I feel compelled, urged, driven, consumed, and pushed to use this medium of writing to illustrate the strength of the written word. I find myself wanting to format this as a letter, even, just to enhance the revealing aspects of writing and the vulnerability unfolded in reading an addressed letter. By delving into the work of female artists and writers such as Chris Kraus, Sophie Calle, Emily Dickinson, and The Guerrilla Girls, this research essay prompts to delineate how the second-wave feminist movement propelled women artists and writers to challenge the complicity and submissive feminine behavior through an epistolary practice.  

     After Simone de Beauvoir’s publication of The Second Sex in 1949 an outburst of feminist analysis on sex and power between genders rose mainly during the 1960s and 1970s. The group The New Left, a broad political movement consisting of activists in the Western world, advocated for a libertarian and democratic impulse, acknowledging multiple forms of oppression including feminism, environmentalism, the rejection of bureaucracy, LGBTQ+ rights, gender roles, and drug policy reforms. The group, retrieving inspiration from the work of Beauvoir, used their sexual discontents to help them understand the power relations between men and women, the American writer and prominent early radical activist of second-wave feminism, Alix Kates Shulma, writes in her essay Sex and Power: Sexual Bases of Radical Feminism, “we wanted to get at the truth about how women felt, how we viewed our lives, what was done to us, and how we functioned in the world.” (594) 

     Women artists had to find a way to redefine their experience as the marginalized Other.  These artists found diverse ways to tackle the system through various mediums, but not limited to performance, photography, conceptual art, and the one I will focus on today, writing. Shulma expresses, “I was optimistic about the effect of our movement. Our intense examination of our personal experience for its social and political significance even helped me to develop as a writer” (601). It is important to outline the difference between Literature and Art; I want to emphasize that although some artists have also published feminist texts, both forms of creative expression have very distinct characteristics. This research essay will deal with both and in consideration of the reader and the main thesis, I will roughly exemplify how words unify both realms. 

     Letters, love letters, angst letters, formal letters; Chris Kraus is an art critic, editor, writer, and filmmaker that has turned reading and writings a possibility for turning ‘the law of the father’ against itself, letter by letter. In her book I Love Dick, 1997, she uses the written letter as a way of dominance over the male subject. In the book, Chris, the main character who is based on the actual Chris Kraus, writes over 100 letters to her husband’s colleague after a single night of drinks at his place. This manic situation evolves into a conceptual art piece inspired by Sophie Calle that eventually turns into a publication. Kraus turns a medium historically associated with courtship into a social revenge on patriarchy by dominating and projecting her sexual desires onto Dick’s faceless identity. Cultural and media theorist Anna Watkins Fisher wrote that he “is made to stand for the very idea of men in Kraus’ litany of disappointments in the spheres of love, sex, and art” (226). In the middle of the book, the author questions whether if the letters are truly meant to be written for Dick, and instead changes the unmissable Dear Dick into Dear Diary, turning him from subject to object. These letters make him impotent, they’re intense, vulgar, honest, horny, vulnerable, emotional; freeing. Her inherent obsession and sexual liberation make her the agent, it is she who has the last word.  

     Similar to Kraus’ work, the French writer and conceptual artist, Sophie Calle, has claimed the last word in her piece Take Care of Yourself, 2007. In her work, Calle has asked 107 women professionals to interpret her ex’s break-up email. This was created as a direct response to challenge the expected behavior of women to emotional situations. By bringing together such a diverse group of women and asking them to analyze and respond to the email, Calle is highlighting the unique perspectives and strengths of each individual and celebrating the power of collective wisdom and interpretation. The artist plays with X’s last words and takes his imperative sentence, take care of yourself, and dismantles his orders by reinterpreting his words and obtaining the conclusive response. What begins for both women, Calle and Kraus, as an “it’s all about you” project slowly turns into “it’s about me”; “Dick and “X” get emptied of their meaning as individuals, as Kraus and Calle are recognized by the art world as never more unique.” (Fisher 232) 

     Tension between dominant and submissive attributes build up. We’ve seen two examples on how the dominant and submissive attributes alternate between writer and recipient, but how does this change when the institution plays a part? The Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous feminist group that formed in New York City in 1985, they’re constituted by female artists devoted to tackling sexism and racism within the art world. They’re known to create satirical billboards and posters that challenge the museum institution with the purpose of a higher inclusion of women in the arts. Josephine Withers, Associate Professor Emerita focused on Twentieth-Century Art and Feminist Studies at the University of Maryland, writes in her essay The Guerrilla Girls, 1998,  how “we need activist groups like the Guerrilla Girls working with and within the system to effect change” (289). One of the group’s earliest works is Dearest Art Collector, 1968, a print in which they wrote a “nice” letter addressed, as its name claims, to art collectors, and they use the characteristics of a “feminine” or even little-girl like letter (cursive letter, a sad flower drawn on top, pink sheet of paper) to deliver a passive-aggressive claim of the lack of art made by women in their collection. Similar to Kraus or Calle, The Guerrilla Girls used a medium, language, format, and tone “known” to be “feminine” to object to the dominant “male trait”. 

