Faith Wilding
On
May 7, 1971, Everywoman magazine
(“Everywoman is our sister”) published a special issue. Designed by Sheila De
Bretteville in a tabloid format sporting a gigantic set of hot pink lips across
the entire cover page, the magazine announced: “This issue was done completely
by a woman’s collective in Fresno––Miss Chicago and the California Girls”(1).
The text next to the lips on the front page proclaims:
“Miss Chicago and the California girls:
Sixteen women with a lot of cunt.
Sixteen bitches.
Sixteen witches.
…………….
WE ARE FREE WE ARE FREE WE ARE FREE
And Sister You Had Better Believe It!”(2)
Everywoman
encapsulated many of the issues, images, and attitudes that became signatory
for 1970s feminist art education and activism (both collective and individual)
on the West Coast: The bold, contemporary tabloid format rather than messy,
hippie psychedelia; the sharply printed text overlaying blowups of each woman’s
face featured on her own page; the representation of intimacy and individuality
within a collective whole; the pink lips as an icon of a newly assertive and
sexual femininity—all were indicators of a radical new moment of feminist
consciousness. Further, many of the texts boldly declared the primacy of female
sexual liberation, including the assertion of desire and the demand for sexual
satisfaction, as the basis for a new-found female subjectivity and self
valuation: “As long as we could not make demands for sexual satisfaction, we
would not be able to break through more rigid taboos to obtain satisfaction in
any other parts of our lives. Not being able to make demands to fulfill our
needs is deeply rooted in our psyches as women and constitutes the greater part
of our damage.”(3)
Primary
among the issues discussed was consciousness-raising (CR). Borrowed from the
model of “speaking our bitterness” used to organize peasant groups during the
Chinese Cultural Revolution, CR became a key organizing and activist tool of
the women’s liberation movement in the U.S. beginning in the late 1960s. Since it was based on describing and
analyzing individual lived experience, CR was seen as a process that could be
used equally well by women from different classes, races, levels of education,
backgrounds and interest groups. Many early feminist publications, educational
projects, women’s clinics and health projects, labor union and equal rights
actions, and the like first sprang from CR group discussions. CR’s fundamental
importance to feminist organizing, education, art, and action was articulated
by Suzanne Lacy in the Everywoman
issue: “Putting forth your experiences, individually and collectively, in the
context of work is at once individually life-giving and also vital to the
building of a feminist culture. Consciousness-raising is necessary to prepare
us for the magnitude of the task of the complete reconstruction of our
culture.” (4)
CR
was notable for countering the authoritarian patriarchal voices of religious
tradition, psychoanalysis, and sociological theory by eliciting and validating
women’s personal experience, intensity, and subjectivity. Quickly moving beyond
expressing bitterness in CR sessions, women began to speak about the direct
experiences of female embodiment in heretofore unprecedented ways: Sexual acts and
feelings, orgasm, motherhood, reproduction, lesbianism, pleasure, food, body
image, rape, domestic labor, and the like were given a new vocabulary of
expression. This taught women more clearly than could any theoretical textbook
how we adapt our bodies to the dictates of culture, and how our bodies become
signs of gender. I believe many of us experienced
subjectivity consciously for the first time in CR, just as we taught each other
about orgasm. Such intimate revelations often uncovered the immense amount of
internalized insecurity, pain, and self-loathing that many women harbored in
secret and alone.
As well as creating great solidarity among
women personally, such confessions also had their social dimensions: On one
hand they resulted in much powerful (though admittedly often crude and naïve)
art that expressed anger and outrage about women’s collective pain; on the
other hand, they prompted the desire to honor and celebrate women’s bodies and
bodily expression in new cultural and social
formations. Boldly, women declared the old definitions of gender roles
oppressive and tried to perform new ones, or they tried to transcend them
altogether, declaring that they could be anything they wanted to be. It was a
short-lived utopian moment when every aspect of female experience, whether
negative or positive, seemed an important object of exploration and experiment,
as it added to the knowledge of that which had been unspoken for so long. It
was a moment in which the complexity of lived interactions of the personal,
political, and social became increasingly palpable, a moment of intensity and collective delirium that is hard to
recapture in description now. Ultimately it was from this outburst of speaking
“the truth about the body”(5) and examining the phenomenology of becoming woman
that much of the impetus and subject matter for feminist theorizing in the
1980s developed.
