Day One: Welcome to the Dinner Party!

using to figure/literally/what this course is about/what it means to do feminist literary studies

this is what Judy Chicago did:
selected 1038 women in western history
inscribed names of 999 of them on porcelain floor tiles
honored 39 of them w/ symbolical place settings @ a table:

equilateral triangle, 13 settings on each side
each one got a china plate in a vulvar form,
elaborate needlepoint runner worked in period techniques,
narrating her life

(Sojourner Truth: pieced quilt of strip-woven African patterns,
combined w/ triangular sections of printed fabric,
to honor slaves who pieced weaving from home into large quilts)

70s particular historical moment: 2nd wave feminism
positive mode of representing female body,
reclaiming it from patriarchal construction as passive, fetishized
from flat ancient goddesses representing relative constraint/containment
to sculptural thrusts of Virginia Woolf: creative female subject,
active vaginal forms, muscular, 3D

explicitly sexual, bodily content was a revolt,
in context of high modernism/pure abstract aesthestic objects
deliberate choice to use media associated w/
women's domestic labor (china painting, ceramics, needlepoint)
and to make the form monumental

intensely controversial exhibit
1. damned by postmodern feminists as biologically essentialist, naïve

2. dismissed by modernist art critics as pornographic kitsch
transgressive/in-your-face threat to inherent artistic value
----both in over celebration of craft
(make debased sentimental domestic art form monumental;
handmade female crafts aggressively, blatantly sculptural)_
----and by flamboyant exploration of
boundaries of aesthetic value
explicit sexualization/politization of history of women's culture
“feminized restaging of all-male club of Last Supper,
from point of view of those who cooked it
but not figured as hands; rather:
direct, relentless, biologically redundant
representation of labial folds

3. also dismissed by feminist artists/art historians because populist
this period in feminist art criticism→
rampant anti-pleasure rhetoric
don’t be captured by illusions:
dis-identifactory practices erode cultural consumption

4. dismissed by radical feminists who shared her aesthetics, but not her politics
feminism challenges exclusionary, elitist system of values
but Chicago aimed @ elevating women to state of transcendence,
w/out questioning exclusions that transcendence implies
she was invested in upholding opposition between high/low
ascribed to structure of value she critiqued:
wanted installation viewed as high art
not only reinforced masculinist notions of greatness
but self as “Master of Studio”
betrayed a feminist commitment to collaboration

5. strongest critique, however, came from women of color,
who asked the most compelling questions of the exhibition:
how does ST plate differ from “mold” I’ve described,
of relentlessly biological vulvar forms?

One place set for black woman,
only one in collection that shows a face instead of a vagina
(actually three faces!)
Alice Walker wrote in Ms. Magazine abt.
Chicago’s ignorance of black women artists
“white women can’t imagine black women have vaginas;
or if they can, where imagination leads them is too far to go”
exposes hesitancy of white feminists
in relation to black female sexuality

6. most important critique of TDP as comprehensive narrative of women’s history
1978 group of Hispanic women fr. National Woman’s Political Caucus visited studio,
wrote ltr. complaining that no pre-conquest New World heroines were honored @ table;
called for boycott and letter writing protest

chose to begin w/ Sojourner Truth plate as opening image for this course:
graphic portrayal of basic assumptions about what feminist art/can do/
what feminist reading is/can do
about varieties of both art & reading
and—most importantly—because
the woman this plate figures was illiterate

who knows of her/her speeches?
Much of what she has to say
(can read more speeches later in semester if you chose)
is abt. class, abt. expanding the category “woman”
from lady, to include women like herself who were
not isolated @ home but labored in the field, enslaved
significant: these speeches were transcribed
(most famous perhaps invented)
by literate white women who heard her speak
since she wrote nothing herself, these texts of speeches
(and narrative of her life, written by Olive Gilbert,
clearly ventriloquized) raise questions abt. authenticity

she constructed herself, was own myth maker
Nell Painter on her visiting cards: free bourgeois matron

assembled appendix to Narrative in 1875,
w/ newspaper reports, autographs, collage of accolades;
dictated account of her warm mtg. w/ Lincoln
(she hadn’t heard of him; he’d heard often of her)
capacity to claim symbolic identity
and did some powerful speaking
--took master’s family to court for selling her son to Ala; got him back
--twice took D.C. streetcar conductors to court for refusing to let her ride,
one for assault and battery, both victorious

all that is to figure this course called Critical Feminist Theory
start to give you a sense of how I’m proposing that we take on a # of difficult jobs:
Interrogate what it means to write & read as a feminist
problematizing acts of reading and writing,
and objects we read and write
attend to the political dimensions of reading, writing

Highlight not only gendered but racial/class/national limits of that activity
(class valences of “dinner party”!)
literacy abt. politics, empowerment, agency
African slaves were denied literacy
(FDouglas: “teaching a slave to read would forever unfit him to be a slave”)
pathway to liberty (cf. today: 70% males in prison not completed h.s.,
40% functionally illiterate, 19% illiterate)
inarticulate: in jeopardy
use words to express who you are,
to challenge, organize for better world
teaching/reading/writing for social justice
James Baldwin, "A Talk to Teachers": paradox of education—
examine society in which you are being educated,
create ability to make own decisions, imagine alternatives

also do what lit courses usually do:
Meet 2x week to discuss theory and literature
Start w/ Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas
Every Wed. evening post on-line reaction to reading
(past or future; tomorrow night re: Sojourner Truth plate, The Dinner Party, or 3 Guineas)

in addition, 25-pp. more formal writing:
three 5-pp. papers due along the way, and a final 10-pp. research paper

four sections of course, each problematizing a different category
Besides 3 Guineas, you should buy three novels in the Bookshop:
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
Monique Truong, The Book of Salt &
Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis.

go there and add your thoughts!