Thematic Section: “Art through a Female Lens”

2026-01-07

Guest editors: Mirian Tavares and María Jesús Botana Vilar

Deadline for article submission: 15 February 2026

Art is, in principle, a field defined by artistic practice rather than by gender. From this perspective, it should no longer be necessary to speak of Art in the Feminine. Yet persistent questions remain regarding the position accorded to women within the artistic field, particularly within official art histories, which have been overwhelmingly written by men and about men. Such narratives have often implied that women artists were either absent or marginal, rarely acknowledging them as agents of aesthetic rupture, canonical figures, or contributors to the development of enduring formal or conceptual systems.

Although the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have witnessed a significant increase in the visibility of women artists and a gradual revision of art-historical narratives, this recognition remains partial and belated. Feminist scholarship has demonstrated that women’s artistic production has long been structurally marginalized within canons, critical discourse, and institutions of cultural legitimation, through naturalized hierarchies of authorship, genius, and value. These conditions make it necessary to continue critically examining the historical and contemporary frameworks through which art is written, exhibited, and evaluated.

This call for papers invites contributions that address Art in the Feminine from practice-based perspectives, including artists’ reflections, process-oriented studies, artistic research, curatorial practices, and experimental projects, as well as from historical, critical, and theoretical perspectives. Submissions that articulate practice and theory are particularly welcome, especially those that explore modes of making, situated methodologies, and critical strategies that contribute to a more plural and integrated understanding of women’s artistic production.

Key Themes

  • Artistic practice and gender: creative processes, methodologies, and modes of making
  • Artistic research / practice-based research from feminist or situated perspectives
  • Critical revisions of the canon: counter-narratives and art-historical reconfigurations
  • Authorship, genius, and artistic value: historical, critical, and contemporary perspectives
  • Body, materiality, and experience in women’s artistic production
  • Curatorial practices and regimes of visibility: exhibitions, institutions, and legitimation
  • Strategies of resistance, subversion, and reappropriation in contemporary art
  • Intersectionality in artistic practice: gender in relation to race, class, and sexuality

For instructions on how to submit, access the journal’s website:  https://journals.ipl.pt/rhinocervs/about/submissions

Editors’ short bios:

Mirian Tavares, Full Professor of Arts at the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences of the University of Algarve. She is Deputy Coordinator of the Centre for Research in Arts and Communication (CIAC), Director of the PhD programme in Digital Media Art, and a member of the management team for the BA in Visual Arts, as well as the MA in Creative Process. She researches and publishes at the intersection of various art forms. She was a consultant for the project ‘SPECULUM - Filming and Seeing Yourself in the Mirror: The use of self-writing by Portuguese-speaking documentary filmmakers’ funded by FCT (EXPL/ART-CRT/0231/2021).

Mª Jesús Botana Vilar, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences of the University of Algarve, is a member of the Scientific Council of the Centre for Research in Arts and Communication (CIAC) and directs the Centre for Galician Studies. She currently collaborates with ADHUC-Centre de recerca Teoria, Gènere, Sexualitat at the University of Barcelona and in the past has also collaborated with the Institute for Feminist Research at the Complutense University of Madrid.