Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art

Between 1966 and 1976, American artist Nancy Spero completed some of her most aggressively political work. Made at a time when Spero was a key member of the anti-war and feminist arts-activism that burgeoned in the New York art world during the period, her works demonstrate a violent and bodily rejection of injustice.
Considering the ways in which anti-war and feminist art used emotion as a means to persuade and protest, Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art examines the history of this crucial decade in American art politics through close attention to Spero's practice. Situating her work amongst the activism that defined the era, this book examines the ways in which sensation and emotion became political weapons for a generation of artists seeking to oppose patriarchy and war.
Exemplary of the way in which artists were using metaphors of sensation and emotion in their work as part of the anti-Vietnam war and feminist art movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Spero's practice acts as a model for representing how politics feels. By exploring Spero's political engagement anew, this book offer a profound recontextualization of the important contribution that Spero made to Feminist thought, politics and art in the US.

Rachel Warriner is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art, UK, where her research focuses on the important contribution of activist collectives to the American feminist art movement during the 1970s. She has published widely on feminist art and poetry.

List of Plates
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Pain and its Politics
Pain's Metaphor and Metonymy
Chapter Outline
Chapter One: Personal and Political: Pain and Emotion 1966-1976
Anti-War Anger and Feminist Hurt
Pain 1966-76
Chapter Two: The Suffering of War and the Pain of Alienation
Fantasy, the Beast, and Herman Kahn': metaphors and metonymy of war
From Symbols of War to the Fractured Symbolic
Chapter Three: Codex Artaud: Hysteria and Silence
Picturing Silence
Hysteria and the Politics of Pain
The American Woman Artist Show, GEDOK and the Amerika Haus
Chapter Four: Torture of Women as devotional object.
Unreliable Witness
Torture and Information in the 1970s: Feeling the Pain of Others.
Affective meditation and beholding: medieval modes for feminism
Conclusion
Notes
Index