Lippy Women: Feminist Art Activism on a Catholic Campus

Abstract

Claiming public space—and challenging the relegation of women’s bodies and lives to the private sphere—is an old feminist strategy, one which works by heightening anxieties around the gendered contradictions of the public/private divide. Including images of paintings as well as clips from the artist’s video statement and interview, this multi-media essay examines how a women’s studies program, a campus women’s center, and an undergraduate student at a Catholic university in the Midwest garnered institutional support for a sexually explicit program of feminist art and public pedagogy. The centerpiece of the program, an exhibit of the student’s original mixed-media paintings of genital labia, was an activist installation designed to highlight and critique both the consumption of pornography by male students on campus and the little-known but growing trend of labiaplasty (female genital cosmetic surgery), which, the artist and her collaborators argue, is encouraged by pornography itself.

Catholic and other religiously-affiliated campuses can present a unique double bind for women in so far as they foster anxieties about female agency—and sexual agency, in particular—while also participating in the larger society’s increasingly pornographic visual culture. Situating this campus case study as an instance of feminist art activism, the essay argues that feminist pedagogy can be an effective strategy for navigating institutional and cultural constraints, such as those operating at religiously-affiliated colleges and universities.