 Okay, so the title of my talk today is called RE Post Feminism. In the introduction to the 1994 anthology New Feminist Criticism, Art Identity Action, the title of the included essay by noted art historian, art critic and curator Amelia Jones, Post Feminism, Feminist Pleasures and Embodied Theories of Art, is cited somewhat erroneously as debunking the post in Post Feminism, Feminist Pleasures and Embodied Feminist Theories of Art. I prefer the latter titling, if only for the addition of debunking the post, for it suggests a certain problematic of the term that is not present in the second configuration of the title by Jones. Playing on the title of Hal Foster's 1982 essay on Post Modernism, RE Post, this paper will address the use of the term Post Feminism, which first emerged in the early 1980s, in relation to analyses of visual discourse. Foster, in his essay, states that, quote, post modernism articulated in relation to modernism tends to reduce it, end quote. Following the logic of Foster's statement, I ultimately argue that the term Post Feminism hinders the use of the concept of feminism as a viable theoretical tool in the study of art history and visual culture. Post Feminism implies a division that the ideals and political implications of feminism and art informed by feminism has passed. This is a false divide, for as I will show by using the work of artist Gada Amer as an example, the themes and practices employed by feminist artists working in the 1960s and 70s are still manifest today, offering a model of continuity between generations. It is imperative for the future of our discipline that a feminist approach to the study of art history remain entrenched within our dialogues with one another, and that we not allow for our collective history of feminist activism and production to be forgotten or dismissed with the addition of the word Post. In the arena of my profession, I identify myself as an art historian who employs feminists and psychoanalytic theory to the studies of my subject. In my social world, I freely and proudly call myself a feminist. Ultimately, these words are inseparable as my political beliefs inflect upon my work as an art historian. I attended an all women's college for my undergraduate degree and pursued a master's in art history working with the pioneering feminist art historians Norma Rowdy and Mary Gerard. My interest in feminist art history has been ongoing during my time at Bryn Maw, a women's college, and I currently teach at the nation's only women's art school Bryn Maw College, excuse me, Maw College of Art and Design. All this is to say that what I have known in my life is feminism, feminism as politics, feminism as relationships, feminism as social practice, and feminism as a mode of thinking and working through my discipline. I have shared a history that at times feels powerful and exuberant, and at others whitewashed and even swept under the rug to use a tellingly domestic turn of phrase. The topic of my paper today, while stemming from my ongoing experiences and work at all of these places, was inspired by the linguistic dialogues in the arena of mass media from this past political season. In particular, the constant use of the word post in front of racial. In regards to the election of now President Barack Obama, and the term post-feminist in relation to the historic campaign of Hillary Clinton and brief appearance of Sarah Palin on the national stage. Yet my talk was ultimately shaped by a comment made in a paper by one of my students, one which I'm sure all of us in the room are familiar with. I am a feminist, but I am not a feminist. That is the very important word in there. I am not a feminist, but I believe that I should not be treated any differently because of my biological makeup. Yes, that appeared in one of my students' papers. It is a response to the statement, this false assumption about the definition of feminism, that I offer my thoughts today. The tone of the paper is personal. I follow the second wave feminist mantra, the personal is political. And this is where I would like to situate the term feminist, an argument for its continual use in opposition to the addition of post. The word feminist is both abstract and concrete, one full of ideologies, yet grounded in the real lives and spaces of women and men. Within these spaces, new issues have emerged, different from those addressed by Jones almost 20 years ago. For example, the problem of online misogyny. But the opening up of new spaces also means that new voices are heard, especially through blog and social networking sites, connecting together global voices which previously would have remained separated. Academic analyses of the term post-feminism have, as of late, appeared most often in the arena of visual culture, specifically film and media studies. This is of no surprise to me, for if we look around at our current cultural markers to take stock of where we stand, what we see is almost no different than what Jones addressed in the 1990s or Griselda Pollock wrote about in the 1970s. As has been recognized by many recent scholars in the field of women's studies and visual culture, post-feminism attempts to redefine anti-feminism as feminism. Advertisements, mainstream movies and popular magazines all aim towards controlling images of women, cloaking their agendas behind the facade of options and choices. Such mechanisms of control have a name, neuroadvertising, the practice of exploiting the subconscious fears and desires of potential customers. In contrast to such consumers' attempts, what we have to be aware of is the constant manipulation of language and images which work to codify particular social ideologies as the norm. In essence, it is imperative that what we pay attention to is language and how language is used. Writer William Sapphire, well known for his meticulous investigations into the intricacies of language, in a 2007 New York Times magazine essay for his column on language, addresses the usage of the term woman versus female, analyzing the grammatical role that the two words play as modifiers. Sapphire references the work of linguist Robin Lakoff, who suggests that once we use the word woman or female in front of other terms, for example, woman president, we mark the position as unnatural for a woman to be in, in essence further codifying the idea that it is natural for a man to be in that role. In the media and our society, every time we repeat this labeling, we are reinforcing the stereotypes. All this is to say that language is important for it is in labeling and our continued use of these labels that we perpetuate societal ills. The word post-feminism implies the idea that the time of feminism has come and gone. It is a term that brackets off the political implications of feminism and neutralizes its power. Post-feminism confines and polices, the boundaries of feminism, just as women's rights and issues of personhood have been confined and policed under patriarchal law. I follow Amelia Jones' assertion that the addition of the word post has been used as an attempt to culturally and socially promote the death of feminism, to imply that this is a term and a concept that is no longer needed. What post-feminism additionally suggests is the idea that feminism is a solitary and monolithic concept that can be singularly erased. But as one who