In the art of the 1960s and 1970s, many women artists worked extensively with industrial materials such as plastics, challenging assumptions shaped by the dominant discourse of the period. Feminist Substances shows how their practices offered distinct, gender-aware approaches to synthetic materials, generating new meanings through a feminist lens. Focusing on Europe and Latin America, the book examines the work of Carla Accardi, Lea Lublin and Alina Szapocznikow, combining close analyses of selected artworks with broader reflections on their social contexts. It explores their use of Sicofoil, plexiglass, plastic inflatables, polyester resin and polyurethane foam to address themes central to feminist thought, including social reproduction, motherhood, memory, desire and illness. Moving beyond clichés about plastics as inherently ‘bad’ materials, Feminist Substances considers more complex, entangled ways of engaging with synthetic matter.
Price: $44.95
Pages: 328
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: Rethinking Art's Histories
Publication Date:
05 May 2026
ISBN: 9781526193575
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
ART / History / Contemporary (1945-), History of art, ART / Women Artists, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Feminism & Feminist Theory, Sculpture, Textile artworks, Feminism and feminist theory, Plastics and polymers
'Feminist substances is a thrilling, but also disturbing (!), study of the use of plastics in early feminist art. Charlotte Matter shows us how plastics changed the affective terrain of the art world and yielded a new lexicon for the expression of embodied experience and material conditions. The case studies take the reader from the U.S. to Argentina, Italy and Poland showing how the globalization of feminist art collided with this postwar substance, for better and for worse. For this generation of artists, critics and curators, the stakes of materialist criticism are high and could even have fatal consequences. We should all pay attention to this aesthetic history.'
Amanda Boetzkes, Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste
Charlotte Matter is Laurenz Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Basel, Switzerland
Introduction: Materiality and gender in the plastics age
1 Macho materials and feminist outlooks
2 Lea Lublin: Plastics and the politics of work
3 Carla Accardi: Time, memory and the other story of plastics in art
4 Alina Szapocznikow: Synthetic substances and the sick/erotic body
Epilogue: Zombie materials
Bibliography
Index
