Expanding the Parameters of Feminist Artivism

This book explores the work and careers of women, trans, and third-gender artists engaged in political activism. While some artists negotiated their own political status in their indigenous communities, others responded to global issues of military dictatorship, racial discrimination, or masculine privilege in regions other than their own. Women, trans, and third-gender artists continue to highlight and challenge the disturbing legacies of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, communism, and other political ideologies that are correlated with patriarchy, primogeniture, sexism, or misogyny. The book argues that solidarity among such artists remains valuable and empowering for those who still seek legitimate recognition in art schools, cultural institutions, and the history curriculum.

Gillian Hannum is Professor Emerita of Visual Studies and Art History at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, where she served on the faculty from 1987 to 2021. A photographic historian with M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from The Pennsylvania State University, she has published on photographic topics in the Journal of the Royal Photographic Society, History of Photography, and Nineteenth Century, has contributed to several books and exhibition catalogs, and has presented papers or chaired panels at a number of conferences.

Kyunghee Pyun is Associate Professor of History of Art at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York. She wrote Fashion, Identity, Power in Modern Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and will publish School Uniforms in East Asia: Fashioning Statehood and Self in 2022. As an independent curator, she has collaborated with contemporary artists for exhibitions such as Violated Bodies: New Languages for Justice and Humanity. Pyun co-edited Interpreting Modernism in Korean Art: Fluidity and Fragmentation (Routledge, 2021) and American Art in Asia: Artistic Praxis and Theoretical Divergence (Routledge, 2022).