Abstract (Summary)
This dissertation explores the home both as a theme in contemporary art by Native North American women artists and as a means to engage Native women's art and visual culture in a critical, intercultural feminist discourse. The home is a rich and complicated site in feminist theory and women's history; it holds additional meaning in Native cultures, where it has ties to specific cultural traditions, to homeland, and to the history of colonization. Artists working in performance, video, film, photography, and installation explore aspects of the home; of particular interest here are those works which relate to intercultural encounters between Native and non-native women.
Transnationalism is introduced as a conceptual framework for analyzing home, gender, and identity in Native women's art and visual culture. Relying heavily on feminist interpretations of transnationalism, borders, migration, diaspora, cosmopolitanism and hybridity, this dissertation addresses the multiple contexts for Native women's identities and homes. It explores how artists present an experience of homeland and collective identity that reflects their position as global citizens whose own experiences and identities may find points of commonality with the experiences and identities of artists from other cultural, ethnic, and national positions.
Contemporary artists discussed include Sama Alshaibi, Rebecca Belmore, Hannah Claus, Bonnie Devine, Rosalie Favell, Danis Goulet, Maria Hupfield, Marianne Nicolson, Shelley Niro, Alanis Obomsawin, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, and Anna Tsouhlarakis. In order to consider representation and encounter between Native and non-native women more broadly, a close reading of the photographs Gladys Knight Harris took of Iñupiat women in Kotzebue, Alaska in 1949 is also presented.
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