The carnivalesque, parody and irony in the contemporary american visual art: Project Womanhouse, a case study

Abstract

The present paper situates its concerns at the crossroads of Gender Studies, visual art, and feminist theories in its attempt at investigating a famous 1972 art installation by American artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro, Project Womanhouse. Primarily grounded on contemporary theories of gender as a cultural construct, this study is concerned with how this particular instance of contemporary American visual arts deals with the deconstruction and reconstruction of gender through parody and irony. The study also discusses the problematic viewpoint of feminism on gender as too narrow-sighted and restrictive, while opting for the term feminine to describe the gender-related statements of the artists under scrutiny.