2세대 페미니즘 이후의 페미니즘 미술비평

Abstract

This paper starts from the question how feminism still stimulates our lives after the 2000s and what significant issues it raises. Whereas feminism in the field of Korean contemporary art had been the leading discourse in the 1990s with the theme “politics of identity”, it is a fact that it has today, at least in the field, lost its momentum. In universities, “women’s studies” has become an unpopular subject and is replaced by practical studies that help one find employment. However, women’s issues, class issues or social structure issues have neither been solved nor substantially studied enough to justify women’s studies or feminism being shunned by students and young artists. Feminism studies based on psychoanalysis and postcolonialism have been rearmed as a new dimension of theory, but practical action related to the quality of women’s lives has been ousted from interest. Anti-feminist sentiment had always coexisted and disappeared with feminism throughout history, like two sides of a coin, but at least in America, the mass media has “constructed” an anti-feminist sentiment. Chapter II of this paper focuses on post-feminism talks after the 1990s and studies the concept and main issues of post-feminism. The positioning of feminism since the mid-90s, usually as the third wave, has been rather vague. Whereas the first and second generations had collectively, along with visual art movements since late 60s, indulged in the practice and theorization of feminism, a more comprehensive name - “women’s studies and gender studies” or “gender studies” - was adopted since the 2000s to replace the term “women’s studies”referring to academia of feminist spirit and theory. This chapter examines that the field of study is headed towards a more inclusive nature that embraces ethnic minorities’ studies and queer studies. Chapter III examines the map of feminism since the 2000s and analyzes the new trend of feminism that is, in place of having lost its theoretical buoyancy, proceeding toward museography. This will locate the danger of treating Western feminism and non-Western feminism in the same context. Special focus will be directed toward“global feminisms”, associated with “multiple modernisms” under the context of contemporary art’s contemporaneity. Chapter IV looks into the study trends of feminism extending into gender and queer criticism through specific scholars and texts. I will examine the various ways through which schools and research institutions are rephrasing the “women’s studies” or “women research institute” terminology when feminist criticism is losing its strength and research subjects are being redirected towards queer or gender studies. Though drawn from West-oriented issues, this paper, by discussing gender and queer texts that could be of reference for future studies in Korea, analyzes that postfeminism has - despite its not having established a novel critical model of its own - been extended to gender and queer studies; postfeminism has been extended to studies of various races and classes, breaking bounds of Caucasian-centered interests and embracing the sexual minority that have been socially excluded. This paper poses the necessity of analytical studies on artists that take on the cultural essentialism of various races as the object of representation and bring about a fixation as the result of their essentialist works, and proclaims that this is a task that feminist scholars comprehending the various cultural contexts should now undertake. There is much necessity for seeking the methodology to bring the social objects on the boundariesinside as the social subjects, and such studies will serve as a new momentum for gender studies. Although this paper examines the academic trends of the West and is short of discussing the visual art studies within gender studies, it does propose a potential of feminist spirit extending into the gender and queer studies in Korea and eventually being studied as a new methodology.