Judy Chicago’s Gender Trouble? The Dinner Party, Feminist Politics, and the Aesthetics of Literalism

“My vagina is a metaphysical question.”

—Judy Chicago

“And what is ‘sex’ anyway?”

—Judith Butler

THIS ARTICLE considers two canonical texts in US feminist politics. First exhibited in 1979, Judy Chicago’s installation piece The Dinner Party has been lauded as a feminist masterpiece, attacked as a relic of 1970s feminist essentialism, and derided as mere kitsch. Now installed permanently at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, The Dinner Party is, in a word, monumental. It features thirty-nine place settings for mythical and historical women chosen to represent Western history. They are equally lined along three sides of a triangular table, moving from the Primordial Goddess to Hildegarde of Bingen to Georgia O’Keefe. Sitting atop handmade, period-specific runners, each place setting, save two, includes a plate hand-painted or sculpted in Chicago’s signature butterfly/vulvar imagery (Haider 1975).¹ The table sits over “The Heritage Floor,” composed of smaller tiles featuring 999 additional figures lauded for their contributions to women’s history. The Dinner Party would again make headlines in 1990, when it became another entry in the ongoing culture wars. Chicago planned to donate the piece, which had been sitting in storage, to a public university in DC. Conservative political and religious leaders opposed this plan, attacking The Dinner Party’s vulvar symbolism as no less than explicit pornography.

Published the same year, in 1990, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble quickly became an iconic text in feminist theory and queer politics. It questioned the need to ground feminist politics in the presumably shared identity of “woman.” Butler asks how people come to embody and reproduce normative gender identities (or fail at doing so). They argue that gender is not a given but rather is performative, formed through stylized acts that constitute the sense of a stable self. Reaching far beyond the academy, Gender Trouble has been celebrated as a foundational work of queer theory, criticized for its difficult prose and theoretical promiscuity, and accused of reducing sexed bodies to mere cultural or linguistic constructions. More than three decades after its original publication, Gender Trouble remains, for this writer and many others, one of the most generative texts to revisit in the study of gender and sexuality—and their intersections with religion.

This article brings together The Dinner Party and Gender Trouble not merely to register historical shifts in feminist politics from the 1970s to the 1990s but to ask how Butler’s work may help us to reevaluate pitched battles over the political and aesthetic work of Chicago’s piece. I am interested in what we might think of as The Dinner Party’s gender performativity, including the fantasies of gender, sexual, and religious politics that it has animated over its career. In this sense, like Kristin Bloomer, who imagines her own dinner party with Butler, I want to consider “phantasmagorical being[s], non-human agent[s],” and how they materialize—“and not just through language” (Bloomer, this roundtable). To be sure, Gender Trouble challenges the reliance on “women’s experience,” including the forms of biological or cultural essentialism to which claims to that experience are often wedded, that grounded much feminist art in the 1970s, including Chicago’s.² Here, though, I want to pick up a different thread from Butler’s work that has helped me think through the history of The Dinner Party, including claims that it represents little more than “pornography.” I am interested in how Butler centers the work of style in their account of gender performativity, wherein gender emerges from the “stylized repetition of acts” (Butler [1990] 2007, 191), as a “corporeal style.” I want to bend this emphasis on style toward questions about visual culture and aesthetics, asking about the styles through which The Dinner Party works and through which it has been represented and critiqued as an icon of feminist art. How has it become a site for gender trouble, and through what forms has that trouble worked? How might it reify or loosen the “gender matrix” that Siobhan Kelly so aptly theorizes out of Butler’s work (Kelly, this roundtable)?

To consider these questions, I first ask how religious iconography and language animate—stylize—the gender politics of The Dinner Party, which invokes not just Leonardo’s Last Supper but also the Communion plate, religious mysticism, and Goddess spirituality.³ Its viewers have frequently described having a spiritual experience while taking it in, but religious language also animated critical responses, as when one reviewer derided it as “gaudily evangelical” (Hughes 1980, 85). Second, I read the work of this religious language alongside accusations that The Dinner Party is too literal, explicit, or pornographic, which sometimes emerge from what I call an “aesthetics of literalism.” I develop this notion more fully in my forthcoming book, called Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Culture Wars, which examines heated debates over feminist and queer artists such as Chicago, David Wojnarowicz, Renée Cox, Ray Navarro, and Marlon Riggs. Culture wars debates over “offensive” art are shaped by interpretive habits that read visual culture on the model of language, which is taken as fundamentally representational and sincere (see Petro 2019). To be clear, I am not suggesting accusations that The Dinner Party is pornographic are sincere or produce literalist arguments.⁴ Rather, I am attempting to trace a rhetorical style that has constituted the scene of much debate over feminist and queer art. How has this politics of “seeing,” of literalizing, incited disgust among feminist critics and rightwing leaders alike? What does this have to do with the politics of gender that The Dinner Party enacts, and how have styles of religion and an aesthetics of literalism shaped the work and the sexual politics viewers see enacted through it?

