Visual Art and Black Feminist Theory

Catalog description

This course argues that black women disturb, dissolve, and give definition to the concepts of gender and racialization that shape the modern human. We will closely analyze black feminist theory alongside a wide-ranging survey of significant painting, sculpture, performance, photography, and installation art made by black women in the 19th to 21st centuries. Theoretical concepts representing the singular modes of dispossession that ensnare black femininity, as well as black femininity's re/production of the modern world—concepts such as black flesh, ungendering, fungibility, black mater, plasticity—will be applied to analysis of artworks and the artworks will in turn flesh out these concepts. We will utilize close textual analysis, visual analysis, and art historical context to interrogate the ways that black female artists illuminate, critique, and intervene on hegemonic constructions of gender and sexuality and art historical ideologies.