ABSTRACT
Part of the task in describing a women’s avant-garde is to justify this grouping. Why separate out women? This task seems to have been different in the 1980s and early 1990s than it is today. Currently, the category “woman” does not have the explanatory power it had in the twentieth century. Generalizing statements about identity categories such as gender, most feminists would say, essentialize them, a practice of reduction that erases the multidimensionality and variability of identity. Identities may be better described as intersectional – that is, marked not only by the social construction of gender but also by other social constructions, such as race, class, religion, sexuality, nationality, and ethnicity, which necessarily come into play in the delineation of women and their productions. Moreover, in the postmodern, identities are seen as provisional and unstable linguistic constructs. If we follow this logic, the avant-garde itself must be seen as a linguistic construct with variable and arbitrary features. Earlier in the twentieth century, however, before intersectionality was brought to the table of feminism, the avant-garde was recognized by its formal experiments and the justifications for separating women out had to do with exclusion and difference.
