What bad has feminism done art? What kind of question is that? I can hear you sigh already. Or is it my own sigh? Well, it must have done something bad according to the way it’s being treated these days. Why is there so little talk and reading about the whole feminist movement, its history, its ideas and impact within the art-scene and art-academies in these times? Have we heard enough? Do we know it already or do we know it all too well?

I’m an art student within an art institution. If anywhere this would bee the place for education in, talking and discussing about, feminist art and theory. Instead it is almost silent. Why is it this way? And why do I feel almost embarrassed every time the question do come up, in regard to my art practise, if I’m a feminist or not? What is it with the word FEMINIST? And, can I not speak as a person, a human first and as my sex second? I will try to give an answer to these questions but I know already it might not be possible to do so and I’m sure other questions will rise along the way.

I will tell you the story about the Feminist Movement, as I have perceived it through reading about it. As I have read books, essays, articles and journals, a history have evolved that I will try to map out.

There is a huge amount of writing, starting from the early seventies, when the second-wave feminist movement was just born (‘first-wave’ feminism being the suffragettes fighting for the right to vote in the early 20th century). It sprung out of Women’s Liberation Movement in the US in the sixties that started alongside with the fight for Civil Rights among blacks, the left-wing political student revolution of 1968 and the demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Women were among a lot of things fighting for abortion-rights, sexual freedom and social and economical equality and the Women’s Lib and female artists became closely connected in fighting and visualising the injustices. Books like Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1953), Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) are some examples of important writings that contributed to new ways of understanding the construction of patriarchal power.
This happened at the height of Modernism and the feminist movement and its theory came to be one of the most powerful forces to bring a change in the understanding of society. Sue Thornham writes in Postmodern Thoughts (1988) that,

…it became increasingly clear that the ‘universal subject’ of Enlightenment modernism, far from being ungendered and ‘transcendent’, was not only gendered but very specific: a Western, bourgeois, white, heterosexual man. (1)

Feminist art historians began to question the all-dominant male canon of the history of art and the exclusion of women from it. They began the project of rewriting the history of art, trying to write the female artists they could find into it alongside the men.
That would soon prove to be a bit problematic as Edward Lucie-Smith points out in Race, Sex and Gender in Contemporary Art (1994) where he gives a summary of Germaine Greer’s criticism of Linda Nochlins famous essay, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (first published 1971), that came with the exhibition Woman Painters: 1550-1950, that Linda Nochlin arranged together with Ann Sutherland Harris at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976. He writes,

For example, Greer soon found that the women’s art of the past, even when rediscovered by modern researchers, remained firmly tied to structures of male domination…Here in a nutshell are most of the problems of the new feminist art history.

And he quotes Greer from her book The Obstacle Race: the fortunes of women painters and their work (1979):

            Any student of women painters therefore finds that he [sic] is actually studying the female relatives of male artists…Women artists before the nineteenth century seldom expressed their own creativity: they adopted modes of self-expression first forged by integrated, self-regulating (male) genius, most often when they were already weakened by eclecticism and imitation…Until the nineteenth century liberation from the overwhelming and ubiquitous artist father would also have meant the cessation of all technical training.

As we can see, there was a problem both to try and evaluate women’s work within a patriarchal art-historical structure because of the male-dominant value-system and also to try to elevate it to an equal level within that system. This led to a demand for a new feminist critical theory and art criticism and general feminist theory have since been intimately connected.

The goals for the artists, critics and historians that were a part of the feminist movement in these early days was to radically change and transform the nature of art and culture by introducing women’s perspective on it. The dream was a universal gender-less experience, equal to men and women. The way in which female artists started to work, one could say, revolutionised the way in how to make art. Political activism and group collaboration were common, addressing personal and collective female experiences as a perfectly valid resource for art making. Women started to work with their bodies, claiming authority over it as subjects with power rather than victims or fetishized objects of the male gaze. They expressed themselves through ‘new’ media such as performance and video and introduced second-hand rated means of expression by the use of domestic crafts like quilting, sewing and weaving. 
But, what soon became questioned was the use of the term ‘woman’ as a sweeping term for, what it turned out, one kind of experience; a white, Western and heterosexual woman’s; a universal ‘essential’ theory blind to race, class and sexuality. Second, such a grand narrative followed from modernist ideas and therefor risked becoming oppressive and dogmatic.