The
centrality of CR to feminist process began to fade during the late 1970s when
much public feminist debate and activism also began to become fragmented by
internal factionalism and by media and market pressures. As a result of the
institutionalization of feminism, feminist theory grew rapidly as an academic
field in the early 1980s, and theory reading
groups began to supplant CR groups. By the late 1980s, women were most likely
to encounter feminism through academic feminism, reading groups, gender
studies, and more rarely through activist participation in feminist organizing
and participation in experiential feminism such as CR. Consequently many young
feminists now have a strong theoretical background rather than one rooted in
the lived experience and activist practice in which CR had been such a
liberatory tool for an earlier generation of feminists.
In
September 1998, Mira Schor, myself, and several other original Feminist Art
Program (FAP) members were invited to participate in a “working symposium”, The
F Word: Contemporary Feminisms and the Legacy of the Los Angeles Feminist Art
Movement, organized by a group of
students and alumni calling themselves FAWS (Feminist Art Workshops) to be held
at CalArts in October 1998. As described by FAWS organizer Andrea Richards, one
goal of the symposium was “to better establish the original participants’
legacy, foster understanding of contemporary feminism, and create a dialogue
between different generations associated with feminist practice”(6). As part of
the events leading up to the symposium, I was asked to facilitate a
consciousness-raising session at CalArts for any woman who wished to
participate. This request both surprised and excited me, although I was also
skeptical. I hadn’t been in a classical CR session myself since the late
70s—although I’d been in several reading groups. I wondered, was CR a form that
could still have any viable function in contemporary feminism? Could the ironic
modes prevailing today be put aside to allow for the intensity and personal
vulnerability CR demanded? However, it seemed that FAWS was genuinely committed
to understanding as much of the histories of the feminist (art) movement from
an experiential point of view as possible. For them, doing CR entailed a
certain amount of risk; for me it meant a chance to engage with a different
generation of women artists in a feminist process. So I agreed to facilitate a
CR meeting, and to keep to the rules of confidentiality that CR demands as a
basis for trust and honesty among the members (7).
On
the appointed night, about fifteen women (mostly white) representing quite a
range of ages, gathered in an austere room at CalArts. We sat in a circle on rather uncomfortable
chairs. (I thought nostalgically of the comfortable “rap room” we had created
at the original Fresno studio, with piles of big floor pillows on a colorful
carpet quilt.) The atmosphere was somewhat cautious, though friendly. We broke
the ice by going around the room and introducing ourselves. Next we tried to
agree on a topic to discuss. Nobody suggested discussing sex, mothers, money,
power, men, or our bodies (the hot topics we usually pounced on first in the
1970s). Many of the women wanted to address practical problems, such as working
together for the first time, and the conflicts between private artistic
ambition and political work. I formulated some of the different issues
mentioned into the CR topic for the evening: State your desires and ambitions
for yourself in terms of being an artist, an activist, and a feminist. How do
these identities intersect in your life? What are your problems, or obstacles,
in realizing your desires?
To
provide some background, I spoke about the historical experience of CR and discussed the classic “rules” (see
side-bar). They wanted personal history, anecdotes, and experiences, and
listened with great interest as I recalled some of our more incendiary sessions
(including the one about physical appearance after which several of the Fresno
students cut off all their long, beautiful hair). They raised questions about
CRs’ contemporary viability—could it act as pragmatic theory to be put to use
in artistic and activist practice now (as it had often been in the past)? What
about CR as a strategy for building coalitions and practices across
generations, races, and classes? Can CR be an organizing tool outside the
context of a visible, socially and politically grounded, active feminist
movement? Can it be updated as an organizing tool now, and if so, how?
