Feminism and Art History

In Mathew's articles she says that feminism is not a method of approaching art it is a world view consisting of its own politics. She goes on to list the three feminist approaches; recuperating the experience of women and women artists, critiquing and deconstucting authorities and ideologies, and rethinking the cultural and psychological spaces traditionally assigned to women. With regards to the "subject", the author says that "poststructuralists and psychoanalytic theories of the decentered subject- even in the hands of the feminist- are no more than another form of masculinist silencing of womens' experience and histories at the very moment they are finally beginning to be heard". I think that this means that considering the subject in the way that these theories suggest discredit feminism as a means for change and perpetuates the repression of women's experience.

In all the art history courses that I've taken, I think only a handful of times has the artwork been discussed through any sort of feminist theory. When I studied Degas, his work was not presented to me in terms of his depiction of the female and what it meant. Mathews mentions how feminists debate his intentions and the ideological affects of the females that he depicts. It is interesting to consider the work through this different lense.