After I saw a Facebook post featuring the work of Hope Gangloff, I wrote a post that gave a shout out to the Cantor museum for supporting living woman artists. I was pleased that an institution with which I had been closely affiliated while at Stanford was committed to showcasing contemporary art, particularly contemporary art made by a woman and—in the post they shared—art that contained an explicit anti-fascist message. I wrote that post thinking that their politics aligned with my own, when in reality, as I thought about it, my politics aspire to align with theirs.
On this note of featuring marginalized figures, I started to think about the essays and research projects I've done while at Stanford. My work is almost always focused on questions of gender and sexuality, reading into gendered representations of Roma people in German Expressionism, black femininity in Warhol's oft-problematic oeuvre, and even notions of the body and gender in films of sea animals to name just a few of the topics I've addressed in my written work. Queer and feminist theories are so fundamental to my work that these lenses are among the first things I say in describing the scholar I am and want to be.
Yet my written work has so often focused on male producers of artwork. I wrote an honors thesis and a senior paper during my senior year in addition to the several papers I produced each quarter while at Stanford. Across all of these papers, I've only twice written about woman authors/artists, once about a women's poster-making collective and the other about Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, hardly an overlooked figure or work. Across these essays, the construction of female identity was addressed often, but through the eyes of a male director. Same too with female identity in the fin-de-siecle—the male gaze and male artists only.
Depictions of black femininity? White male artist. Work outside of the English-language? Still a wealthy European man—gay, but that marginalized identity did not prevent him from becoming canonical. I'm currently interning at an modern art museum, and the same problem arises. I'm doing research for two exhibitions about two men.
I'm not saying that my work hasn't been critical or that the artists I've looked at haven't been important, but this is a call-out to myself and others, to pay particular attention to who we are writing about, not just what we are writing about. Queer readings of canonical works are important. I'm proud of the work I've done, but it is easier to write "the-canon-with-a-twist" than it is to write about the radically undiscovered and as-yet-unaddressed. Of course, there are canon-adjacent female writers and artists who have attained great degrees of fame, but the project of historical equality requires more work than critically examining these figures more (though this is crucial work, just as my work on queer male artists is).
Linda Nochlin's "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" argues that there may not actually be thousands of undiscovered comparable woman "genius" painters because of the patriarchal institutions that prevented their development and full realization. So what that means is that we cannot simply write about these other figures just as easily as I've written about Lorca or Warhol or Klimt. Telling their stories might require examining pamphlets not paintings, letters not literature.
I've done substantial research many times, combing through online archives, reading texts from digitized libraries, and examining facsimiles of ephemera. I've always searched for a name I knew, but now the task may be to also uncover a new name. I'm applying to graduate school in the fall. My advisors at Stanford have almost all been women, the primary theorist and writer whose ideas I work with is a woman, yet the people I've wanted to study and write about have all been men. Those are the films I've seen and the works that have dominated the pages of the books I've read and the walls of the museums I've visited, but I need to cast new glances backwards, find new images, screen new films.
This is a challenge to myself to continue doing critical work, to continue examining the way marginalized figures operate at the highest, most widely-proliferated levels of culture. But alongside that, when I'm down in the archives, I must also resurrect other stories I find. It is my duty as a historian and scholar to share the diverse, vibrant histories that exist and my selective presentation is erasure. For every paper I write about a decade and about a male artist, I overlook women and gender non-conforming people from that era and make the past seem more homogenous. I've often looked back at the past and found queer masculine figures to converse with through the art and literature they've produced, but this project of reclamation is bigger than just my personal relationships and interests—the issue at stake is the destructive and selective domination of certain narratives in history. As a budding scholar, it is my duty to address more than what I thus far have. I challenge myself and others to think through these issues while down in the archives, contact mentors about who to look for and where, and above all, share the stories you ultimately discover in the literature, art, and ephemera you find.