In
classic CR fashion each woman in turn then addressed the topic, speaking
uninterruptedly about her own experiences and feelings. As they spoke it became
clearer to me how differently the challenges and risks of being feminists were
experienced by these women compared to my own experience. I was moved by the
complexity of their positions and choices. These women had grown up enjoying
many of the “benefits” feminists had struggled for in the past. And yet they
often found themselves groping for ways to individually confront the real
issues of sexism still operating in their school, home, and work environments. They were sensitive to the privileged
positions they occupied as educated (mostly white) middle-class women, yet they
felt alone again––perhaps even silenced by this awareness of privilege––bereft
both of a feminist support network and of viable new strategies to organize
group action. Until organizing FAWS they had not realized their desire to work
together for common goals, and now they were wondering how to build on this
experience. Past decades of turbulent feminist activism, and all the mechanisms
and strategies that had been developed and practiced then, had to be rethought
in the light of new conditions now. They felt they had to reinvent feminist
action and being for themselves on their own terms. Thus they had begun in the
time honored way by looking back at feminist history—specifically that of their
own institution (CalArts)––that had pretty much been purged from institutional
memory. This prompted more questions: How and why does this loss of feminist
history continue to happen? To what end do we want to recuperate this history
now? How can this history help us as artists grappling with contemporary issues
of embodiment, difference, and the new technologies?
I
have mentioned that the CalArts women felt they had taken a risk by doing CR
and organizing the F Word symposium. On the last day of the symposium, several
of them approached me privately to thank me and tell me that the CR session had
been the most significant event of the week for them. They also begged me not
to tell anyone that we’d done it because they were afraid of being ridiculed by
other students or colleagues. When I
began this essay I considered honoring this request, but the more I thought
about it, the clearer it became that the question of risk was central to many
of the conflictual questions that the CR session and the symposium had raised;
consequently it seemed crucial to address it here directly. What exactly were
these women risking by doing CR and thus being associated with 1970s feminism?
And, more crucially, what price were they actually paying for their risk? These
were talented, educated, articulate women in one of the country’s elite art
schools. They had enlisted the institutional support of a strong feminist
provost, the wife of CalArts’ president
(also a faculty member), and the president, as well as many faculty and
a considerable number of both male and female students. True, they had had some
difficulty persuading the student activities committee to divert a small amount
of the considerable sums usually reserved for the all-important CalArts
Halloween bash toward a cause that was not deemed to have sufficient general
interest and benefit to merit funding; and there had been some incidents of
sexist sniping by students and faculty. Thirty years ago, the Feminist Art
Program had also received much initial support from the institution and from
then Art School Dean, Paul Brach (husband of Miriam Schapiro). We had been
given our own studio and funding, as well as graduate assistantships and
scholarships for several of the original Fresno students. The FAP had used this
support to help pioneer a highly visible, groundbreaking feminist art movement
on the West Coast, as well as to take a confrontational and institutionally
critical position at CalArts. The FAP had been separatist in the strategic
feminist fashion of the early 1970s, and as such had attracted quite a bit of
hostility during its tenure at the school. As we’ve seen, most of the program’s
traces were quickly buried once it was discontinued. It is worth noting that
Judy Chicago, Sheila De Bretteville, and Arlene Raven, who cofounded the
Feminist Studio Workshop, an alternative feminist art program in the Woman’s
Building, all left CalArts because they felt that the institution undermined
their radical pedagogical and cultural ideas.