CHICAGO’S FUNDAMENTALISMS

The Dinner Party was first exhibited in March of 1979 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where it gained immediate popular success. Upwards of five thousand people showed up for the opening alone, and somewhere around a hundred thousand visited during its first three months on display (Gerhard 2013; Levin 2007a). The installation conjured feelings of religious experience and transformation, with its dramatic restaging of The Last Supper placing women at the table. Chicago, who grew up in a progressive Jewish home, considered her work not merely a catalogue of women’s history but also a feminist creation story. “The Dinner Party,” she explains, “is a work of art that is women’s history; women’s religion; women’s metaphor. It gives women something they never had—a history, a mythology, a religion, a cultural identity that is their own” (in Gerhard 2013, 144). The vulvar imagery on the dinner plates spoke to certain strains of feminist spirituality and politics (Klein 2009), and its celebration through this recasting of The Last Supper invited women into the sacred triangle. In The Village Voice, Diane Ketcham (1979, 47–48) lauded The Dinner Party as an “awesome undertaking.” She quoted an older woman seeing the exhibition with her: “I felt I was in church. It was like visiting the cathedrals in France. She made these women into something holy” (Ketcham 1979, 47–48). Susan Havens Caldwell likewise captured the devotional feeling of the exhibition: “Voices were hushed in the darkened room as viewers proceeded very slowly around the brilliant triangle, visiting each place setting as if it were a chapel” (Caldwell 1981, 36).

But The Dinner Party received a cooler reception among many feminists and art critics, who found in its popular appeal, feminine imagery, and transgressions against modernist aesthetics more symptoms of kitsch than signs of the sacred. Again, religious language animated the responses. One reviewer derided The Dinner Party as “no better than mass devotional art” (Hughes 1980, 85), while another dismissed the “women who file worshipfully past this cunnilingus-as-communion table” (Mullarkey 1981, 211). Journalist Dorothy Shinn complained that the piece was not really art but “first and foremost, an indoctrination” and even the “religiofication of the feminist cause” (Shinn 1981, 4). The Village Voice’s Kay Larson faulted Chicago for “not being more open about the gay theme: sitting down to ‘dinner’ before plates depicting women’s labia” (Larson 1979, 13). Larson connected this sapphic sensibility to what she took as Chicago’s spirituality: “How do you create a major art event that speaks for all women yet derives mainly from your personal involvement with the goddess cult?” (Larson 1979, 13).⁵ In Art Forum, Hal Fischer drew the religious resonances more closely to the piece’s literalism: “Chicago’s conception originates in her own interpretation of medieval art: just as art taught the Bible to illiterates, so should The Dinner Party instruct us. To this end, the presentation is obsessively literal and cloyingly ecclesiastic” (Fischer 1979, 76–77). It suffered, he continued, from “proselytizing self-righteousness that replaces art with cultism and offers literalism under the guise of education” (Fischer 1979, 76–77).

Popular religion and kitsch, both feminized and devalued, come together for many of The Dinner Party’s fans and detractors alike. I am particularly interested in how they motivate accusations of literalism, sincerity, and explicitness. No review better captures what I mean than conservative art critic Maureen Mullarkey’s “Dishing It Out,” published in the Catholic magazine Commonweal. She describes The Dinner Party “moving around the country like an itinerant revivalist, abetted by populist resentments and generating its own Awakening” (Mullarkey 1981, 210). Like Fischer, Mullarkey bemoans the “didactic nature of the imagery” and “preachiness” of the exhibition, “outdone only by the prettiness of it” (Mullarkey 1981, 210). She attacks The Dinner Party—and “the feminist art movement as a whole”—for its attempt to challenge conventions of the high and low. This “folkish desire to pit intellect against feeling and its willingness to play on the susceptibilities of its audience” is “a continuation of the fundamentalist impulse in American Protestantism” (Mullarkey 1981, 210). Chicago’s iconography, which Mullarkey faults for its “abuse of sincerity,” lacks “the hilarity of Marcel Duchamp” while sharing “more in common with Carl McIntire,” a well-known Fundamentalist pastor (Mullarkey 1981, 210). “After the fundamentalism of the cross and the flag,” Mullarkey quips, “we now have the fundamentalism of the vagina” (Mullarkey 1981, 210). If, for Mullarkey, the feminist and religious sincerity of The Dinner Party proved even more damning than its sexual explicitness, this inflexion would shift in the coming decades.

