Feminist fever: women exhibitions and ethical paradoxes

Abstract

It is possible to verify that for about five or six years in Brazil, there has been a media fever of feminism in its multiplicity of approaches and agendas. Specifically in the field of culture, or rather in the arts system, this period has provided a wave of exhibitions in visual arts, from small to large scale, both in large artistic centers and peripheral territories, which have continued since the fragmented contribution of the French exhibition Elles, from the Georges Pompidou Center collection, through the itinerancy of Radical Women at the São Paulo State Gallery, to the most recent undertaking by the São Paulo Museum of Art with Feminist Stories. Taking such manifestations, and the local and recent studies of art history, criticism and feminisms and gender in the arts, I seek here to establish some lines of forces of these curatorial narrative negotiations, and some apparently indissoluble paradoxes that such exhibitions raise.