In
the 1980s, feminist art generally became something that one should be catious
of being associated with, as it was considered an essentialist practice, yet it
had a lasting (if unacknowledged) influence in both art schools and the art
mainstream––as was attested to by several of the women faculty who had been
active feminists in the 1970s. It seems that as long as it could be located in
1980s-sanctioned feminist theory studies, feminism was institutionally
tolerated. In retrospect, it’s clear that the Feminist Art Program, which was
activist and social in nature, was not assimilated into the school in ways that
would continue to provide a generative and visible legacy for women students to
draw upon. The institution itself does not advertise its feminist legacy––to my
knowledge it has never been used as a recruiting or fund-raising focus, for
example, nor has CalArts made any effort to properly archive the FAP. Clearly,
this all contributes to the sense of risk that contemporary women students feel
there when they identify themselves as feminists. Fundamentally they are afraid
that overt feminism will count against them in the cultural marketplace that
the institution represents, and for which it is preparing them. After all, none
of the program’s graduates went on to become bigtime art stars like some of
their CalArts contemporaries such as David Salle, Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl,
and Matt Mullican. By attempting to keep one foot firmly in the institution,
these young feminists are trying to straddle a difficult divide. Hence their
conflicts about the F Word, secrecy, and being identified as outspoken
feminists. Yet the F Word Symposium was a hopeful gesture; perhaps as a result
of this experience these relatively privileged young women will be inspired to
use their positions to become active feminist leaders at their institutions and
in the art world. To do this they must be willing once again to question the
models of individual success and achievement still presented as the norm in art
schools today.
Herein
lies another point of risk; the women students repeatedly voiced sensing that
there are conflicts between making their own work and working collectively or
collaboratively. Does one have to work collectively to make feminist art, they
asked? To be feminist, does the work have to be about women directly? Can you
be a feminist and not make feminist art? How does one translate feminist theory
and ideas into art works? In the Fresno Program and in Womanhouse, CR had been the principal tool for arriving at subject
matter for our work. Our collective process had often generated collaborative
work, but it had also fueled and supported individual work. Currently, the lack of a shared experiential
or social feminist process (such as CR) among
feminists means most contemporary feminist art is no longer produced in the
context of a visible political/social feminist movement. This calls for
tactical changes in both the conditions of creation and of distribution of
feminist art. How can feminist projects be shaped to address these new
conditions and the new relations between artists, audiences, and feminism?
In
Everywoman I had written, “We are
finding a body of work created by women which uncovers and expresses a world of
values which is very different from the male world of values which has been
supreme for thousands of years. Our task is to expand, cultivate and promote
our female values until they change the world as it now exists”(8). While this
statement would be branded as naïve and essentialist today, it speaks of a
central early feminist strategy—that of using past feminist tactics and women’s
histories as sources and models for new feminist work. Crucially, it also
incorporates the recognition that a new subjectivity—a new consciousness—and
its active cultural and social expression will
change the world eventually. In A Room of
One’s Own,Virginia Woolf points to the importance of women writing their
own histories as one among several strategies for women artists. She suggests
women create female histories by “writing” the work of other women artists and
practitioners into their own work through quotation, reference, appropriation,
and fictional reconstruction. I suggest that this tactic is more viable than
ever today, and has the possibility of producing more radical social and
political effects than the parodic and ironic appropriations of the work of
male artists and media images so widely practiced by many women artists in the
1980s. For one thing it revitalizes and
elucidates an often hidden history of female dissent and subversion that is
found in many different cultural traditions. Rather than focusing solely on the
oppressions of women (which tends to reify patriarchal hierarchies and gender
division), it seeks out tactics of resistance, strength, and selfinvention. For
another, it interrupts the often uncritical repetitious flow and recirculation
of media(ted) images on which most appropriation rests and introduces new
images, knowledges, and skills, and proposes subjectivities not based on reaction
but on desire and invention.
Conflicts
between personal success, ambition, and committed feminism were mentioned
repeatedly in the CalArts CR session: Can you be a feminist and still read Vogue magazine? Do feminists have to be
outsiders? Shall we work inside or outside the art world? Should we engage
dominant art ideologies and trends, or do we critique them and try to create
our own?
