‘Deviant’ Women: Women and the Visual Arts Research Symposium (Bristol, 10 July 25)
On the 10th of July 2025, the Women and the Visual Arts Research Cluster at the University of Bristol will host the interdisciplinary symposium “Deviant Women: Women and the Visual Arts Research“, that aims to explore women who transgressed social norms in their roles as artists, authors, models, patrons, or collectors.
While the focus is on submissions that think about women’s ‘deviancy’ in their relationship to the visual arts in diverse ways, perspectives from fields such as history of art, visual culture, classics, film and theatre studies, history and religious studies are welcome.
Potential topics could include, but are not limited to:
- Exhibiting and collecting strategies used by women or the curation and collecting of work by women
- Self-representation and self-portraiture – identity and sexuality
- Transnational feminine identities – culture, race, immigration and exile
- The nude and representations of the body
- The archive – the formation of celebrity, reception and legacy
- Women and the environment
- Women’s work – motherhood, domesticity, labour, artist collectives
- ‘Deviant’ use of artistic medium through textual approaches, the applied arts, craft, performance, etc.
Abstracts (up to 200 words) along with a short biography should be submitted to Helena Anderson and Valéria Fülöp-Pochon by May 5th, 2025.
In addition to proposals for papers, submissions for videos or artist talks related to the symposium’s themes are also possible.
Click here for further information.