As the feminist theories developed, within the art-scene, the focus on individuality and self-representation grew more dominant and built more on personal experience that acknowledged the differences among women, for instance ethnic and sexual. The personal became political. Feminist art during the seventies was of course as diverse as the women who made it, whatever their feminist standpoint were and I’m going to mention just a few artists working in this period to illustrate the diversity of art practises that flourished then. There was for example Nancy Spero (anti-war/ anti-racist prints and drawings), Betye Saar (anti-racist painting/ mixed media), Howardena Pindell (addressed racism/ power through video), Martha Rosler (photo and video), Miriam Schapiro (collage/ fabric/ pattern), Adrian Piper (anti-racist performance, video, installation), Carolee Schneemann (body performance), Ana Mendieta (earth-body ‘sculpture’/ performance), Hannah Wilke (body performance/ video/ photo), Judy Chicago (collaboration/ installation), Louise Bourgeois (sculpture), Joan Semmels (figure painting), Alice Neel, (painting), Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz (political activism/ collaboration/ performance) and Mary Kelly (photo and text based work on psychoanalysis/ language).

Although the feminist movement became a huge inspiration and a releasing trigger for almost a whole generation of women artists some soon felt it had become restraining and dogmatic and the movement was to be torn apart from inside. Some artists even felt it necessary to totally avoid or dismiss feminism as a fuel for their practise.
Elisabeth Frink, one of the most well known female sculptor in Britain is to have stated:

In the arts you cannot differentiate between the sexes: men and women are equal. Women artists who explore their femaleness through their art are being very introverted.

And Judy Chicago, who now stands as the maker of the (in fact collaborative) installation The Dinner Party (1974-79), a celebratory piece and homage to forgotten or underestimated women in western history, together with a rewriting of God in Genesis as Goddess, said in an interview in 1982 that

            I don’t believe in art simply as a tool of social change. I believe in art as art. One can use art as a tool for social change or one can make art which has as one constituent the changing of social and political circumstances, but after all is over art will continue to exist as beautiful images.

By the late seventies there was a rejection of the celebratory and politically activist ways in which a lot of the early feminist artists had worked and a move towards a more conceptually theory-based art practise. Whitney Chadwick describes in her book Women, Art and Society, (1996), that
           
             Shift in emphasis became clear as the collaborative and activist politics of the 1970s gave way to the institutionalising of gender studies within American academic structures during the 1980s and the influence of European psychoanalytically based theories of sexual difference.

As post-modernism became an established term within philosophical theory, so became post-feminism and whatever came first, it was the re-writing by feminist theorists (ex. Lucy Irigaray, Helen Cixous and Julie Kristeva) of post-structuralist ideas about language and psychoanalysis (Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan) with the emphasis on difference that made the new feminist theories position them selves against the former equality model. Michele Barrett explains in Understanding Contemporary Society…, (2000), in chapter 3: Post-feminism that

            The ‘equality’ model argued that there were no significant differences between men and women – other than those created in a sexist society – and that the task of feminism was to bring about a social and economic order in which that underlying equality was realized. The second model argued…that women – on account of their role in reproduction – were different from men and that social arrangements should ensure that they were different rather than unequal.

The term difference became a key term in postmodern theories concerned with the constructions of theories around language, text, power, identity, gender, hetero- and homosexuality and ethnicity. It has occupied post-feminist theorists for the last twenty years and feminists have also been struggling with the question of whether positioning itself outside or within postmodernism. Maybe here lays the roots to today’s confusion about the term feminist, what it really means and stands for. Post-feminism now contains so many different theoretical ideas and as the debates are often held within academic institutions it is hard to keep up with them. Maybe this is why, when the term feminist is brought up it stirs up some confusion as maybe what first comes up in our memory are the loud outspoken political activist feminists of the 70s rather than the ‘intellectual’, theory-based writing feminists of later date? One thing that is striking though when reading different sources are, however disagreeing they are generally, one thing that everyone confirms is what a tremendous impact the whole early feminist movement and its writing has had on our cultural, political and social studies and the way we understand our society. Norma Broude and Mary D.Garrard write in The Power of Feminist Art…, (1994) that

            Feminist art and art history helped to initiate postmodernism in America. We owe it to the feminist breakthrough some of the most basic tenets of postmodernism: the understanding that gender is socially and not naturally constructed; the widespread validation of non-“high art” forms such as craft, video and performance art; the questioning of the cult of “genius” and “greatness” in Western art history; the awareness that behind the claim of “universality” lies an aggregate of particularity standpoints and biases, leading in turn to an emphasis upon pluralist variety rather than totalizing unity.

