Date of Award

5-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts

Department

Art

First Advisor

Stefanie Snider

Second Advisor

Gabriela Romero

Third Advisor

Khristin Landry

Abstract

This thesis explores the ways in which Contemporary Latin American feminist artists have been able to subvert the Western constructed ideas of gender that work to locate the feminine Other as subordinate and inferior. Focusing on the installations and performances by Johanna Hamann, María Evelia Marmolejo, and Regina José Galindo, there is an emphasis on the role of the abject which is used to defamiliarize our established concepts of the traditional feminine in order to allow space for a redefinition and portrayal that excludes a detrimental modern semiology rooted in a zero point epistemology. By analyzing these artists' works in conjunction with Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject, the intent becomes to convey how they incorporate forms of resistance to counter hegemonic gender narratives that maintain a perpetual cycle of limiting normatives within systems of patriarchal and colonial structures.

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