believes in a positive application of psychoanalytic theory as a means of attempting to understand social relationships, such erasure is impossible. At best, a form of political repression may occur. But what this suggests is that the inhabitable position of feminist is one which will continually reappear and one which we must seek out behind the false veils offered by our still patriarchal society. The term post-feminism sets up a false division of definitions. One posed against the other with the ultimate objective of solidifying the always tenuously held position of power by a patriarchal society. In using the term, we are validating the belief that there is a separation of camps and us versus them and a break between a present future and a past. This concept was repeated in the 2003 exhibition catalog, Feminine Persuasion, where the curators of the show write, quote, the methods that contemporary artists employ to depict women's sexuality in the contrast to what feminist artists created in the late 1960s and 70s are notable, end quote. In arguing against this statement, I want to suggest instead the idea of continuation, a concept that is negated with a repeated use of the term post-feminism. There is a strong affinity between the themes and approaches taken by feminist artists of the 1960s, 70s and 80s and work produced today, a feature perhaps noticeable to anyone who saw the 2007 shows, Whack, Art in the Feminist Revolution and Global Feminisms. The art of Gada Amir, an Egyptian-born artist currently living in New York, addresses themes of pleasure and language in the visual fields. Amir references the history of traditional craft techniques culturally associated with the feminine through her employment of embroidery in a technique which both creates and veils form. Amir writes, quote, I was interested to address in my art the practice, in my art practice, the language of women, that of seamstresses, end quote. In this way, Amir's work is tied to the themes of women's work and craft taken on by early feminist artists, for example, the embroidery and cloth collage of Miriam Shapiro, and I'm showing you Wonderland from 1983 here, and the individually embroidered placemats of Judy Chicago's dinner party, which of course we can all go upstairs and see here. Around 1993, Amir began to incorporate into her work images of women from porn magazines in an effort to complicate the relationship between practice and representation. In Waiting for Jay from 2000, Amir traced the contour lines of an erotic photograph onto carbon and then repeatedly transferred the image to a canvas, into which she embroidered the forms in red, black, blue, and white thread, wrapping the loose ends of the thread across the figures in a semi-veiling of the transformed pornographic image. In these works, Amir aligns the practice of sewing with the traditional world of women and the erotic pictures to the world of men. Yet the pornographic images are only the starting point for Amir's practice. Ultimately, she sees her work as indicative of female eroticism, writing, I speak of women love their desires and loneliness. I speak about the desire to seduce and about not knowing what to do with that kind of desire. There is not one answer here, but a lot of contradictions. End quote. A number of women writers and artists address the theme of female eroticism in the 1970s, including Audrey Lord, Joan Semmel, and Hannah Wilkie. Wilkie's pink champagne from 1975, an almost five-foot-long pink latex wall sculpture composed of delicately thin overlapping clusters, is described by Joanna Frew as, quote, a rippling pink petal-like horizontal expansion of pleasure, which suggests waves of sensation, plural pleasures, end quote. This intense focus on the erotic nature of female pleasure and bodily form relates to Amir's insistence on the positive envisioning of the female body, a reaction, she says, to the belief upheld in different cultures that the manifestation or the representation of the female body is something to be ashamed of. Amelia Jones has situated the refusal of pleasure as a masculinist project. As it demands, within the realm of art discourse, a rigid separation between impure pleasure and pure theory, upholding the binary separation between emotion and intellect, feminine and masculine. Resistance to pleasure is a maneuver of control, for according to this social doctrine, writes Jones, quote, only a cerebral pleasure, purified of eroticism, can elevate the estate or critic above the masses, end quote. It is this maneuvering of control and creation of boundaries, which Amir, continuing the lineage of feminist artists who manipulate the erotic image, seeks to deny, instead opening up a space for a positive interaction with the concept of female pleasure, emerging from behind the veil of repression. This is a feminist artistic action, one which emphatically counters the notion of post-feminism and continues the dialogue and practices of previous generations of feminist artists. I will conclude today with a mention of the archive, which, although it implies issues of codifying and categorizing, is wholly necessary for the continuation of dialogues across the generations. I attended a talk by Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labovitz at the College Art Association conference a few weeks ago, during which they discussed their current project, the Performing Archive. In this work, Lacy and Labovitz collected the written and visual documents from the time of their first meeting in 1977 to the present day, ephemeral material which otherwise might've been lost to the recycling bin. Lacy and Labovitz have opened up this archive to scholars and artists in an effort to merge together voices and deny the historicizing impulse of the archive, indicated by the inclusion of the word performing in the title. The preservation of the word and the action take place via the archive, which may be situated as one of memory and one of physical space. The concern over the question of archiving is especially relevant in contemporary art with its problems of preserving performance, earth and land art, most of which is ephemeral but also time and site specific. As the movement towards a conservation of historical records occurs, one that does not seek to codify, but rather preserve, we must be careful not to seal off the previous generations of feminist artists and writers. In our roles, we must activate the archive, as Lacy and Labovitz would say, utilizing our virtual spaces and opening up boundaries. It is here that I situate the ultimate rejection of the term post-feminism. For to perpetuate its usage is to suggest a bracketing off of feminism as situated in a time before, a concept that is no longer needed nor relevant. In denying the term post-feminism, we are not simply making a U-turn back to what once was, but rather viewing the position of feminism as active and continuously shaped and reshaped through a dialogue with past, present and future voices. We practice, act, speak, live feminism and in these voices we continue. The Gorilla Girls are still in action, performing and posting their word across the country. Their work is still needed, as is ours. For to live and produce as a feminist is entirely a positivist strategy whose repercussions will be felt well into the work of future generations. Thank you.