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Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party
“”The Dinner Party became the piece that everyone wanted to see and nobody wanted to show”
Between 1974 and 1979, she made the piece for which she’s now best known: an installation called The Dinner Party, which celebrates the lives of 1,038 notable women (at the Serpentine, visitors will be able to go on a virtual tour of it, guided by Chicago).
It comprises a triangular table, 48ft (nearly 15 metres) long at each side, with 39 place settings, each one designed to reflect the accomplishments of the woman whose name is embroidered on the runner beside it (think Hildegard of Bingen, or Elizabeth I, or Emily Dickinson).
Beneath the table is a “heritage floor”, the names of a further 999 women (Catherine of Aragon, Colette, Clytemnestra) inscribed on its tiles. But there’s something else. Uh oh. Each plate is decorated with a vulva. Is this vulgar or beautiful? Reductive or bracingly political? Opinion has long been divided.
The critic Robert Hughes thought it cliched and cheap. The artist Cornelia Parker has said that she would like to see it “binned”. But at the Elizabeth A Sackler Centre for Feminist Art in the Brooklyn Museum, where it’s now on permanent display after years in storage, its presence is said to account for a third of visitors.”
Women struggled to be admitted to universities, to win the vote, to have financial control over their lives. They're still struggling to preserve their reproductive rights. TiMs never had to fight for any of these things.
Heck, they're still struggling to be born, to even be seen as members of the human species . . .
This reminds me of Dave Chappelle's joke about how the trans rights movement is a rich White man's hobby. And how it would have gone if all the trans-women were poor Black people...
-Black TIMs: "We feel like girls on the inside!!!"
-White society: "Shut up, n*****rs! Nobody cares how you fucking feel!!!"
I bet if TIMs were treated like real women they would be fed up with "being a woman" really quickly...
Shut up and be happy, you can vote right? And rape is illegal. There's no inequality here. You're completely equal to men and face no sexism-based issues. In fact, you have an inverted-penis pass and are actually better off than everyone else.
Except that last thing is actually true and someone should say it to them.
or else you’re just hysterical
And, let’s not forget, a witch, and therefore need to be burned alive in public.
They don’t even want to be real women. That would not be extra-special enough for them.
They think that they are the all-new and vastly improved version of womanhood.
Yes lmao with the way they talk about sex and gender it’s as if femaleness is some abstract thing in Absolute Form out there that they are actually capturing the most accurately somehow. How CLASSICALLY MALE.
Edit to fix mobile typo