GWSS 235 A: Global Feminist Art

Autumn 2023
View in MyPlan View in Time Schedule
Meeting:
TTh 11:30am - 1:20pm / GUG 220
SLN:
16150
Section Type:
Lecture
Joint Sections:
ANTH 235 A
Instructor:
Syllabus Description (from Canvas):

Course Information

GWSS/ANTH 235 A: Global Feminist Art 

Autumn 2023 [syllabus pdf]
Time: TTh 11:30-1:20
Classroom: Guggenheim 220

Instructor

Professor Sasha Su-Ling Welland (she/her/hers)

Email: swelland@uw.edu*
Office Hours: Mon 2:00-3:00
Office: Padelford Hall B-110L (inside main GWSS office)

Teaching Assistants

Ayda Apa Pomeshikov (she/her/hers)

Email: ayda@uw.edu
Office Hours: Tues 1:30-2:30 or by appt.
Office: Allen Library Research Commons - Booth D (or near Booth D)

Tess Chen (she/her/hers)

Email: tchen01@uw.edu
Office Hours: Thurs 2:00-3:00
Office: Padelford B-111

Danwei Zhu (she/her/hers)

Email: danwezhu@uw.edu
Office Hours: Tues 2:00-3:00 or by appt.
Office: Padelford B-111

*Please note: Every effort will be made to respond to email within 72 hours.

About the Course

  • Can art move you to understand the world in different terms?
  • How have feminist and queer artists and critics looked power in the eye?
  • Do women really have to be naked to get into the Met?
  • Is the Met really the place for feminist and queer intervention?

COURSE DESCRIPTION

In 1989 the U.S.-based group of anonymous artists called the Guerrilla Girls issued the following question with their Metropolitan Museum poster campaign: Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Guerrilla Girls ads like this one have been published in magazines, pasted on signboards for street protests, and plastered on bathroom walls in museums and theaters. Their anonymous, collective work, which involves image making, performance, and institutional critique, serves as one example of feminist art practice. It has also incited critique of feminist art movements that center white, Euro-American artists and their work.

Feminist art cannot be classified as a style, like impressionism or cubism; nor is it bound to a particular medium, like painting or quilting; nor is it simply art by women. Feminist art challenges norms and conventions; it embraces multiple media; it critiques intersectional inequities rooted in gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationality; it proposes alternative ways of seeing the world. In other words, feminist art is an epistemological field of practice rather than an object, event, or project, in which thinking relationally, in terms of social hierarchies, aesthetic form, and ideology, is foundational.

This course takes that premise to the global level, to ask:

  1. How are social categories like gender and sexuality constructed in similar and different ways across cultures, as well as through transnational cultural encounters?
  2. How does the work of feminist and queer artists respond to these powerful formations, which are shaped by local and global forces?

Rather than assuming that feminist art begins in the West, as origin stories like the formation of the Guerrilla Girls sometimes suggest, we explore an art history of innovation and intervention emerging from centers like Johannesburg and Mumbai, Tehran and Beijing to also ask if women have to be Western to get into textbooks of feminist art.

The first two weeks of the course address foundational questions such as “what is feminism,” “what is art,” “what is visual culture,” and “what is feminist art.” An overview of how feminist art has been institutionalized focuses our attention on critical sight lines occluded by canon formation. After that, each week of the course presents a case study that introduces students to debates about gender, sexuality, nation, and artistic representation based in specific cultural, historical, and political contexts. With this background as interpretive lens, we then explore the work of specific artists and configurations of power their artistic practices challenge. An emphasis on feminist transnationalism throughout unsettles static understandings of gender, culture, and identity.

While this is a lecture course, close-looking exercises in the classroom are designed to sharpen students’ visual analysis skills and spark further discussion in TA-led sections. Students will be evaluated on their comprehension of core concepts in the field of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies in relation to the artists and artworks introduced in class; they will also complete assignments that explore and contribute to the project of feminist knowledge production. 

For GWSS Majors: This class fulfills the Global Identity Formations and Building Social, Cultural, and Political Movements for Change focus points and the Transnational Perspective requirement.

COURSE OBJECTIVES

  • To explore how art shapes and transforms understandings of gender, sexuality, race, class, culture, and power on local and global scales, while decentering the West as the origin and epicenter of feminism, art, and feminist art.
  • To develop close looking and visual analysis skills through written, oral, and visual forms of communication.
  • To develop an understanding that we cannot interpret artworks or understand feminist interventions without understanding context: the social location and historical background of artist, artwork, and audience.
  • To practice an interdisciplinary feminist approach to art through course assignments that guide students to analyze visual form together with the social, political, and economic dimensions of art objects and practices.
  • To develop collaboration and presentation skills, with an emphasis on accountability, critical thinking, and creativity.

COURSE READINGS

There is no textbook for this course. All materials are available via Canvas through Files and arranged by weekly modules. A complete bibliography of materials is also included in Files.

