1979 Judy Chicago. Lenono Photo Archive. Connecting was the function and meaning of women's traditional art, and it is still consciously a function of feminist art today. I realize my unease over the popular word used to describe my own genitalia indicates how deeply ingrained is the cultural shame about our body parts.
Sex is indeed a profoundly important and deeply political issue.
These politics are manifest in the debates that have surrounded Judy Chicago's Dinner Party , which I would like to position in this catalogue and exhibition as part of the ongoing history of feminist art practice and theory in the United states and Britain. I turn to the end of the catalogue, to the Checklist of the Exhibition, to survey the manner in which the exhibition is organized. Cheri Gaulke's This Is My Body documents a 1982 performance in which she linked traditional Christian misogyny with the Western dominance over and ultimate devaluing of nature. Feminism has employed diverse approaches to challenge history's exclusions. Theorists tell us we are in the Post Modern period.