The femmeuses Workshop addressed certain key works by artists of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, including Laurie Anderson, Dara Birnbaum, Valerie Export, Yoko Ono, Yvonne Rainer, Martha Rosler, Cindy Sherman, Sarah Lucas and Adrian Piper. The Workshop began with an analysis of performance videos and influential texts, and then proposed a series of remakes, traversing artistic processes and the creation of performances. It was intended that the workshop would ascertain how the different stands taken by feminist art influenced not only post-modern art, but also contemporary dance, and especially what we now call non-dance. The feminist, gay, and queer movements, and in particular the writings of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, underline how the acquisition of gender can be seen as a performative approach. The workshop also investigated how the body is confronted by different forms of artistic media, as well as proposed an analysis and broadening of the potentials revealed by extant processes in the construction of gender.
