“Third Wave Feminisms”
Panel discussion with María Cruz, Chitra Ganesh, Emily Roysdon, Faith Wilding, and Theresa Masangkay (moderator)
Exquisite Acts & Everyday Rebellions: CalArts Feminist Art Symposium
California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California
March 10, 2007
exquisiteacts.org

The panel discussion “Third Wave Feminisms” addressed a challenging list of questions: Is feminism for everybody? Is third-wave feminism defined by its greater inclusiveness, multiculturalism, and plurality? What is the role of gender and sexual identity in feminism today? How do questions of racial identity factor into third wave feminism? Have the conditions of the contemporary art world changed for women and/or feminist artists? What possibilities are opened up by cyber feminism and net culture?

María Cruz related her experiences as a child crossing the border between Mexico and the United States. She acknowledged that although the term “feminism” didn’t enter into her lexicon until she learned about it in an academic context, it was the influence of the strong women in her family that inspired her to be a young feminista and video art activist. Chitra Ganesh addressed the reality that many have come to regard feminism as a white middle-class women’s movement of the 1970s. As a result, many younger women and women of color have been resistant to adopt the identity or ideology of feminism, much less feminist art. She argued for more interdisciplinarity between fields of study, so that conversations about art, feminism, environment, and sociology (to name a few examples) can reveal their connections and relationships rather than deepen discursive insularity. Faith Wilding brought attention to the habit of dividing feminists arbitrarily into fixed chronological generations, which has deepened the age-bias of feminist dialogues, and has often resulted in her assignation to “history panels” based on her participation in the Feminist Art Program (at CSU Fresno and CalArts) and the Feminist Art Movement in the 1970s. She has since joined forces with cyberfeminist (obn.org/cfundef/faith_def.html) groups such as the Old Boys’ Network and subRosa (cyberfeminism.net), which developed out of a desire to harness the Internet as a site of agency and also deals with the intersection of bio-technology and women’s bodies and health. Emily Roysdon called upon the collective energy of the symposium audience to ecstatically shout demands—for recognition of artists who weren’t included in MOCA’s WACK exhibition, for art that accepts different kinds of bodies, good sex, et al. Quoting radical thinker Eqbal Ahmad’s “How to Tell When the Rebels Have Won” (emilyroysdon.com/images/rebels.pdf) in reference to the recent efforts to institutionalize feminist art, she read, “We out-administer. We don’t out-fight. We build parallel hierarchies. We systematically rebuild public institutions.”

For a complete transcript of this panel discussion, please visit: exquisiteacts.org/symposium/third-wave-feminisms-transcript.html

María Cruz is a young Queer Latina media artist based in Los Angeles. Her arts and activism focus on issues of immigration, feminism and Latina Queerness. María worked with REACH LA, and she also developed an LGBT youth media justice workshop with the youth activist organization Q-Team. qycrashpad.com, reachla.org

Chitra Ganesh is a New York-based artist whose work explores how memories, dreams, and their repression shape personal and social crises. From 1998-2003, Chitra was a Board Member of the South Asian Women's Creative Collective (SAWCC). chitraganesh.com, sawcc.org

Emily Roysdon is a Los Angeles and New York-based interdisciplinary artist whose projects engage language, gesture and memory. Imaging collectivity and communicability as metonymic structures, the works tries to simultaneously exhibit ecstatic resistance and structural collapse. She is also an editor and co-founder of LTTR, a feminist genderqueer artist collective with a flexible project oriented practice. emilyroysdon.com

Faith Wilding was a participant in the Feminist Art Program at CSU Fresno and CalArts and was co-founder of the feminist art movement in Southern California, chronicled in her book By Our Own Hands (1976). Wilding founded and collaborates with subRosa, a reproducible cyberfeminist cell of cultural researchers using BioArt and tactical performance in the public sphere to explore and critique the intersections of information and biotechnologies in women’s bodies, lives, and work. cyberfeminism.net

Theresa Masangkay is a Los-Angeles based artist working in film, montage, sculpture, and video installation. Masangkay addresses technology and appropriates her family's photographic archive to pose personal, social, and political questions relating to history, memory, contemporary context, media, post-colonialism, and relationships. She received her MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts. theresamasangkay.com

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Exquisite Acts & Everyday Rebellions: 2007 CalArts Feminist Art Project was a student-organized project that took place at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California in March 2007. For more information, please visit: exquisiteacts.org.

Video credits:
Cameras - Adam Feldmeth, Nicholas Grider
Video Editor - Audrey Chan
Sound - Emery Martin