Connecting Womanhouse with Disability Studies in Art History: Contemporary Intersections in Marginalized Identities View Digital Media

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Valerie Tures  

This paper re-interprets and centers on "The Linen Closet" by Sandy Orgel, an installation of Womanhouse as the bodily and social narratives of oppression are read in the piece, both in terms of feminist and disability activism. The intersection between the two fields exposes a lineage of thought about minority groups in the museum, and the still-present marginalization these groups face in institutional settings. Womanhouse (1972), a public art project by the Feminist Art Program at CalArts, tackled aspects of female identity and social roles through installations that confronted assumptions about women’s innate abilities and purposes, and perceptions about their social expectations and daily realities, often in tension. The scholarship on this installation heavily focuses on oppression and the connections between feminist artists and scholars as they discuss these realities, and I add to this conversation by introducing the parallel structure of arguments happening in the scholarship of disability studies in art history. Disability studies offers a recent framework with which to reconsider formal and thematic choices in Womanhouse, such as the fragmentations and deformities of represented bodies, in the socially imposed expectations for disabled individuals, and finally in the coexistence of these models of understanding marginalization in art historical settings.