A feminist genealogy of posthuman aesthetics in the visual arts

Abstract

This article aims to reassemble a feminist genealogy of the posthuman in the arts, with a specific focus on the visual works conceived by female artists after the rise of what has been retrospectively defined as first-wave Feminism. Starting with the main avant-garde movements of the first half of the twentieth century—specifically, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism—this genealogy analyses the second-wave Feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, with its integral exploration of the body highlighted by performance art. Following this, it takes into account the third-wave Feminism of the 1990s and its radical re-elaboration of the self: from Cyberfeminism and its revisitation of technology, to the artistic insights offered, on the one side, by critical techno-orientalist readings of the futures, and on the other, by the political and social articulations of Afrofuturism and Chicanafuturism. Lastly, this genealogy accesses the ways contemporary female artists are dealing with gender, social media and the notion of embodiment, touching upon elements that will become of key importance in fourth-wave Feminism. This article is published as part of a collection dedicated to multi-and interdisciplinary perspectives on gender studies.