As the gap between the younger more academically influenced feminist artists and the second-wave influenced ones grew so did the demise of the feminist movement. The ‘new’ generation of 80s feminist artists, such as Jenny Holzer, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Sherrie Levine adopted postmodernism’s theories and a more ‘slick’ and ironic attitude in assembling images and language/text of popular culture (Holzer, Kruger) and turned to question authority by appropriating male artists’ work to try to subvert the male canon of art history (Sherman, Levine). Their attempt was though questioned by some feminist critics; is it really possible to subvert anything (male power) by using its own language (as language is ‘male’ and women are positioned outside it as ‘the Other’), or is it just re-instating it?

Although post-modern critical theory challenged Modernist notions of male authorship, originality and the autonomy of the art object it has been questioned if, as Craig Owens puts it in The Discourse of Others; Feminists and Postmodernism (1992) if not

…postmodernism may be another masculine invention engineered to exclude women. And he continues: The feminist voice is usually regarded as one among many, its insistence on difference as testimony to the plurality of the times.

And Whitney Chadwick writes in her Women, Art and Society, (1996) that

            While it is true that feminism…share with Postmodernism a critique of an earlier model of a unified, autonomous “master” subject and a belief in a “decentered” subject (that is, a notion of agency subjected to, and created through, language), many feminists are critical of Postmodernism’s assumption of a cultural authority, its tendency to nihilism, and its emphasis on theory at the expense of social activism.

With no evident general feminist movement in the 80s, though a lot of female artists still employed feminist strategies in their art practise, the decade has generally been seen upon as the backlash for feminist issues, the gap between different generations seemed to grew even bigger, making feminist standpoints more of a private choice one did not discuss. In spite of this, in the late 80s and beginning of the 90s there was a modest tendency towards 70s feminist strategies that seemed more open to a more intuitive and emotional way of working. Examples could be Helen Chadwick (sculpture), Kiki Smith (sculpture), Sue Williams (painting) and Paula Rego (painting). There was also the Guerilla Girls, formed in 1985, who used a collaborative activist way to raise consciousness around feminist issues and point to the under-representation of women within art galleries, institutions and museums. And it was certainly needed because the male dominated art-scene at major museums and galleries was still, in the mid-80s, almost undisrupted, showing very few women or none at all. An example is when in 1984 the Museum of Modern Art in New York put up a very big and ambitious show, the International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, with only 14 women among 165 artists. And almost ten years later, at 1993, sadly to say, not much seemed to have changed as the travelling show American Art in the 20th Century, that came to London and Berlin, showed a total of 66 artists - and only 5 were women.

Where does this leave us today? Well, during the 1990’s there has been an ongoing debate as to what happened in the 70’s and 80’s and a search for what state feminism is in today.
In 1996, the American art magazine ARTnews made an attempt to “weigh in on feminism” to see what three decades of feminism have meant to a number of female artists’ lives and careers. I will give you some examples as it perhaps will give a contribution to the way we can understand feminism’s position in the 21st century.

Nicole Eisenman, artist: It’s a double-barred question. On the one hand, it’s helped me live my life as a woman, have a career as an artist…On the flip side…I’m kind of, Ick, I don’t want to talk about it. It’s also given me something to react against in my artwork – when feminism gets dogmatic or dull. But that’s even a double-barred thing. Using it as a target works to help it, the way criticism strengthens ideas…You can’t help but be a feminist if you’re working. But having to be politicised is what bugs me.

Adrian Piper, artist: The limitations that I’ve experienced have been rather because I identify myself as black. Most of my work deals with race and xenophobia. Some work is about gender and forms of oppression of women, but mostly it’s about race. I think the way feminism affected the content of my work was by giving me an even stronger sense of the importance of what I was doing.

