‘Deviant’ Women: Women and the Visual Arts Research Symposium.

The Women and the Visual Arts Research Cluster at the University of Bristol is excited to announce our forthcoming symposium taking place at the University of Bristol on Thursday, 10th July 2025.

Women have long been viewed as ‘deviant’ in their roles as artists, authors, models, patrons, and collectors. Their paths to becoming artists or patrons may ‘deviate’ from the norm, their chosen medium or subjects may diverge from those expected by the market, and their representations of themselves and those around them may be unorthodox compared to the art historical canon. How can we, as researchers, contextualise this ‘deviancy’ in our work on women and the visual arts?

We welcome submissions that think about women’s ‘deviancy’ in their relationship to the visual arts in diverse ways: women who push the boundaries on what has been seen as the norm or whose work is divergent from accepted standards. While we are explicitly seeking contributions that foreground the visual, we are excited to hear from colleagues working across fields and disciplines, including (but not limited to) history of art, visual culture, classics, film and theatre studies, history, religious studies, and those doing practice-based research.

Potential topics could include, but are not limited to:

- Exhibiting and collecting strategies used by women or the curation and collecting of work by women
-Self-representation and self-portraiture – identity and sexuality
- Transnational feminine identities – culture, race, immigration and exile
- The nude and representations of the body
- The archive – the formation of celebrity, reception and legacy
- Women and the environment
- Women’s work – motherhood, domesticity, labour, artist collectives
- ‘Deviant’ use of artistic medium through textual approaches, the applied arts, craft, performance, etc.

In addition to proposals for papers, we also welcome submissions for videos or artist talks related to the symposium’s themes.

Submission guidelines:

Please submit a 150-200 word abstract with a short bio to Helena Anderson (helena.andersonbristol.ac.uk) and Valéria Fülöp-Pochon (vf15404bristol.ac.uk) by Monday, 5th May 2025.