Content area
Full text
Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (editors); University of California Press, Berkeley,Los Angeles,London, 2005, 478 p,
ISBN 0-520-24251-3
£40.95 (Cloth);
0-520-24252-1
£26.95 (Pbk)
This is a big book in every sense, the third anthology of essays that Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard have co-edited over the last two decades, encompassing twenty-five years of writing and research in feminist art history. The titles of their three collections, 'Questioning', 'Expanding' and 'Reclaiming' Feminist Art History, reveal Broude and Garrard's project, which they view as an empowering scholarly tradition establishing a genealogy of feminist scholarship passed on from teachers to students (Broude and Garrard, 1982, 1992). The current volume comprises twenty-three essays, which include studies of women artists ranging from established feminist art historical icons such as Artemisia Gentileschi and Mary Cassatt (both subjects of essays and previous studies by Garrard and Broude) to contemporary Chinese- and Iranian-born artists living in the United States, Hung Liu and Shirin Neshat. Together the essays represent a substantive body of scholarship in feminist art history in the United States over the past decade, most of the essays having been previously published elsewhere in the 1990s.
However, Broude and Garrard's choice of title also represents a declaration of intent: no less than reclaiming feminist art history from the deconstructive project of postmodern theory, which they see as fatally undermining the concept of female...