Louise Bourgeois, artist: I agree with the feminists when they say there is a feminist sensibility. Obviously. If you are a woman you have a woman’s sensibility…I disagree with the feminist in the sense that I do not believe that men are against us…I went to women’s meetings in the 1970’s. I did not go because I approved. I went because I disapproved. I would get up, I would get furious. I would raise a stink. So there’s a kind of weaving of arguments that I have – sometimes feminist, sometimes violently anti-feminist.

Annette Messager, artist: In France, the meaning is much stronger. When you say you’re feminist, you’re very, very engaged… In any case, for any artist, if a woman, feminism has to be implicated in some way in her art. Because artists work from their personality, who they are, what they stand for. By necessity women have certain things distinct to them. It’s almost too obvious. My work speaks about me as a woman…At the same time, if you say to me, “Are you a feminist?” It’s like saying “Are you Jewish?” I want to say I’m a feminist, but I don’t want other people to say that. It’s too restrictive.

Jacqueline Humphries, artist: As much as I appreciate the achievements of women, I also appreciate those of men. I wouldn’t say my work comes directly out of feminism at all. But I hate the question. It reinforces distinctions; men are never asked such questions.

The British women’s art magazine make, published by the Women’s Art Library in London founded 1978, made a similar query for their 20th anniversary in 1998. They made a survey over the older generation of artists and critics verses the younger, mostly British, and asked them accordingly:

 “What were the key issues for women’s art when you were involved, and what do you think about them now?’ and “What issues are important for the upcoming generation of women artists?”

Rose Frain, artist and writer: The key issues were inequality of exhibiting opportunities and of critical response, and the marginalisation of artists who are women. Only the libidinal economy was represented – the masculine. The situation has improved greatly, but ageism has taken over as a major prejudice. Misogyny has won a battle, as younger artists are afraid of calling themselves feminist…but it hasn’t won the war.

Caryn Faure Walker, critic and curator: Women should explore the feminine at the same time as they change the mainstream. When I edited Women’s Art Magazine (1990-91) there was intense, sometimes inhibiting, conflict over this and other priorities: whether to focus on political activism and documentation of women’s lives, create a sound theoretical base, or pioneer new media? Post-feminist artists are less intellectually self-reflexive, more direct. Our job now is to see how these two models of the feminine – the deconstructive and the investigative – interconnect.

Fiona Carson, artist and writer: For me, the key issue is still the complex, living relationship between theory and practise. As an art historian I absorb and expouse the latest feminist theory but as a practitioner I often felt heretical.

Alexis Hunter, artist: Twenty years ago art done by women was considered unstructured, weak and superficial. It is good to see younger artists like Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin continuing to disprove these generalisations. I hope they have been able to work without the angry disapproval artists attracted in the 70’s.

Caroline Coon, artist: Thirty years ago when I was a fine art student at Central St Martins, any information which could counter sexism was hidden. Confronting male prejudice and bigotry was profoundly terrifying. The feminist project was literally life-saving. The key issue was gaining for women equal status to men…From feminist writing, groups, collectives and action I/we learned that much of our personal despair was political, a symptom of sexist exclusion from the public male art space. Today it is incontestable that 1970’s feminist art paved the way for contemporary women artists’ higher profile. Now we must hold our ground to ensure that no new prejudice or backlash thwarts women’s continuing progress towards equality.

Among the younger artists, aged 20 –25, all students or former students at Norwich School of Art, England, the general attitudes towards feminism are ambivalent. Although they can see what feminism has done historically, they distance their selves from the word feminism, which they see represent extremism and man-hate or calls it ‘difficult term’, ‘dirty word’, ‘bad name’ or confess they don’t really know what it stands for.

As we read the different replies we become aware of the multitude experiences and understandings of feminism that were current then and today. For an older generation feminism is still important, but maybe a sensitive issue, and for the younger ones it seems easier to simply reply ; feminist? –no thank you. Because if you say yes, you have to define what kind of feminist you are, justify it and put up with the judgement of it.
In make, issue 76, (June-July 1997) we read on the editorial page:

            Chasms that fractured the women’s movement of the 1980’s, are now more pronounced. What has developed is a great schism between a younger generation of artists who recognise the viability of an apparent political indifference, and an older generation who are angered and perhaps rightly hurt by this…Many younger artists argue that a set political agenda is out-dated.

