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Gender Enters the History of Art Not so long ago there was much talk of “en-gendering” art. In the 1990s, nearly every session at the College Art Association conference included at least one paper that wrestled with issues of gender. Art historians concerned with those issues had already complicated their work by attending as well to questions of race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. They had moved beyond an initial focus on Western art, and they had embraced masculinity as an object of study. In short, they had begun to revolutionize the discipline. Yet despite having influenced the practices and assumptions of art history, gender studies today are significantly less visible than they were a decade ago.1 What factors have led to the current state of gender studies in art history? Are they related to the initial presumptions that spurred and guided the analysis of gender, or to the interpretative strategies of its practitioners? If gender studies in the history of art have reached an impasse, what can be done to reinvigorate and redirect them? Gender infiltrated art historical writing little by little, in ideas borrowed from here and there and shaped to fit the aims of an art history driven by feminist politics. Those involved in feminist movements during the 1960s opened the way for introducing gender as an analytic category, a situation that likely resonates with the entry of gender analysis into other disciplines.2 And as in other disciplines, the first feminist art historians were concerned with recovering the work of women and outlining the obstacles to their advancement, a concern they shared with contemporary women artists who addressed similar CHAPTER SEVEN Seeing Beyond the Norm Interpreting Gender in theVisual Arts MARY D. SHERIFF 162 | MARY D. SHERIFF issues in their practice. Art historians, however, only got fired up in 1971 when Linda Nochlin posed the impertinent question, “Why have there been no great women artists?” in an essay indebted to the work of Simone de Beauvoir and published first in Art News (January 1971) and soon after in the interdisciplinary volume Women in Sexist Society (1971). With its accessible, irreverent , and trenchant prose, Nochlin’s essay remains a powerful statement, and one that I find very readable even today. This first salvo was followed five years later by the catalog of the groundbreaking exhibition Women Artists 1550– 1950, held in 1976 at the Los Angeles County Museum, a catalog Nochlin co-authored with Anne Southerland Harris.3 Although a pioneer of feminist art history and an effective spokesperson, Nochlin has never undertaken an analysis of gender as a concept. She has consistently defined herself in terms of feminist art history, and what we see in her work is the adaptation of critical and theoretical concepts and terms developed in other disciplines. For example, in the opening essay of Women Artists 1550–1950, the exhibition catalog, Nochlin explored the dichotomy that correlated woman with “nature” and man with “culture,” drawing not only on Beauvoir’s work, but also on Sherry Ortner’s 1972 essay in Feminist Studies, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?”4 My point is not that Linda Nochlin, in particular, or art historians, in general, are derivative thinkers—after all, few of us create our own analytic categories. My observations are rather to suggest that some idea of a sex/gender system took shape early in feminist art history before the term “gender” was in play. When “gender” did enter into art historical analysis, however, it did so in the absence of an intervention on the order of Joan Scott’s founding essay. In fact, many art historians read and adopted the concept of gender as articulated by Joan Scott, finding her essay persuasive, lucid, and very useful indeed.5 Gender, however, has not necessarily been the main term embraced by feminist art historians in pursuing their work. By 1989, when she published a collection entitled The Politics of Vision, Linda Nochlin preferred the term “alterity ,” proposing that feminism, under its theoretical and political aspects, had brought her to considering the history of art from the perspective of the “other.”6 The “other” included not only “woman,” but also peoples of different races, classes, ethnicities, religions, sexualities, and so forth. Nochlin tied her consideration of “othering” to what Griselda Pollock, another influential art historian, would call the “sociological,” a term that Pollock associated with “gender” as distinguished from “sexual difference.” Pollock has consistently positioned her work in terms of “difference...

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