"Women's art"

Interesting post on Jez about art and "women's art" -- nothing new, but not a bad topic to think about from time to time, regardless of the art context, though that helps frame the general conflict about gendered traits. What's missing of course is the fact that men cling to masculinity so much, but then I guess I don't know if the metrosexual backlash is over yet or not.

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ETA: Comments I like:

This is just about the masculine as norm-the masculine is considered universal (see: rights, work, art, literature, film, etc)and the female is considered the other.
The question is based on the predication that "art" is men's art.
Also we, each of us, are a whole bunch of things jumbled together so gender is always present and important but does not function in a vacuum and intersects with a variety of identities such as ethnicity, class, etc.
In short, "women's art" is a reductionist product of the patriarchy that privileges men and collapses half the world's population into one experience.

-- info*ninja

It's a really tough topic. I took a class called Women Filmmakers last semester, and we spent a long time talking about how it was a problematic (yet necessary) categorization. Necessary at this point because Film History I and Film History II might as well be called Men Filmmakers, but problematic because of the essentialist separation. We got into the issues of essentialist vs anti-essentialist feminism. I have a friend who, when I asked if he was a feminist, called himself a humanist. He says that we all just need to think of ourselves as people. Artists make art, whether they are male or female. I read a quote from an artist in Bust magazine that said something like, "I don't consider myself a woman artist.I consider myself an artist, who happens to be female."
The problem with this approach is, of course, that it's prematurely post-feminist. To get to the humanist stage, I believe we have to be post-patriarchy.

-- Gobiasomecoffee

ETA2: Essentialist vs anti-essentialist feminism in brief.