Course Slides: PDF files of class slides will be uploaded each week to the Canvas course files page.
Additional Materials: One dedicated note/sketchbook for the course (suggested)

Research Resources:

The following books are suggested reference material for class assignments that require some independent research. Click on the links below for UW Libraries catalogue entry, location, and call number. This list is just a start. You should have fun exploring the Art Library! You can also use this resource guide created by UW Librarians specifically for this course.

Other Research Resources:

The following films will be shown in class. If you miss these screenings or want to watch the films again, they can be streamed online.

  • Lynn Hershman Leeson (director), WAR: Women, Art, Revolution. This film is also now available as an evideo for online streaming through the UW Libraries.
  • Zanele Muholi and Peter Goldsmid (directors), Difficult Love. This film is available for online streaming through IMDb: www.imdb.com/videoplayer/vi3128728089.

ASSIGNMENTS & EVALUATION 

Each student’s performance will be evaluated as follows:

  • Discussion Board Posts (5 x 5% each): 25%
  • In-Class Exam: 25%
  • Visual Analysis Paper: 10%
  • Curatorial Project: Group Presentation: 15%
  • Curatorial Project: Individual Paper: 25%

Grading Criteria:

4.0 – achievement outstanding relative to the level necessary to meet course requirements
3.0 – achievement significantly above the level necessary to meet course requirements
2.0 – achievement meeting the basic course requirements in every respect
1.0 – achievement worthy of credit that does not meet basic course requirements

The GWSS grade scale provides precise GPA conversions. Incomplete grades may only be awarded if a student is doing satisfactory work up until the last two weeks of the quarter. 

Class Participation & Discussion Board Posts: Active, prepared participation in class and discussion sections is essential to success in this course. Students are expected to complete the readings by the day they are listed in the syllabus to think about them in relation to material presented in the lectures. Please bring the assigned texts to class and discussion section so that you can refer to them. The contextualization provided in course lectures is vital to interpreting the artworks and understanding the key ideas covered; the lectures are therefore a critical component of your learning and should be referenced in your discussion board posts.

There will be five discussion boards, opened in Canvas for weeks 2-6, with specific prompts for each week. Your posts of no less than 150 words will provide the foundation for discussion in the Friday TA-led sections. Your submissions will be due by 11:59 pm on Thursday. In-depth engagement with course materials through your written posts and the practice they provide in the skills of visual and feminist analysis will also prepare you for the in-class exam.

In-Class Exam: This short-essay exam will assess students’ comprehension of readings and material covered in class lectures and discussion from Weeks 1-6. One half of the exam will be a visual analysis of images to be projected on screen during the exam.  

Visual Analysis Paper: This four-page writing exercise asks students to: 1) seek out and research an artist not included in course materials; and 2) to describe, contextualize, and analyze one of their artworks. The research and thinking through writing about an artwork of your choosing will serve as the foundation for your contribution to the group curatorial project. A handout with instructions will be distributed during Week 5, with the paper due during Week 8.

Curatorial Project—Group Presentation: Working in small groups (of four to five), students will collaborate to conceptualize and develop a proposal for a “dream feminist art exhibition.” Groups will be organized within Friday discussion sections so that you have dedicated time to work together with TA supervision. A written proposal will serve as the basis for a Pecha Kucha talk (20 slides x 20 seconds per slide) to be rehearsed and presented in Friday sections during Weeks 10 and 11. A handout with detailed instructions and workflow plan will be distributed together with the Visual Analysis Paper prompt during Week 5.

Curatorial Project—Individual Paper: Each group member will write a more in-depth essay that puts the artist/artworks they chose for the proposed exhibit in relation to at least one other artist included to reflect upon the analytic ideas central to this course and the overarching exhibit idea develop by the group. You will receive more detailed instructions and guidance on this capstone assignment as we near the end of the quarter.

LEARNING RESPONSIBILITIES

Academic Integrity: Behaving with integrity is part of our responsibility to our shared learning community. It is therefore essential that all of us engaged in the life of the mind take the utmost care to appropriately handle the ideas and expressions of other people. For assignments in which the ideas or materials of others are used, they must be cited. For assignments in this class that require citations, please use Chicago Style formatting. In any situation, if you have a question, please feel free to ask. Such attention to ideas and acknowledgment of their sources is central not only to academic life, but life in general. Please acquaint yourself with the University of Washington's resources on Academic Conduct. Acts of academic misconduct may include but are not limited to cheating (sharing answers and previewing quizzes/exams) and plagiarism (representing the work of others as your own without giving appropriate credit to the original author(s). 

