The F Word is an all-day symposium being held Friday, October 26 at the Alexander Library Teleconference Room. Registration is required, free and open to all disciplines.

Feminism in the visual arts remains as fiercely contested today as it was thirty-five years ago. Despite recent backlash against feminist concerns and even an atmosphere of anti-feminism among younger scholars, in terms of both artistic representation and criticism, feminism remains highly relevant. The legacy of 2nd generation feminism has been explored in several recent art historical conferences. This symposium seeks to extend this investigation by examining how feminism currently informs a broad range of discourse within the visual arts. We hope to create a view of feminism that acknowledges society's systematic exclusion of minorities as well as women. This perspective will dispel stereotypical portrayals of feminists while also examining feminism's relationship to institutional critique, queer theory, and issues of race, class, and gender. These issues are distilled in the subjects of body, space, and performance, which are the three panels that comprise our symposium. We aim both to reaffirm and re-appraise the state of feminism today and its direction for the future. Our title invokes the boat-rocking, bold attitudes of our 2nd generation feminist forebears, whose spirit informs and inspires this process of new discovery.

Sponsored by:

The Associate Vice President of Academic and Public Partnerships in the Arts and Humanities,

The Department of Art History

This conference is co-sponsored by the Institute for Women and Art. Support has been provided by a Rutgers University Academic Excellence Fund Award to the Institute for Women and Art under the auspices of the Associate Vice President for Academic and Public Partnerships in the Arts & Humanities, Rutgers University.

The Feminist Art Project, administered by the Rutgers Institute for Women and Art, is a collaborative national initiative celebrating the Feminist Art Movement and the aesthetic, intellectual and political impact of women on the visual arts, art history, and art practice, past and present. The project is a strategic intervention against the ongoing erasure of women from the cultural record.