These
questions speak to the complex issues of gender stereotyping, gender performance, difference, and
separatism in feminisms and feminist art making. In the early 1970s it was an
important tactic of feminist education, activism, and solidarity to create
separatist groups and institutions in which women could be independent of men
and learn the uses of power and self determination. Contrast this to the 1990s
when many young women with feminist sympathies are afraid of being publicly
identified as such. Instead of being outspoken feminists, young women are
offered the role of the (cool) bad girrl, who is very much in the mainstream of
culture and fashion. Although in the past, the bad grrl may have been seen as
subversive in her parody of traditional female roles and subjection, currently
this image is so overcoded as to be virtually useless as a figure of
resistance. One need only surf some of the grrl sites on the Web to understand
how profoundly the bad grrl image is rooted in stereotypes that recirculate
female transgression under the sign of commodified sexuality, violence, and
supposed female superiority. Furthermore, voluntarily playing the role of bad
grrl is a privileged position, considering the punishments meted out to classes
of women who are societies’ (usually) involuntary bad girls, including sex
workers, prostitutes, welfare and unwed mothers, innercity black teens, illegal
aliens, lesbians, and the like. I
suggest it is more subversive to make common cause with them, and to search for
radical models for feminist action and becoming in unpublicized, uncommodified,
and unpopular places where women are resisting various economic, social, and
political oppressions, than to continue to excavate the same narrow trove of
western cultural representations. To do this one must be willing to find allies
and forge coalitions across territories heretofore little explored.
The
CalArts CR session raised further crucial questions: Can one be a feminist
(artist) without being engaged in group action or activism? What counts as
activism? What are possible new feminist formations both locally and globally?
In this gloomy moment of capitalist market saturation and stock market
liberalism, I am struck by the utopian desire expressed in the declarations of
the ultimate goals of feminism and feminist art in the Everywoman issue: “Our task is to expand, cultivate, and promote
our female values until they change the world as it now exists,” and
“Consciousness-raising is necessary to prepare us for the magnitude of the task
of the complete reconstruction of our culture.” Granted, this was in another
time and in a very different social climate. Nevertheless, we fervently
believed that cultural transformations induced by deploying new feminist
consciousness and practices produced new subjectivities and desires for
liberatory, creative, and variant modes of living in the world.
I
suspect that much bad grrl posturing may act as a protective personal
smokescreen for tremendous ambiguity among many younger women, and that it
masks the absence of an activist feminist philosophy adequate to Guattari’s Age
of Planetary Computerization. It is crucial for feminists to address the
question of how to reorganize and revitalize feminist action within a global
culture that is being radically reconstructed by the worldwide introduction of
interactive telecommunications and the accompanying consolidation of
pancapitalist power. In light of this consolidation and the increased economic
and social stratification it produces, it would seem that there is a greater
need than ever for communication, solidarity, and creative sociopolitical
movement among marginalized, disenfranchised, and minoritarian segments of the
population. The irony—and perhaps also the seed of radical possibility—lies in
the fact that the livelihoods of middle=
and workingclass first world women are now inextricably linked to those
of third world (rural) women and (urban) sweatshop/factory workers by a network
of global marketing, communication, and production forces that still hold
profit to be the master goal of life.
In
widening my focus here from the issues raised by the CalArts CR session to
consider the global possibilities of feminism, I am acknowledging my own
desires for personal and collective resistance and activism within an
increasingly electronically networked world.
If one surfs the Web, it quickly becomes evident that there’s in fact a
lot of organized feminist activity in many parts of the world, although this
fact is rarely advertised in any of the mainstream media (9).
As
Avital Ronell, Donna Haraway, and others have pointed out, it behooves
feminists
to become technologically skilled and knowledgeable lest the new
technologies
of global communication and domination once again perpetuate and strengthen the
same old male culture and power structures. In this regard,
feminists
who have access to technological privileges need to be particularly
alert
to cultural, racial, and economic differences in the way women work,
live,
and use technology globally––differences that are rapidly shifting and
increasing
with the onrush of technological "advancement."
In
recent years interactive telecommunications technologies have been
causing
profound changes (globally) in social and political cultures.