     Emily Dickinson, an American queer poet, paved the path for letters to be a literary response against patriarchy and heteronormative views. She has tenderly dismantled male courtship and the love letters that come with it. Various critics such as John Walsh and the literary editor Thomas Wentworth, would enforce a heterosexual reading of Emily Dickinson’s poems, eradicating completely the idea that she would have any deep feelings towards women. Nonetheless, the author Lillian Faderman, an American historian focused on highlighting the lives of historical LGBTQ+ people, attempts to provide a kinder and more caring reading to Dickinson’s oeuvre.  

     How vain it seems to write, when one knows how to feel – how   much more near and dear to sit beside you, talk with you, hear the tones of your voice – so hard to “deny thyself, and take up thy cross, and follow me –” give me strength Susie, write me of  hope and love, and of hearts that endured, and great was their reward of “Our Father who art in Heaven.” I don’t know how I shall bear it, when the gentle spring comes; if she should come and see me and talk to me of you, Oh it would surely kill me!  

It is primal to point out the ever-present intersectionality in the liberation from patriarchal ideas; Emily Dickinson has had to endure, even after her death, a vast misreading of body of work, since only a “few critics attempt to deal with what is an apparent homoerotic strain not only in her poetry but also in her letters” (Faderman 199). Letters being written for women by women; letters about love and desire; letters that show the rawness of emotions; not only has the poet been oppressed by her gender but now because of her sexuality too. We should position ourselves in history to better understand her writing, since “many of her letters to women are quite clear about the nature of her affection and are as explicit as it was possible to be in the nineteenth century, lacking a modern vocabulary and a modern perspective of psychosexuality” (Laderman 200).  

     All of these examples open the discussion regarding gender; Judith Butler, an American philosopher and gender studies writer whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literature theory, has written in her essay Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory, 1988,  

     Gender is not passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by nature, language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of patriarchy. Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure, but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or linguistic given, power is relinquished to expand the cultural field bodily through subversive performances of various kinds. (531)  

     Whether it'd be writer to reader, reader to writer, lover to lover, artist to institution, women to patriarchy; letters hold in them messages that are urged to be delivered, important information that must be said. Kraus, Calle, Dickinson, and The Guerrilla Girls are using a medium mostly known to be attributed to women in a way that the meaning is reverted. Thanks to the second-wave feminist movement where sexual discontents started to rise and pushed women to delve into the power relations between men and women, these artists (except for Dickinson, due to the timeline) could explore how is it to be a women artist – a woman alone, in the oppressive system. And as for Dickinson, it was important to rectify and closely observe her work with a more nurturing approach having new information at hand since the time that she was alive. These contemporary artists, writers and scholars were actively challenging the expected submissive feminine behavior by using words as weapons.

(Important to highlight additional artists who used the letter as a powerful tool to act against submission: Adrian Piper, Carolee Schneemann, and Frida Kahlo. (within others)).  

Bibliography

Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, 1988, pp. 519-531. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3207893. Accessed 24 February 2023. 

“Carolee Schneemann Foundation.” Text from Interior Scroll | Carolee Schneemann Foundation, https://www.schneemannfoundation.org/writing/interior-scroll. 

Dickinson, Emily, et al. Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson. Wesleyan University Press, 2019. 

Faderman, Lillian. “Emily Dickinson’s Letters to Sue Gilbert.” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 18, no. 2, 1977, pp. 197–225. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25088726. Accessed 12 Mar. 2023. 

Fisher, Anna Watkins. “Manic Impositions: The Parasitical Art of Chris Kraus and Sophie Calle.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 1/2, 2012, pp. 223–35. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23333446. Accessed 11 Mar. 2023. 

Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Ecriture Feminine.” Literary Theory and Criticism, 21 Nov. 2019, https://literariness.org/2016/05/14/ecriture-feminine/. 

Shulman, Alix Kates. “Sex and Power: Sexual Bases of Radical Feminism.” Signs, vol. 5, no. 4, 1980, pp. 590–604. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173832. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023. 

Withers, Josephine. “The Guerrilla Girls.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, 1988, pp. 285–300. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3180154. Accessed 15 Mar. 2023.