Furthermore, in an article discussing the show Bad Girls, held at the ICA in London in 1993, there is an analyse about the gap between different ‘feminists’ artists made by Ann Elgood, curatorial associate at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York:

            …the [early] feminist artists had more of a goal and message in mind – as well as a more dogmatic attitude. These new, younger artists are less interested in making a political point…There’s more ambiguity. They seem to be asking more questions and muddying the waters…While there’s still an effort to examine women’s roles, stereotypes, and access to power...the positions of the postfeminists are not so clear-cut.

It is quite apparently not so easy to call one-self a feminist, because as I’ve mentioned before, there seems to be a confusion as to what it means, other than maybe a political statement of some kind, and what ever kind that might be, maybe one doesn’t want one’s art-practise to be so politically easily framed. Will it ever be possible to find a way then, we might ask ourselves? 

As much as feminist academic theorists are good at pointing at issues and say: look, this is wrong, they have hard times looking beyond that and come up with solutions on how we could solve our situation within in a still (but more obscure) oppressive patriarchal system.
Academic feminists Debbie Epstein and Deborah Lynn Steinberg says in a response to the question ‘what is the state of feminism?’ put to them by the magazine parallax in 1996 that,

            We find (in) ourselves (‘the state of feminism’) enmeshed in a paradox. Theoretically and politically we no longer believe in the value of attempting to fix a theoretical unity for feminism or to fix an address in the terms of its location or mode. But this leaves us stranded, in some crucial way homeless……….and in need for an address.

There has been though, in recent years, an attempt to ‘go back to basic’ one might say. An attempt to re-examine and embrace similarities within different strands of feminism and a recognition of a possible Third Way Feminism. Maria-Elena Buszek writes in the article Waving not drowning in make, (Dec1999-Jan 2000) that,

            Third wave thinkers have been comfortable with re-defining feminism to include any woman who believes that inequality between women and men exists, that it effects their lives, and that action is needed to balance the scales. As a pointedly individualistic and anti-elitist approach to feminism, it looks as much to pop culture as to politics for influence and strategies.

Although it recognises the difficulties in keeping a movement together that is based on a philosophy of subjectivity they rather seek to negotiate contradictions and say ‘both/and’ instead of ‘either/or’. This is where we find for example the activist group Riot Grrl, Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth), Courtney Love and perhaps even ‘Girl Power’, saying: yes, I’m both SEXY and I’ve got POWER. Another example is of course Madonna that has instigated miles and piles of writings and debates in feminist theories and cultural studies.
Is it perhaps in the spirit of third-way feminism that we should look at feminist/ female artists working today? Artists that are both funny, angry, witty, in-your-face, sleek, sweet, ironic, personal, sexual…

The show Bad Girls, that I’ve mentioned before, that was held at the ICA in London in 1993 and at the new Museum of Contemporary Art in New York 1994 takes on board precisely that spirit. The title of the show, Bad Girls, is hoped to be both humorous and ironic and the art showed in it is to be perceived as restless, subversive, uncomfortable, subtle, sensual and sexy – celebrating the multiplicity of feminisms in the 90s. It showed work of such artists as for example, Nicole Eisenman, Nan Goldin and Sue Williams, artists who certainly work within a feminist framework addressing pornography, sexuality and gendering. But as the show was a huge success in it self publicly, it received much harsher treatment from the critics. Emma Dexter, exhibition director at ICA in London and one of the curators of the show, remembers in the article What’s So Good About Being Bad in ARTnews (Nov 1999), by Micelle Falkenstein that,
It was a good show with good work [but] the male critics hated it because it was too girly, and the feminists hated it because the title was infantilizing of women. We were always talking about the title.

And, she says, the title was not unproblematic as it did put a limitation on the art-works possible interpretation and meaning and that bad girls are actually quite titillating but bad women on the contrary are scary.

