On Queer-Feminist Interruptions in Avant Garde Feminist Art
Feminist art did not arrive fully formed. It broke itself into being—urgent, splintered, contradictory. It wanted to speak, but also to scream. It wanted to show the body, but also to take it back. From the late 1960s through the 1980s, feminist art became a field of battle: for visibility, for authorship, for the right to represent—and be represented.
Into this field stepped queerness. Sometimes named, often not. Sometimes welcomed, often resisted. Queerness didn’t arrive with answers. It arrived with questions. About identity, about desire, about what it meant to say woman at all.
Much of early feminist art was organized around visibility—making the female body visible, speaking its pain, displaying its histories. Queerness, on the other hand, introduced ambiguity. The queer body does not always want to be seen. Or not in the way you expect. It prefers codes, gestures, irony. It interrupts the gallery with signals, not statements.
VALIE EXPORT stood in a cinema with her pants split open, offering her vulva not to the camera, but to the audience. The act wasn’t erotic—it was confrontational. It turned the gaze into a weapon and the body into a trap. EXPORT didn’t want to reclaim femininity. She wanted to rupture it.
The feminist body was often imagined as whole, wounded, emerging from repression. The queer body is less stable. It slips, splits, poses. It performs its own undoing. Where one seeks truth, the other prefers friction.
Vaginal Davis never performed gender—she mangled it. Her drag was sloppy, glorious, punk. It refused polish. Davis was too queer for feminism and too feminist for gay male culture. She made a home in that refusal. Her performances were not empowerment—they were sabotage. Drag not as illusion, but as defacement.
Queerness, when it entered feminist art, brought with it a sense of play. But not lightness. A heavy kind of play. The kind that comes from knowing that visibility can kill. That performance is not celebration, but survival. That claiming space is never clean.
Harmony Hammond wrapped her sculptures in cloth and latex—bound, soaked, stitched. These works didn’t declare identity. They embodied it. They whispered queerness through texture and form. She gave abstraction a pulse. Lesbianism not as subject, but as method. A way of touching. A way of folding. A refusal to give the viewer everything they want.
Feminist art was never one thing. But often, it leaned toward the coherent. Queerness resisted that. It offered multiplicity. It replaced the universal woman with a shifting constellation of bodies, desires, and strategies.
The role queerness played in avant-garde feminist art was not supplementary. It was insurgent. It bent the narrative. It invited failure. It brought sex into spaces meant for politics and brought politics into bedrooms. It asked the feminist project to go further—not just to represent the body, but to question the frame. Not just to show desire, but to scramble it.
Feminist art gave us the mirror. Queer-feminist art cracked it.
—Daniel Hill, 2024