“To both ends of the chain”: some reflections on the relationship between the visual arts and feminism in Portugal in the 1970s

Abstract

By problematizing the rhetoric of separation associated with the term feminism in the discourse of some Portuguese women artists, this text seeks to explore the strategies developed by women artists in Portugal in the 1970s to assert their agency in the cultural sphere. These strategies, which could perhaps be understood as strategies of non-separation, should be apprehended in the light of the Portuguese political, social and cultural history of those years, clearly distinguishing themselves from feminist-oriented strategies of intervention developed by women artists in the same period in other geographies, and more particularly in the Anglo-Saxon context – a context that, in this field of studies, has become an important reference.