Women can only stay marginal in an object-centered art history. Producing a few more names and flirting with the possibility of a ‘feminine’ input into existing categories of genre and style embellish the margins while leaving them … marginal. On the other hand, feminism finds natural allies among those poststructuralist and psychoanalytic approaches whose object of study is the field of signification and that offer accounts of the individual subject along linguistic lines as both subject of meaning (an active ‘I’) and subject to meaning (an object of reference).
Lisa Tickner, “Modernist Art History: The Challenge of Feminism” (1988), from “Feminism, Art History and Sexual Difference,” Genders 3 (1988): 92-128. (via lesbianartandartists)
