Speculative Networks: From Political Protest to the Neoliberal Market in Feminist Video Art in the US, 1970-85

Author

Helena Shaskevich, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

2-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Art History

Advisor

Siona Wilson

Committee Members

Amy Herzog

Alexandra Juhasz

Erica Levin

Subject Categories

Cultural History | Digital Humanities | Interdisciplinary Arts and Media | Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Other Film and Media Studies | Visual Studies | Women's History

Keywords

feminist art; video art; activism; pornography; healthcare; television

Abstract

This dissertation argues that video played a critical role in the shifting landscape of feminist politics in the 1970s. Video’s introduction to the consumer market during the late 1960s coincided with the emergence of feminist liberation politics in the United States. Portable, relatively accessible, and without the burden of the historic weight of male mastery – unlike more traditional mediums including sculpture, painting, and even film – video was quickly and widely adopted by feminist artists and activists. For many of these women, video’s specific characteristics – its portability, accessibility, reproducibility – highlighted its democratizing possibilities and closely aligned video with notions of freedom. Above all, however, it is video’s technological affinity to feminist consciousness-raising practices which cut across the categorical distinctions between art and activism, with echoes of CR practices discernable not only in video’s production, especially its unique live feedback, but also in its distribution. For women, video manifested the feminist adage, “the personal is political''; it was both a medium of interiority, a closed-circuit between the artist, her camera, and the image on the monitor, as well as a social medium, recording political issues and broadcasting them to a wider community.

Despite the significant role of video in feminist projects during the 1970s, current historical narratives of video art emphasize a split between art (form) and activism (network) which has led to the de-politicization of works by some of the most prominent female video artists including Lynda Benglis, Joan Jonas, and Dara Birnbaum, on the one hand, and an erasure of the work of activist collectives such as the Women’s Video News Service or Vulva Video on the other. Beginning with the premise that the simple act of a woman taking up a camera in the 1970s was in itself political, this dissertation works across this discursive divide between video art and video activism and instead places the works in dialogue with one another as they respond to and imagine how video might transform the feminist politics of three distinct activist spaces – pornography, healthcare, and television. Lynda Benglis’s video works, for instance, are discussed through the lens of feminist debates about pornographic artifice as they intersect with questions of video’s intimacy and immediacy; canonical pieces by Joan Jonas and activist healthcare videos by Susan Gage, among others, are contextualized in relation to feminist healthcare materials which reconfigure video’s live reflexive feedback loops into embodied models of knowledge production; and lastly, some of Dara Birnbaum’s most famous single-channel works including Kiss the Girls and Technology/Transformation are reevaluated within the context of the milieu of 1970s feminist media activism, which in turn shifts the videos’ grammar from the single cut of TV appropriation to the spatialized social dynamics of networked TV broadcast as a public utility. In each of these cases, the tapemakers embrace the specific technological qualities of video to create a feminist visual language which transcends the divide between art and activism.

Each chapter discusses these works in relation to a changing feminist political landscape, which maps the rise and fall of collective action between the early 1970s and mid 1980s, a trajectory which echoes philosopher Nancy Fraser’s lament on feminisms’ shift away from a politics of redistribution in favor of a politics of recognition. Feminist videos respond to but also affect these changes, often critiquing them or offering alternative models, and importantly, occasionally spurring on some of the shifts towards a privatized market. Consider, for instance, Candida Royalle capitalizing on the newly emerging female porn consumer to sell “high-class” tapes, to the self-monitoring and self-surveillance of feminist healthcare activists further engendering the emergence of healthcare as an individualized lifestyle choice, to finally, the failure of imagination which plagues women’s attempts to form their own TV shows and channels, as they attempt to make them entertaining for mass audiences; in these ways, and others, this dissertation maps the ways in which feminist video helped transform spaces of feminist collective activism into gender-specific, “women’s” consumer marketplaces.

Even as the collective public sphere of politics is eradicated under the Reagan administration and recast into what Lauren Berlant refers to as “juxtapolitical” spaces, this dissertation argues that pockets of subversive feminist video tactics remain. A common thread throughout the chapters for instance, is the riotous possibility of pleasure – pleasure in looking, touching, performing, and being together, and the ways in which these pleasures translate into politics of belonging and care. Video documents and plays with the emergence of both the self-consciousness of the individual tape maker in the closed-circuit, and a feminist community-in-becoming in broadcast. These pleasures in evident in tapes across genres – from the electronic experimentations of Louise Etra’s Narcissicon in which the artist transforms self-touch into a sensuous flow of electronic signals, to the joys of being-in-community in documentary tapes like Ricki Ripp’s Sexual Fantasy or Susan Gage’s Self-Help, to the pleasure and liberatory possibility in gender and identity performance in Ann Magnuson’s Made for TV or Ilege Segalove’s Mom Tapes. Additionally, the activist categories mapped out in this dissertation are neither monolithic nor stable, and instead, frequently overlap. The video works highlight the ways in which these issues are intertwined. Julie Gustafson’s Politics of Intimacy, for instance, appears in both the pornography and television chapters.

Recommended Citation

Shaskevich, Helena, "Speculative Networks: From Political Protest to the Neoliberal Market in Feminist Video Art in the US, 1970-85" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6102