Session 1: Performing Gender

November 23rd, 2020, Monday, 8am EST
Join through Zoom: Meeting ID 880 8691 3297

As Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” What is this process of becoming?

In the very first session of Feminism Beyond the Body, a seminar developed by 2020-2021 fellow Aliza Shvarts for the Feminist Art Digital Program, we are going to explore artworks that deal with gender performativity, examining the processes by which we are called into difference. How might we think of the experience of gender difference as socially and historically constructed rather than as a static, ahistorical, essential or “natural” binary? And, what kinds of feminism become possible when we do not presume to already know what a “woman” is beforehand?

Suggested Reading:
Adrian Piper, “Xenophobia and the Indexical Present” and “My Calling (Cards) #1 and #2,” Out of Order, Out of Sight, Vol 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art, 1968-1992 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999)” 245-273, 219-221.
Judith Butler, “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990): 1-44.

Aliza Shvarts is an artist and theorist who takes a queer and feminist approach to reproductive labor and language. Her current work focuses on testimony and the circulation of speech in the digital age. Shvarts received her BA from Yale University and her PhD in Performance Studies from New York University. Her artwork been shown at venues including the Tate Modern in London; Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA in Prague; the Athens Biennale; Universidad de los Andes in Bogota; SculptureCenter, Art in General, and Participant Inc in New York; LACE in Los Angeles; the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia; and Artspace in New Haven, CT. Her writing has been published in Whitechapel Documents in Contemporary Art: Practice, The Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader, TDR/The Drama Review, Women & Performance, and The Brooklyn Rail.