• 
• Curator: Susanna Gyulamiryan
  Coordinator: FemLibrary Armenia

  Exhibition II
  Gender Corpora

  Modern Art Museum, Yerevan
  March 1-30, 2023

  Artists:
  Licia Cholakian (Canada), Hripsime Ghazanchyan (Armenia), Armine Hovhannisyan
  (Armenia), Inna Kolupaeva (Armenia), masharu (Netherlands), Valentina Maz
  (Armenia),
  Karine Matsakyan (Armenia), Silvia Sarsano (Italy-Germany)

The second edition of the International Feminist, Queer Festival conceptualizes gender
epistemology and gender constructions, which have been at the forefront of feminist
and queer dialogues both in Armenia and internationally. Gender Studies uses the
methodology of feminist theory and other contemporary critical discourses.
In contemporary culture and thinking, there is an obvious paradigmatic shift toward
epistemological subjectivity marked by gender. Gender studies examine not only
feminine and masculine subjectivities along the traditional line of binary oppositions but
also other kinds of subjectivities such as gay, lesbian, genderqueer, transsexual,
agender, genderfluid, gender non-conforming, pangender, and other identities. Thus,
gender structures (corpora) have become more diverse, and gender boundaries are
ever-expanding. An individual is free to construct and deconstruct identities,
relationships, and gender to liberate themself from the policies and constructs imposed
by the biosocial norm.

The gender corpora have adopted a new methodological apparatus that examines the
concepts of social class and colonial, post-colonial, racial, national, and ethnic identities.
It is increasingly necessary to talk about the practice of gender marginalization and
suppression of subjectivity at the core of this growing diversity. The enormous research
on gender deals with the theme of the “other” that is common to postmodern discourse.
The difference between the “other” and the “diverse” is considered to be ideological.
Contrary to multiculturalism's rhetoric, being the “other” in contemporary culture means
being subjected to fundamental dispossession—in other words, political marginalization,
and discrimination.

In some theoretical formulations of second-wave feminism and feminist existentialism,
the term “other” remains limited in its usage by referring only to women’s subjectivity.
This phrasing – which does not imply multiple or victimized ‘otherness’ – universalizes
the concept of otherness for all women. Donna Haraway, in her article A Cyborg
Manifesto, points to the “troubling dualism” in the social and cultural contexts (self/other,
mind/body, culture/nature, masculine/feminine, civilized/savage, reality/appearance,
active/passive, etc.) She emphasizes that certain dualism has been persistent in
Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logic and practices of domination
of women, people of color, nature, workers, and animals – in short, domination of all
constituted as “others”, whose task is to mirror the self. Thus “other’ is interpreted as
unequal irrespective of whether the “other” is in a dominant or subordinate position.
The second Feminist, Queer International Festival featured exhibitions, public events,
and discussions that included gender discourses in non-Western world countries, the
historical “excavation” into a brief genealogy of binary and non-binary gender identities,
female reproductive health, motherhood, sex-selective abortions, the social structure of
the family, social classes, non-symmetrical division of labor and the gendered structure
of wage labor, the “post-colonial turn”, similarities and differences between artistic
statements of Western and non-Western feminist and queer practices, and Armenian
diasporic feminism.

The public events included in the Festival took place in 2023. The exhibition included
artworks from the early 2000s to the present day to emphasize the importance of social,
political, and gender issues in contemporary art practices.

Armenian text here.