Increasingly,
globalized society is being territorialized by western aesthetic
and
market strategies and cultural formations. Many supposedly alternative
subversive strategies have been
harnessed by pancapitalism to capture new markets and consumers everywhere. This situation acts as a rallying cry for a
new (cyber)feminism for the 21st
century. A diversity of critical,
aesthetic,
and cultural feminist practices are becoming more and more relevant and
necessary to decode, critique, and subvert the languages and practices of
global capitalist culture.
In
my panel presentation at the F Word symposium, I asked: What are the
possibilities offered by the new technologies for a networked feminism? What
are the conditions necessary for agency and female subjectivity in a wired and
globalized world? To my mind, these can be leading projects for feminist
artists and activists today. Some energetic new cyberfeminists are already busy
creating liberatory and empowering uses of communications technologies and
attempting incursions into the masculinist culture of the Internet. As I have
written elsewhere (10) we should not look to the utopian magic of a liberating
technology for the hard cultural work that needs to be done. Rather, women's
tactical and imaginative uses of the Internet are already bringing about new
social formations and associations among very different constituencies.
For
example, some female hackers and computer engineers, as well as artists and
tinkerers, are acquiring technological knowledge which if used strategically—and
even metaphorically––could seriously disrupt and disturb the still
overwhelmingly male culture of the Internet. Such disruptions presuppose a
close entwinement of political and tactical thinking and technological
know-how––something that is quite possible given current international feminist
resources. One can imagine other interventions: Feminist spokeswomen and policy
makers could communicate about labor, employment, and displacement issues with
activists working in diverse locations with working-class and poor women (who
are often not connected to on-line resources). Feminist health, environmental,
and medical workers could directly monitor the effects of the new biomedical
and genetic technologies on different groups of women, and the like. Instead of
being subjected to the irrelevancies of Jennicam (11), perhaps wired feminists
could figure out ways to become more familiar with day=to=day living conditions
and the new experiences of women and girls in the global integrated circuit.
When the first Cyberfeminist International met at the Hybrid Workspace in
Kassel, we recorded our discussions on video daily, and also emailed a daily
report to the international women-only Faces list. Perhaps this was the
beginning of modeling a new feminist consciousness raising for the 21st
century––a networked, pangeographical, polyvocal conversation, embodied and
gathered locally and distributed globally by electronic means.
The
young women I met at CalArts are in a position to become feminist leaders. Why
else take the risk of revisiting feminist history, if not to be inspired by the
possibilities it envisioned for women in the future? I hope the F Word
Symposium was their first step toward new feminist movements.
Although
it was almost thirty years ago, I have not forgotten the powerful experiences
of consciousness raising. The passion and intensity of the discoveries women
made in CR are still palpably communicated by the artworks made during that
time. Feminism changed my life then and has shaped the trajectory I’ve taken
ever since. While I know it is possible to become a committed feminist without
a conversion experience, I also believe that feminism is an embodied knowledge
and practice that depends on sociality, collective work, and shared intensity
of experience—in the famous phrase of the 1970s, it demands that the personal
become the political. What I missed––I think what many missed––at the CalArts
symposium was a sense of affirming intensity and urgency. I am not arguing for
a utopian, unitary past that never was, but I miss the anger, the excitement,
the power surges coming from the recognition of shared insights and feelings in
CR, the sense of becoming a new kind of creature in action. Many women have
greater opportunities open to them now than ever before, yet they are dogged by
seemingly intractable past formations of patriarchy and inculcated gender
roles. Will these simply go away as the older generations die out? I’m afraid
not, for they are being perpetuated in the global cultures of the new
technologies. In analyzing and resisting this situation with passion, wit, and
courage lies the hope for a new activist networked feminism.
_________________________
Notes:
1.
