How a constellation of Latin American artists explored the body, power, and emancipation—and expanded the meanings of feminist art.
In The Political Body, art historian Andrea Giunta explores gender and power in the work of Latin American artists from the 1960s to the present. Questioning the social place of women and proposing alternative understandings of biological bodies, these artists eroded repressive systems and created symbolic strategies of resistance to dictatorships, racism, and marginalization.
Giunta presents close readings of works—paintings, films, photography, multimedia art, installations, and performances—by a myriad of artists spanning from Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay to Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. Examining themes of visibility, subjectivity, empathy, and liberation, The Political Body tells the story of an ongoing revolution, providing an active intervention in the history of feminist art in and beyond Latin America.
Andrea Giunta is Professor of Latin American and Modern and Contemporary Art at Buenos Aires University and Principal Researcher at CONICET (National Scientific and Technical Research Council). She was cofounding director of CLAVIS, the Center for Latin American Visual Studies at the University of Texas, Austin.
Jane Brodie is a visual artist and translator specializing in the visual arts.
"Andrea Giunta, one of the most insightful and forward looking intellectuals working today, has created an extensive network of ideas and observations about the multiple roles played by women artists, critics, curators, and gallerists throughout Latin America. The Political Body is essential reading for all connected in any way to the world of contemporary art."—Edward J. Sullivan, Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art, New York University
"Since the early 1990s, Andrea Giunta has been a pioneer scholar on feminist art in Latin America. In her hands, this book is neither a genealogy nor a History with capital H; instead, in its specificity, it highlights the forms of resistance, denouncement, and emancipative creative imagination by women artists in the context of gender, social, and racial oppression in Latin America. By combining a constellation of microhistories and academic research with Giunta’s own first-person voice, the book counters stereotypes, racial discrimination, marginalization, and the invisibilization of women, and instead foregrounds the transformational role of feminist art and politics since the mid-twentieth century."—Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, independent curator and art historian
304 pp.7 x 9Illus: 85 color illustration, 52 b/w illustrations
9780520344327$50.00|£42.00Hardcover
Mar 2023