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Feminist Performance Art

Introduction

According to scholar Virginia Mackenny, performance art is a great tool to mold and remold gender because performance art, in most instances, includes a direct subversion to everyday conventions. MacKenny also writes that feminist performance Art had a large presence “in the late '60s and early '70s in America when, in the climate of protest constituted by the civil rights movement and second wave feminism." There are several movements that fall under the category of feminist performance art, including Feminist Postmodernism, which took place during 1960-1970 and focused on women's bodies a means for profit, The Chicanx movement which too place in the 1970's and focused on the Vietnam war and east LA conditions at the time, the post apartheid movement which took place during the 60's and 70's, and the Anti War movement of the George W Bush administration.

Movements

Feminist Postmodernism

As Forte writes in her analysis of feminist performance art in the 1960’s and 1970’s, “Within this movement, women's performance emerges as a specific strategy that allies postmodernism and feminism … women used performance as a deconstructive strategy to demonstrate the objectification of women and its results”. Another strategy that was commonly used by feminist performance artists during the postmodernist movement was “removing of the mask” which was used to show the weight of representations of women in the media, on the psyche of women. MacKenny also writes of this removing of the mask within Feminist Postmodernism. She writes that, “This 'masquerade' or 'masking' occurs when women play with their assigned gender roles in multiple, often contradictory ways - adopting, adapting, overlaying and subverting the hegemonic discourse in the process.”

Chicanx Movement

During the late 1960’s and early 1970’s in East Los Angeles, protests broke out against the Vietnam War and its disproportionate death rate of 22% Chicanx people while the percentage of the population that Chicanx people made up for was only 5% of the United States population. The art collective ASCO, based in East LA commented on queer and brown identities as well as the tragedies that occurred in the protests discussed above due to police brutality. The collective did visual and performative art. Some of their most famous performance art pieces include experimentation with gender such as a male identifying artist who went to a club in “booty shorts, pink platforms, and a shirt that said ‘just turned 21’” The group continued to make performance and visual art which commented on queer and ethnic identity in East LA which in the 1970’s existed as an entirely different country through a border of highways and dilapidated conditions.

Post Apartheid Movement

MacKenny writes about two of the major players in the Post Apartheid performance art movement in South Africa. She first writes about a white woman and her performance titled 'Exposed'. She says that Gainer, the performance artist, is both the model and artist in this performance. She explains that the employment of subversive positioning in the binary mentioned above mirrors the blurring of the "distinction between artist/art, artist/model, constructor/constructed, finder/found, mind/body, subject/object". The second artist Mackenny writes about is a mixed race artist that performs a piece called 'Span'. She says that the artist, Rose, alludes to Western societies usage of bodies of people of color in scientific settings such as the "dissection and embalming of body parts of native 'others' (the most pertinent to the South African context being Saartje Baartman, a young Khoisan woman displayed for her unique genitalia and steatopygia, or enlarged buttocks)", through her own display of her body. Kutz-Flamenbaum gives another example of this tactic in the description of Raging Grannies and their mission statement. She explains that their mission statement "illustrates the way Raging Grannies use norm- embracing stereotypes of 'little old ladies' and 'grannies' to challenge the gendered assumptions of their audiences.'This employment of subscribing in appearance accosted with no threatening and nurturing behavior in order to strategically act in tactical and abrasive ways is used to confront issues of war and the baby Bush Administration.