SESSION: Feminist Art History Now (FULL DAY SESSION – PART 1)

This panel invited contributions that sought to evaluate, critique and imagine feminist art history in the present moment, when noticeable gains in the representation of women artists – as well as other underrepresented constituencies – coincide with a growing tide of hostile gender politics, racism, colonial entitlement, ableism and homophobia. What characterises a feminist politics within and against Art History when, for instance, foundational understandings of gender recognition are contested in legal battles in the UK Supreme Court, encouraging hatred and violence against trans women? Or, how might feminist art histories of transnational solidarity be expressed against the political rhetoric that positions the UK as an ‘island of strangers’?

While resistant to the novelty of ‘newness’ and alive to continuities with longstanding feminist art-historical methods and approaches, we invited papers that address contemporary conceptual challenges with reference to the art and visual culture of any period or region. We aim to consider intersectionality in feminist art history; the relationship between trans studies and feminism; new models for understanding feminist relationality; or the practice of feminist art history in relation to activism, archives, publishing, exhibition-making, collecting, consciousness-raising, or pedagogy. Speakers will reflect on recent work and longstanding projects, as well as engage in speculative papers or ideas in formation.

Ultimately, this panel asks, where is Feminist Art History Now? What are its tools, and coalitions, its limits and affordances?

Session Convenors:

Dr Amy Tobin, University of Cambridge

Part 1 Session Speakers:

Jana Kukaine, Riga Stradiņš University

Visceral Aesthetics: Feminist Art History in Times of Hostility

I am composing this abstract at a historical moment when the Latvian government has voted to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention. It signals that women’s bodies continue to serve as battlegrounds for political interests and that discourses on gender and women’s rights have yet to take firm root in Latvian society. How can feminist art history be written in contexts marked by political hostility, cultural marginalization, and limited recognition of feminist ideas, while navigating postsocialist legacies, including the well-documented fear of feminism, which continues to shape both everyday life and academic inquiry in Central and Eastern Europe?

To address these challenges, I draw on my research on “islands of feminism” in the region since the 1970s and introduce visceral aesthetics – a novel methodological framework offering three key contributions to feminist art history. First, anchored in contemporary affect and embodiment theories, it foregrounds feminist sensibilities rooted in private, often uneventful experiences rather than public activism. Second, by developing viscerality in dialogue with Central and Eastern European art history, it provides a situated perspective that challenges portrayals of the region as a messy and belated “copy of the West.” Third, visceral aesthetics enables tracing feminist genealogies in cultural contexts marked by hostility, obscurity, and ambiguity, integrating Central and Eastern Europe into transnational debates while contributing to feminist solidarity and preserving the region’s cultural specificity and difference.

Wiktoria Szczupacka, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw

Re-locating “Feminist Art History Now”: women’s labour, art institutions, genealogies and geographies

This paper responds to Horne and Perry’s Feminism and Art History Now, particularly its call for transnational, intersectional and institutionally grounded feminist histories. It argues that attending to state feminism in socialist contexts – here, the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL) – reshapes the geography and chronology of feminist art history beyond West-centred, second-wave paradigms.

In my research, women’s labour has been the central focus, examined through the lens of social reproduction within various artistic institutions in 1970s Warsaw. Formations closely associated with the avant-garde, and later connected to second-wave discourse, relied heavily on the invisible labour of women artists. This insight speaks directly to this panel’s invitation to reconsider the tools, coalitions and limits of feminist art history, particularly in relation to archival practice and exhibition-making.

The argument centres on a specific case: the unrealised survey of Polish women artists planned by CBWA Zachęta for the UN’s International Women’s Year in 1975, and its planned reconstruction at the same institution in 2027. The project approaches reconstruction as a feminist method, drawing on Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s notion of potential history. Rather than reading the 1975 archive as a record of institutional failure, the reconstruction treats it as a site where suppressed genealogies may be reactivated. In doing so, it functions as both curatorial practice and historiographical intervention, testing how exhibition history can recover feminist lineages shaped under socialism and reposition feminist art history within geographies and genealogies.

Laura Moseley, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge

The Sleepers: Crip Feminist Curation and the Politics of Rest

This paper will examine The Sleepers (The Women’s Art Collection, 2025–26) as a crip feminist curatorial project that reimagines rest and care as a lens for art-historical revision. Stemming from Gwen Raverat’s work, the exhibition explores how women artists have used the reclining or resting body to articulate resistance, fatigue and repair.

Drawing on feminist disability studies and my own experience of chronic illness, the paper will examine a form of feminist crip curation — an approach that treats rest not as absence, but as a mode of creating. Emphasising the importance of the pre-existing work of feminist disability scholars and the politics of refusal, I will further argue the importance of a feminist art history expanding to accommodate illness and access as a central rather than a peripheral concern.

Through the Sleepers Community Quilt, co-created with Cambridge women’s groups, the exhibition also reframes care as collective historiography — stitching together overlooked narratives of labour and intimacy. The paper will situate these practices within contemporary debates on intersectionality and institutional feminism, proposing rest as part of a feminist methodology. This paper will examine the practice of feminist art history through a lived, curatorial lens.

Laura Guy, Glasgow School of Art

Dyke Research

Over the last decade or so, various projects have invited new audiences to engage with the groundbreaking lesbian photography practices that took root in the feminist 1970s and flourished throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. Through the circulation of images on social media platforms and in exhibitions and print publications, this renewed engagement manifests networked herstories of lesbian image-making. In this paper, I propose the term ‘dyke research’ to capture the affective attachments signalled by these projects and the queer labour that they entail. Looking at how herstories have been historically important to the project of making lesbian images, I will focus on a series of projects that staged herstories of lesbian photography as a process of learning in and for the present. Sewn through this paper are my own encounters with lesbian photography practice as a dyke researcher. In this way, the act of researching is connected to embodied experiences of spectatorship and community—experiences that I argue are integral to the preservation of these histories and the new forms of dyke practice that emerge from them.