Shadow Feminism: Disavowed Feminized Labor in Postwar American Art

Abstract

This dissertation examines the ways in which postwar art historical discourses routinely trivialize feminine creative, emotional, and physical labor, as well as the artists whose work is associated with this labor. It takes form of five case studies, each of which coheres around a different type of feminized laborer, including the domestic, the cook, the entertainer, the hostess, and the widow. It asserts that the labor that characterizes these roles gets written over by art historical practices that cannot conceive of time as doing anything but moving forward, of radicality as involving anything other than rejection of the past and of artistic and social conventions, and of the art object as anything other than autonomously authored and produced. These case studies do not correspond with an examination of four independent artists. Rather, they emulate the gendered work of American kin-work, a set of sustaining practices identified and studied by social scientists since the eighties. Each chapter traces a network of relations between artists whose affiliations are not legible within traditional art historical narratives. The artists who populate this study include a selection of those whose work has been trivialized on the basis of its affiliation with feminized labor, such as Janet Sobel, Lee Krasner, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Charlotte Moorman, and J Morgan Puett. These artist's careers span the transition from modernist to postmodernist art practices and several generations of feminist thought. These figures do not just serve to represent exclusion, however. Nor is it this project's goal to rescue them from obscurity. When we hold back, in order to survey what art historical narratives have left behind, we find that these remains offer alternative methods of meaning making, methods that abide by, rather than seek to dispel, obscurity. This project looks to other contemporary artists whose work addresses itself to the erasure of feminized creative, emotional, and physical labor--including Theaster Gates, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, and Dario Robleto--to develop these historical methods.