Essay on "Chicago, Ringgold"

Essay 6 pages (2333 words) Sources: 3

[EXCERPT] . . . .

In The Dinner Party, Chicago elects to represent black womanhood with abolitionist Sojourner Truth, famous for inventing intersectionality with her question to a largely white women's rights event in 1851, "ain't I a woman?" For Chicago, feminism is set in the context of the history of human culture, and while Truth is the only African-American represented among the 39 main figures seated at Chicago's dinner table: as her merger poem indicates, she looks forward to a world beyond the established cultural binaries and implicitly suggests that the difference between black and white is just such a binary. Jill Fields traces Chicago's politics -- what underlies the vision expressed in the poem and in The Dinner Party -- is a Marxist collectivist vision inspired by Shulamith Firestone's Dialectic of Sex. Jill Fields in fact finds Firestone so central to Chicago's aesthetic that she discusses a film documentary about Firestone, Shuley, re-creating a 1960s era experimental art film starring Firestone, while also invoking the 2010 revisiting of Firestone's feminism in The Further Adventures of "The Dialectic of Sex" (Fields 9). It is worth recalling Angela Davis's sharp critique of this work on racial grounds, remininding us that "Firestone implies that Black men harbor an uncontrollable desire for sexual relations with white women" (Davis 181). Indeed, The Dialectic of Sex notoriously claims that a black man must in order to "be a man…untie himself from his bond with the white female, relating to her if at all only in a degrading way…he may lust after her as a thing to be conquered in order to revenge himself on the white man" (quoted Davis 181). Angela Davis holds that the flaw with this position is that "Racism, in general, so Firestone claims, is actually an extension of sexism" (Davis 181). This seems to be Chicago's position as well in The Dinner Party, indicating a certain deafness to the variety of African-American feminisms possibly because of their potential collaboration with reactionary sentiment.

Is there a way out of this standoff for a woman artist of color to rise above this entrenched dissonance between the two intersectional oppressions, racial and gender-based? I would suggest that the answer can be found in precisely the same time period, in the famous work "Rape Scene" by the Cuban-American feminist artist Ana Mendieta. Kwon contrrasts Mendieta with artists like Judy Chicago or even Ringgold in her self-portrait: "most feminist artists during the 1970s vied for visibility and self-affirming expression through figurative, literal, sometimes "in-your-face" presence. It is curious that Mendieta traced her absence instead" (Kwon 169). Mendieta's 1973 work "Rape Scene" comes from precisely the same era as the WWA group that Valerie Smith's essay describes. But where the WWA artwork was politically reactionary, Mendieta's "Rape Scene" is politically activist: it was made in response to a rape and murder at the University of Iowa in 1973, while Mendieta was a graduate student there: a black undergraduate named James Wendell Hall was arrested for the rape and murder of a white undergraduate named Sarah Ann Ottens. Mendieta responds to this racial standoff with a remarkable work of empathy -- she creates an installation artwork in her own dwelling, in which she poses in a tableau vivant replica of how the murdered rape victim Ottens had been found by her roommate. Mendieta also created the work before James Wendell Hall would go on trial, perhaps out of respect for the sort of black feminism like Angela Davis's which insists upon "the myth of the black rapist" as being a tool of cultural oppression that has been employed frequently by white feminists. It proves Angela Davis right that ten years after the 1973 murder of Sarah Ann Ottens and the memorializing 1973 artwork "Rape Scene" staged by Ana Mendieta, the rapist James Wendell Hall had his conviction vacated in 1983 when prosecutorial conduct was discovered on appeal. It is perhaps a better indication of the existence of an endemic American rape culture that ten years after that, in 1993, James Wendell Hall would be convicted of the rape and murder of another white woman, Susan Hajek, in Iowa.

Works Cited

Chicago, Judy. "Feminist Art Education: Made in California." In Jill Fields, editor, Entering the Picture: Judy Chicago, the Fresno Feminist Art Program, and the-Collective Visions of Women Artists. New York: Routledge, 2012. Print.

Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. Preface by Ishmael Reed. New York: Delta, 1999. Print.

Davis, Angela B. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1983. Print.

Fields, Jill. "Introduction." In Jill Fields, editor, Entering the Picture: Judy Chicago, the Fresno Feminist Art Program, and the-Collective Visions of Women Artists. New York: Routledge, 2012. Print.

Kwon, Miwon. "Bloody Valentines: Afterimages by Ana Mendieta." In de Zegher, Catherine (ed.) Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth-Century Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. 165-171. Print.

Smith, Valerie. "Abundant… READ MORE

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