What about ChatGPT? We have entered new, still relatively uncharted territory when it comes to AI, and I assume that many, if not all, of you are experimenting with how ChatGPT may or may not play a role in your education. Please keep in mind that the current sources it has to draw upon in relation to our course materials and assignments may be relatively thin, possibly inaccurate even if authoritatively stated, and even confabulated. In fact, we’ll try a few group exercises in class to test the limits of AI-based tools and discuss the implications of using them in relation to our course learning objectives. When it comes to learning with and through art in complex ways, writing is not a product to simply generate but is the process itself of developing critical, creative thought. I have carefully designed class assignments with that in mind. I’m not interested in policing use of AI-based tools, but I am interested to know if you find them useful in any way to your development as a critical thinker. If you use ChatGPT or other tool as part of an assignment, please be transparent. Explain what you used it for and the extent to which it pushed your feminist and visual analysis skills further. That said, the academic integrity statement above holds for machines as much as humans.

Classroom Community: This is your education. Make the most of it. You are learning from the course materials, the instructors, and each other. You will have different viewpoints and perhaps even strong feeling about certain topics discussed in class. The different perspectives you bring are vital to the learning process. We expect you to listen to each other with respect, interest, openness, and attentiveness. It is my intent that students from diverse backgrounds will be well served by this course and that the materials presented will respect differences of gender, sexuality, disability, age, class, ethnicity, race, and culture. Your suggestions are encouraged and appreciated. Interacting in an informed way also requires responsibility to yourself and others to keep up with the readings so that you can contribute in a meaningful way in class and discussion section. It also means doing the work agreed upon in collaborative work so your partners are not forced to pick up your slack; and being assertive about a group member who may be slacking.

Feminist Pedagogy: Feminist analysis of the world moves across scales, making connections between sociopolitical structures and embodied, everyday lives. In discussion of course materials, students may choose to share personal experiences. Be respectful and keep that person’s story safe: don’t talk about it outside of class without gaining their explicit consent. Remain open to the ongoing work of introspection and unsettling normative assumptions; this individual and collective theorizing is hard but potentially world changing. Please use preferred pronouns and other identifying language with care, while realizing we all are learning.  

Technology: Please turn cell phones, wifi, and alerts off or on vibrate during class so that you can devote your full attention to lecture and discussion and provide a distraction-free learning environment. Students may use laptops or tablets to take notes, but please demonstrate respect for your peers by refraining from any other activity. Always request permission from the instructor and other students before recording any class content.

Late Assignment Policy & Communication: All assignments should be submitted via Canvas by 11:59 pm of the due date. Assignments submitted late will receive a -10% grade deduction for each day past the deadline. Students requesting an extension in extraordinary circumstances may petition the instructor at least 48 hours in advance of the deadline. Extensions are rare and should not be relied upon. No extension can be assumed without a written response. Please feel free to speak with us for further clarification of assignments or if you have questions about course materials. We make every effort to respond to email within 72 hours. Students who have lengthy or complex questions should meet with us during office hours. As an instructor, I want to help you learn and would much prefer to get to know you and talk in person than through email!

Content Warnings: Many of the artists whose work you will view respond to how visual imagery is implicated in histories of colonial, racial, and sexual violence and conquest. Please process with knowledge of this and care for yourself. If there is material that disturbs your wellbeing, take a break from it, and return when and if you are able. It is helpful for us to know if you are unable to engage with any specific materials; please let us know so that we can arrange alternative means for you to achieve the course learning objectives. We will never ask you to disclose details about what you are experiencing. In Friday sections, students will also work together to formulate other possible approaches to the question of content warnings.

Access and Accommodations: Your experience in this class is important to me. It is the policy and practice of the University of Washington to create inclusive and accessible learning environments consistent with federal and state law. If you have already established accommodations with Disability Resources for Students (DRS), please activate your accommodations via myDRS so we can discuss how they will be implemented in this course. If you have not yet established services through DRS but have a temporary health condition or permanent disability that requires accommodations (conditions include but not limited to; mental health, attention-related, learning, vision, hearing, physical or health impacts), contact DRS directly to set up an Access Plan. DRS facilitates the interactive process that establishes reasonable accommodations. Contact DRS at disability.uw.edu. 

Religious Accommodations: Washington state law requires that UW develop a policy for accommodation of student absences or significant hardship due to reasons of faith or conscience, or for organized religious activities. The UW’s policy, including more information about how to request an accommodation, is available at Religious Accommodations Policy. Accommodations must be requested within the first two weeks of this course using the Religious Accommodations Request form. 

WRITING CENTERS

SEATTLE MUSEUMS & ART RESOURSES

UW POLICIES & STUDENT RESOURCES

UW HEALTH & WELLNES RESOURCES

WHAT CAN I DO WITH A GWSS DEGREE?

WHAT IF I HAVE A GRADING OR COURSE CONCERN?

Catalog Description:
Introduces feminism as a way of thinking about visual art practice in terms of social hierarchy, aesthetic form, and ideology. Explores how feminist artists working in diverse locations and cultural traditions challenge, at the local and global level, artistic conventions and representations of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationality. Offered: jointly with ANTH 235.
GE Requirements Met:
Social Sciences (SSc)
Arts and Humanities (A&H)
Credits:
5.0
Status:
Active
Last updated:
December 24, 2024 - 11:50 pm