ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the historical moment at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s when American artists, art critics, and theorists paused to take stock of and reflect on the shift in artistic, political, and intellectual feminist practices characteristic of feminism. With the second wave resurgence of American feminism in the 1960s, liberal feminism, taking its cues from liberal humanism, sought to redress the fact of male dominance by promoting commonality between the sexes and lobbying for equal rights. In reaction to the perceived a political elitism and intellectual bent of academic feminism early 1990s feminists reinvested in the currency of gender and identity politics and more accessible or elementary discursive strategies. The return to an innocent feminism has been organized, particularly around the possibilities in artistic practice for recovering the body that was supposedly lost to the critique of essentialism and the rhetoric of sexual difference.