This collective was the Fresno Feminist Art Program (FAP) begun by Judy Chicago
in the fall of 1970 at the State University of California in Fresno. A year later, Chicago and seven students
from Fresno moved the FAP to California Institute of the Arts, where it was
reconstituted as the CalArts Feminist Art Program, codirected by Judy Chicago
and Miriam Schapiro. The program’s groundbreaking project Womanhouse made international news in 1972. By 1975 both Chicago
and Schapiro had left CalArts, and the Feminist Program quickly became history
soon buried by the institution. By 1981 the CalArts 10th Anniversary
Show of Alumni included only two women (neither of them from the FAP) out of
the sixteen artists exhibited. And indeed by l997 the feminist legacy had
become so obsolete and cumbersome that a graduate student working in the CalArts
archives found a trash can full of discarded Womanhouse catalogs (now collector’s items) that were being thrown
out due to lack of space!
2.
Written by Judith Dancoff, a film student from UCLA who spent time in the
Fresno studio filming the day-to-day activities. Everywoman, Los Angeles. Special Issue. Volume 2, Issue 18, May 7,
1971.
3.
Cheryl Zurilgen “Becoming Conscious.” Ibid. p. 8.
4.
Suzanne Lacy, “After Consciousness Raising What?” Ibid. p. 10.
5.
It must be noted that CR and much of what I’m describing here was largely
practiced by middle-class white women in de facto segregated groups, even
though many of the participants had been active in the civil rights
movement––indeed they were aware that second wave feminism had been initiated
by black women in that movement who were tired of “being on their backs.” The
discourses of postcolonialism had not yet been formulated at this time.
However, there was a lot of feminist activism among black and Hispanic women,
and coalitions were often made across racial and ethnic groups for particular
feminist battles such as the right to paid abortions, and in working for the
Equal Rights Amendment.
6.
Cal Arts current, Vol. 11, No.1
November 1998. p 1.
7.
This need for confidentiality is different from the great ambivalence many
young women feel about associating themselves with aspects of the histories of
feminism that is reflected, for example, in the (only partly) ironic symposium
title The F Word.
8.
“Women Artists and Female Imagery,” Everywoman,
p. 19.
9.
When feminist opinions or progress reports are sought by pollsters and
journalists, they turn almost invariably to the usual spokeswomen from NOW or Ms Magazine. This perpetuates a fairly
homogeneous, middle-class, heterosexual, and white stereotype of contemporary
feminism in the public mind.
10.
Faith Wilding and Critical Art Ensemble, “Notes on the Political Condition of
Cyberfeminism.” New York, Art Journal,
Summer 1998. Vol. 57, No. 2. Faith Wilding, “Where is the Feminism in
Cyberfeminism?” London, nparadoxa,
Vol. 2, 1998, p. 6.
11. Jennicam
is an Internet project by a young white woman who continually transmits
scenes from her everyday life as recorded by a surveillance camera in her home.
(for printing in a side-bar)
(Excerpted
from “A Program for Feminist “Consciousness Raising,” originated by Kathie
Sarachild [Redstockings] and presented at the First National Women’s Liberation
Conference, Chicago, November 27, 1968.)
“Our
feelings will lead us to our theory, our theory to our action, our feelings
about that action to new theory and then to new action.
…
(This)
is a program planned on the assumption that a mass liberation movement will
develop as more and more women begin to perceive their situation correctly and
that, therefore, our primary task right now is to awaken “class” consciousness
in ourselves and others on a mass scale. The following outline is just one
hunch of what a theory of mass consciousness-raising would look like in
skeleton form.
I.
The “bitch session” cell group
1.
Personal
recognition and testimony
a.
Recalling
and sharing our bitter experiences
b.
Expressing
our feelings about our experiences…..
c.
Expressing
our feelings about ourselves, men, other women
d.
Evaluating
our feelings
2.
Personal
testimony––methods of group practice
a.
Going
around the room with key questions or key topics
b.
Speaking
our experiences––at random
c.
Cross
examination
3.
Relating
and generalizing individual testimony
a.Finding the common root when different
women have opposite feelings and experiences
b. Examining the negative and positive
aspects of each woman’s feelings and her way of dealing with her situation as a
woman”
(For
the complete article please see Notes
from the Second Year: Women’s
Liberation. Major Writings of the Radical Feminists. New York:
Redstockings, 1970.)