By the late 1980s, Chicago was searching for a permanent home for The Dinner Party. She entered an agreement with leaders at the University of the District of Columbia, a historically Black public university in the capital, to donate the work as part of a new multicultural center that included an expanding collection of feminist and African American art. The installation required building upgrades, the costs of which would quickly come to the attention of journalists and politicians, since Congress allocated the university’s funding (Lippard 1991). The donation would likely have gone unnoticed were it not for a series of articles appearing in DC’s conservative-leaning Washington Times. In July 1990, Jonetta Rose Barras penned a front-page story that twisted the financial matters and wrongly reported that The Dinner Party “was banned in several art galleries around the country because it depicts women’s genitalia on plates and has been characterized by some critics as obscene” (Barras 1990a). Barras’s coverage continued the next day, describing how members of Congress “sharply rebuked” approving funds “to acquire and exhibit a dramatic piece of sexual sculpture” (Barras 1990b).

As sensationalist coverage picked up, conservative politicians and Christian leaders debated the merits of The Dinner Party. Televangelist Pat Robertson called it obscene on the 700 Club and, according to Chicago, rumors even circulated “that the reason The Dinner Party was in storage was that the crates contained the Devil and that I was the Antichrist” (Chicago 1996, 221). In Congress, Senator Jesse Helms opposed it, and Representative Stan Parris described it as “clearly pornographic” (Barras 1990b). Representative Robert Dornan complained on the floor of Congress about the “three-dimensional ceramic art of 39 women’s vaginal area, their genitalia, served up on plates that requires a whole room at the University of the District of Columbia to be set aside” (Dornan 1990, 19745).

The flashy condemnations worked. Chicago withdrew her donation, and the storm calmed. Yet, readings of her work as pornographic would reappear. In 2018, the mayor of Belen, New Mexico, suggested the town create a museum to honor Chicago, its most famous resident. The idea came from the town’s former mayor, Ronnie Torres, who was also Chicago’s hairdresser. But evangelical Christians quickly mobilized to oppose the effort. “I love fine art, but I would never want to see a vagina hanging on my wall,” one resident explained (Romero 2018). “As Christians, we are for order, justice, security and protection,” said another, who continued: “I’m for protecting the eyes of the innocent, especially the children” (Romero 2018).

THE DINNER PARTY, THE CULTURE WARS, AND THE AESTHETICS OF LITERALISM

The Dinner Party’s reception reveals not only its curious religious resonances but also how it might help us understand something about the performativity of its interpretation in recent US history—the shifting styles through which it has been constituted, celebrated, and attacked. I am specifically interested in accusations of literalism across The Dinner Party’s career, variably construing it as feminized, religious, sacrilegious, didactic, fundamentalist, and pornographic. Following The Dinner Party’s debut, some feminists worried that it reduced women to their sexual organs, but most early accusations of literalism, largely from art critics, underscored the obviousness of the feminist message—this “transgression of the prohibition against direct representation” (Jones 1996, 92) skirted the orthodoxy of modernist art. Such accusations pointed to The Dinner Party’s early gender trouble, as its religious sensibilities, mass popularity, and kitschiness only confirmed its transgressions against the masculinist norms of high art.

By the 1990s, Chicago’s work would find itself caught in a different swirl of gender trouble. Literalism was no longer something ascribed to The Dinner Party—part of its feminized, didactic kitschiness—but instead becomes the masculinist mode to flatten its symbolic work into evidence of obscenity. The religious readings of The Dinner Party so central to its previous celebration and denunciation alike were also largely absent in the 1990 debate, as opponents narrowed their attention to its explicit sexuality. Of course, this debate featured a different set of actors with different intentions. But the departures are instructive. Conservative politicians and Christian leaders repositioned themselves on the side of religion and The Dinner Party against it, rendering it a profane vision threatening American morality. The Dinner Party’s sexuality was no facet of the “goddess cult” as feared before—indeed, few commenters at this moment even noted the Christian or Jewish imagery or feminist spirituality animating the piece—but fully anathema to anything recognized as “religion” (or art).