Micelle Falkenstein, takes a look, in the same article, at a generation of female artists that can very well be embraced by a third-way feministic attitude that is both concerned with looking good and at the same time reject the passive female role as object. She explains that even if they might not have an outspoken feminist agenda the generation of the “so-called bad girls and angry young women often twist sexual stereotypes into smutty jokes that sting, bruise and bite.” Some of the artists she mentions are Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas, both rocketed to stardom in the 90s, both producing work with a loud nothing-is-sacred honest and witty attitude that exposes a ‘not-so-pretty’ or unfeminine femaleness. Even if neither of them are willing to make any public feminist statemenst, perhaps in the way that they are working – and their art - might be political enough.
Vanessa Beecroft, another artist mentioned in the same article, says that she does not think of herself as a feminist, that “it is too late for that” but like to try to combine an awareness and knowledge of a feminist background with a Helmut Newton portrait of a naked woman in high heels – too see if they can match. She has been much criticised for her ‘events’ where she uses models to pose nude or semi-nude seemingly passive and objectified. They often wear heavy make-up, wigs, high-heels or other attributes that constitutes femininity. The critics accuse her for being shallow, creating highbrow pornography or even being fascist in, what it seems, a celebration of the perfect body. Of course one can question the use of the female body in this way, does it really subvert or change representation, is it possible to see in our culture a female body with a look freed from phallic prejudice? Or is Vanessa Beecroft that kind of feminist who is simply ‘mudding the waters’?
Another artist that I would like to introduce in this context is the Swedish artist Ann-Sofi Siden. She works in many various ways using performance, sculpture, film and video. Her approach is undoubtley feministic, yet so diverse you never know what is coming next. She sometimes uses herself, other times material or persons that comes in her way. The work is investigative and always makes social comments.
In 1989 she made an unannounced performance as Queen of Mud at NK, the most exclusive department store in Stockholm. With her body only covered in a thin layer of mud she walked up to one of the perfume counters and asked for ‘something by Chanel’. When questioned why she was “dressed that way”, she replied “It is the way I prefer to travel”. She was politely asked to leave the store and did so. The subtle yet provocative action points a finger at femininity and how we construct it. The reference to Chanel could point to the ‘Queen of Chanel’: Marilyn Monroe; definitely one of the most famous token for femininity and the mud-covered body, what is that if not ‘woman as nature’?
Another piece is a life-size bronze sculpture of her self squatting and taking a pee with the title Fideicommissum, (2000), see picture at front cover. The sculpture is actually ‘pissing’ with the help of a fountain that creates a never-ending stream of water coming down on a surface of pebbles. The work talks about marking territory, a presumably male action of ownership. The title hints at a real event in history, when the landed gentry in Sweden legally transferred their titles of their estates to their heirs. Her peeing together with the title seems to ask what valuables she has inherited as a female from history, and as the body is placed close to the wall facing into a corner it suggests it isn’t much and the territory for her to mark as a woman might be quite limited. For me, the work reminds me of earlier feminist work, it echoes both from Carolee Schneemann and Kiki Smith but it is interesting that when spoken about in the magazine nu: the nordic art review, the references goes to Duane Hanson’s sculptures of ‘everyday Americans’ and to the fountain of Duchamp. It is as if the critic Jennifer Allen never heard of the feminist work of the 70s and 80s, or at least does not consider it as appropriate and valid sources for comparison and critique.
In her most recent work, a big video-installation, she examines the sex-trade in Poland. She interviews a number of young female prostitutes where they talk about everyday life. The work comments on sex as business and the poor lives of the girls in a very non-dogmatic and non-judgemental way yet escapes sentimentality and becomes a sensitive investigation with social ethos.
Although Ann-Sofi Siden is far from being a ‘bad girl’ she uses the right to speak about any feminist issue she finds important. As I see it, she is letting the work speak for her, and maybe here is where we have to leave it at the moment. At the same time, I cannot stop to think that she is informed by feminism because she has acknowledged that there is an imbalance in the prevalent social structure. And maybe there is where we have to start, we have to be informed, educated and enlightened about the social order, how power is constructed, how gender is determined – through feminism - we simply have to know something to be able to do anything. Because if you are a woman and if you are informed about what is going on in the world, it sometimes is enough to simply open a daily newspaper, you can’t help but be anything else but feminist.

I asked in the beginning if it is not possible to insist on speaking as a person, a human first, and not always as gendered, as woman. Maybe it is not desirable to get rid of gender, who would we then be? Maybe what we rather should insist on is that men are gendered too.

And, by the way, what bad did feminism do art again? None, yeah, I thought so, then why, again, when I come to college on Monday will it worry me…that it is so………silent?