Group 3 Summary

By: Karina, Sam, Alex

Feminism in Art

   For the group presentation we choose a theme that we felt was important to associate with the Guerilla Girls which was the readings for that week. The Guerilla Girls are resistance group that protest the inequality women have in the art world and in general. Their form of resistance included humorous but mocking tactic to target larger key issues among women.  However, my group decided to introduce the process of the resistance women had to go through up to where we are now a days with groups like Guerilla Girls that can approach it differently. We introduced feminism in a brief manner to allow the class to have some background when reading about Guerilla Girls. By presenting the different waves of feminism we allowed to present the difference types of resistance.

One of many examples of Guerrilla Girls

During the first wave of feminism had women fighting for basic civil rights, they were limited to owning property, executing wills or signing documents, voting in elections, refusing to have sex with their husbands, attending university, having legal custody of their children and even divorcing their husbands. The first group of women fighting for their right  believed in achieving change through parliamentary means and used lobbying techniques to persuade Members of Parliament sympathetic to their cause to raise the issue of women's suffrage in debate on the floor of the House. They were mocked and named suffragettes but ended up being the name for their resistance and who they were. Like the Guerilla Girls have been criticized for what they do, the suffragettes were ridiculed, and negativity talked and made fun of in media which was just newspapers at the time. The suffragettes were mocked because at the time it was widely feared that if women gained suffrage, it would begin to corrupt the patriarchal ideology of gender difference and the roles of the family within society. Similarly, guerilla girls do the same in presenting their argument they attack tradition of patriarch inthe museums that has existed for years and demand for change.

Example of propaganda against the Womens act in the first wave

  In the second wave of feminism, women of color, specially African American women were fighting for equality during the Civil Rights movement during the 50s and 60s. In this period, black women could not enter the same public spaces with white people such as schools, public transportation, interracial marriage and places of business. Another goal was to get rid of the workplace equality women were facing. During the 60s women were limited to housewife duties such as chores and and cleaning for majority of the week. In reference to the Guerilla Girls, a lot of women took parts in occupying public spaces. For days perhaps weeks at a time, a lot of women of all color protested and performed sit-ins where many of them would get arrested and sent to jail.

The most radical thing I found was the Sexual Revolution. A lot of women started to question their roles and revolted against it. Women are not obligated to find a husband, get married and have kids. In fact, feminists argued that single women can have the same sexual desires as married woman and that they should have a place in society. A radical way to revolt was using the Birth Control Pill as it was introduced in the 60s. Taking the birth control pill is an act of defiance and shows that women are in control of their bodies and that men should never have a say in that.

Going into the topic of 3rd wave feminism, we discussed how feminism has currently been used in mass media, such as music and television. Positive women representation is something that has always been lacking in media. Similar to what the Guerilla Girls have fought for, Women usually need to be sexualized to be see in a grander light.

Women are seen for their bodies rather then heard for their thoughts. This is something that the Guerilla Girls have tried to fight against for awhile. 3rd wave feminism is arguably one of the most well known, solely because it was the time of mass communication with the internet so many different movements. The music industry began to get involved in the ‘independant women’ movement, because it was becoming more understood that women should be able to do whatever they please. Artists such as Beyonce, Gwen Stefani, Queen latifah, and Pink to name a few, became the voice to an entire generation of women and girls during the 90s to the mid 2000s. Media in television also began coming into the spotlight with bringing up feminist ideas in shows and movies but most notably animation.  

The spread of feminism and questions of a woman's place in society has now made its mark, although typically small, in mass media with not only music but animation as well. Shows like the Simpsons introduced the world to a new type of feminism with their characters like Lisa Simpson and Marge Simpson. Lisa gave an entire the generation the representation that girls are be smart too, the Simpsons also did not sexualize many of their female characters, keeping the playing field level. 3rd wave feminism began to give girls the courage to be themselves without being sexualied, to join groups such as S.T.E.M.

Please see attached for more information !

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1v0MguQ_T4Z3sN6Nvp1F6nb2T5LzPMyDn6kChQQQYcjI/edit#slide=id.p