This shift marks not a forgetting but a pedagogy of unseeing the religious elements others had observed, experienced, or criticized before. It emerges from broader habits of interpretation elevated during the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s that are part of what I call an aesthetics of literalism. For these conservatives, the problem was not that The Dinner Party was too religious or that its symbolic representation too obvious but that it was “literally” or “explicitly” depicting women’s genitalia in public. The rhetorical shift may be subtle, but note how this revisioning sidesteps the work of symbolism. Such representations reduce The Dinner Party to its plates, decontextualizing them from the larger piece, and render the butterfly/vulvar symbolism as “explicit” “female genitalia,” “labia,” or plated vaginas. Their complaint is not that the symbolism is too obvious—or that women are reduced to anatomical organs—but that The Dinner Party publicly displays women’s sexuality by centering the vagina (or vaginas). And such readings were not limited to the Right. The New York Times repeated the literalist rhetoric of conservative attack, leading Chicago to respond with a letter requesting the paper stop referring to the plates as “female genitalia.” She balked at the use of such “clinical terminology” to describe “my abstract, organic, aesthetic—not anatomical—forms” (quoted in Gerhard 2013, 257).

Discussing an aesthetics of literalism recalls the very specific approach to biblical interpretation common among Protestant Fundamentalists since the early twentieth century, but I also intend it to name something broader. Byron Good (1993, 1–24) has observed similarities between fundamentalist and scientific approaches to language and to the category of belief. He draws from Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who traced different understandings of belief across Christian history, as belief transformed from a performative utterance declaring devotion to God to a propositional claim describing one’s position relative to the existence or non-existence of God. Good argues that the European Enlightenment demanded a new approach to language itself, a demystification that would take language to be representational, rational, and instrumental. Language represents the natural world; correct representations constitute correct beliefs. Tracing literalism from churches to legal proceedings, Vincent Crapanzano also sees it as a more generalized theory of language. The strict literalist, he argues, “wants words (or the Word, at any rate) to be as context independent as possible” (Crapanzano 2000, 15). If language is instrumental and rational, then it should not need much context to be understood. A description of a Levitical code condemning men from laying with men becomes clear in and of itself, just as a depiction of a vulva on a dinner plate is obvious, without need for context.

In referring to an aesthetics of literalism, I hope to point to the habits of interpretation that shape debate over works of feminist and queer art. This approach informs how conservative political and Christian leaders have attacked feminist and queer art as pornographic or sacrilegious. It reduces the visual field to language, symbolism to representation, to limit and stabilize meaning in an already existing (and seemingly obvious) referent. Here, I want to underscore the habits—the very doing of this work—and their possible effects. Culture wars conservatives have become quite effective in framing how we understand “offensive” art, as the terms of these debates so frequently pit censorship against freedom of speech, feminist and queer art against religion, and—as we see today—rights to sexual and gender freedom against religious freedom. It becomes much harder to ask how and why religious iconography animates so much feminist and queer art without assuming we know in advance the answer to such a question. If the habits of interpretation traced here seek to literalize Chicago’s symbolism, however, they also inaugurate other forms of imagination.

THE “FUNDAMENTALISM OF THE VAGINA” OR, THIS PARTY’S A DRAG

Butler brilliantly shows in Gender Trouble that descriptions of gender or sex do more than simply describe. They further constitute—sometimes reifying, sometimes subverting—what they seek merely to record. Butler has also examined the performative effects of censorship, including efforts by conservatives like Jesse Helms to censor certain artists in the 1980s. Butler writes: “The effort to limit representations of homoeroticism within the federally funded art world—an effort to censor the phantasmatic—always and only leads to its production; and the effort to produce and regulate it in politically sanctioned forms ends up effecting certain forms of exclusion that return, like insistent ghosts, to undermine those very efforts” (Butler 1990, 108). This passage focuses on responses to the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, but attacks on The Dinner Party have led to some curious births of imagination as well.⁶

I want to close by considering some of the fantasies conjured through attacks on The Dinner Party, which trade Chicago’s “abstract, organic, aesthetic” forms for descriptions of vaginas served up on plates. Such readings replace the symbolic with the anatomical, but they hardly foreclose the work of fantasy. Indeed, rhetoric that literalizes Chicago’s feminine symbolism just as often fosters the explicit sexuality found there. In the Washington Times, for instance, Wesley Pruden insisted that “Miss Chicago’s sculpture actually depicts a table set with dinner plates serving up vaginas—yes, Virginia, vaginas—of famous women of history” (Pruden 1990). If Chicago’s art and writing reflect a grounding in women’s experience common to the 1970s, culture wars conservatives took the cisnormative equivalency of women with vaginas even further. It is one thing to create a symbolic vulvar form for a goddess, and quite another to read feminine symbols as women’s genitalia (or particular, historical women’s genitalia). Such descriptions summon the explicit sexuality of The Dinner Party and even raise the specter of lesbian eroticism. Pruden described how an employee at his local adult bookstore even interpreted Chicago’s piece as “a dyke’s-eye view of some of the tough broads of the past” (Pruden 1990). