show them a little more respect than comparing them to a piece of metal that goes at speed.

    Another aspect to this of course is the issue of how women are presented with their own gender. I’m not the only woman in the world into cars and motor sports. In fact there are quite a few female racing drivers out there now and personally I’ve known as many girls over the years with heavily modified cars as I have guys. I find it frustrating when I’m supposed to just accept naked glamour shots of women alongside my hobby. It’s as if it’s ok for men to be titillated along side their hobbies but women are told that that’s just the way it is because men are a bigger market. Well I’m sorry, but I think that’s rubbish. Perhaps if these magazines featured more of a gender balance (in the case of photography) or just no sexual images at all (in the case of cars) then more women would read their publications?

    Fundamentally I don’t understand though with certain car magazines and websites why we need to have sexually stimulating images of women in them anyway. It seems like a macho pissing contest. He with the biggest car will get the girl with the biggest breasts or something. Don’t get me started on the scantily dressed women at race tracks – people keep asking why there are no top female racing drivers? Perhaps the answer is that we as a gender are put off by the whole sexist approach to the low level car and motor sport industry.