This panel examines the role of avant-garde women in confronting models of gender, domesticity and political practices safeguarded by patriarchal society. From the margins of vanguardism women effectively engaged in syndicalist and anarchist movements that reacted to state politics, while urging the importance of launching social reforms and radical art. This panel will thus provide an overview of artists who participated in a variety of experimental trends such as Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Imagism, Vorticism, Dadaism and Surrealism, among others. Women avant-gardists became prominent figures in changing the direction of art schools, as Amy Lowell’s heated confrontation with Ezra Pound shows on the grounds of the necessity to invest Imagism with a more democratic perspective. Occupying the position of art patrons and editors in leading journals, Gertrude Stein and Dora Marsden, for instance, also gave voice to feminist activism and avant-garde artistic practices. Likewise, several Dadaist and Surrealist women struggled to assert their subjectivity by rising up against those male clichés that conceived them as objects of desire. Based on the ideas of femininity and political dissent, topics might include, but are not limited to the following:

—Print culture as a method of vindicating women’s rights and aesthetics.

—The capacity of feminist artists to rethink the public and private sphere against masculine views.

—The figure of the woman art patron and her effort to promote vanguardism and social progress.

—Gynocentrism and body politic in modern art, literature and criticism.

—The muse versus the male artist.

—Alternatives to the male gaze in experimental cinema and photography.

—Men representing women vs. women self-representing.

—The construction of the feminine subject in avant-garde literary and visual genres.

—Fashion, the modern woman and the commodification of the feminine body.

—Rethinking prostitution in the avant-garde.

—Gender performativity and androgyny in women’s creative works.

By June 14th, 2018, please submit a 300-word abstract in English or Spanish along with a brief bio and A/V requirements to Leticia Pérez Alonso (leticia.p.alonso@jsums.edu), Jackson State University.