"Does this really matter?" Art history, feminism, and peripheral positions?

GLUZMAN, GEORGINA

New York

Conferencia; College Art Association 105th Annual Conference; 2017

College Art Association

In Argentina, feminist studies in art history are still thin on the ground. The starting point for this paper is my experience at developing a regular undergraduate course on ?Women and Art? at the Universidad de San Andrés (Argentina). I will analyze both the institutional atmosphere that led to its creation and the innovation it introduces to the Argentine university curricula, where courses on the topic are rare and not sustained over time. I will also ask and answer questions regarding the limits of teaching feminist art histories as a tool of decolonization of art history in Argentina and, more broadly speaking, Latin America. Is it possible to avoid the Euro-American canon (from Artemisia Gentileschi to Judy Chicago), already established by some feminist art historians? How to give voice to Argentine and Latin American women artists, whose herstories are often yet to be written? I will address these topics from my position in Latin America (and specifically from Argentina), expecting to establish a global conversation concerning the role of feminism in teaching, the obliteration of female creativity by masculinist art histories, and the difficulties faced by emerging areas of research in undergraduate education.