Title: Feminist Movement in Art: Expressing Women's Experience
Headings: The Feminist Movement in Art
The Feminist Movement in Art
Expressing Women's Experience
Historical Context
Becoming a Movement in the 1970s
Feminism and Postmodernism
Feminist Art and Diversity
Backlash

Content: Backlash
Some women who were artists rejected feminist readings of their work. They may have wanted to be viewed only on the same terms as artists that had preceded them. They may have thought that Feminist Art criticism would be another way of marginalizing women artists. Some critics attacked Feminist Art for "essentialism." They thought each individual woman’s experience was claimed to be universal, even if the artist had not asserted this. The critique mirrors other Women’s Liberation struggles. Divisions arose when anti-feminists convinced women that feminists were, for example, “man-hating” or “lesbian,” thus causing women to reject all of feminism because they thought it was trying to foist one person’s experience onto others. Another prominent question was whether using women’s biology in art was a way of restricting women to a biological identity—which feminists were supposed to have fought against—or a way of releasing women from the negative male definitions of their biology. Edited by Jone Lewis. Cite this Article
Format
mla apa chicago
Your Citation
Napikoski, Linda. "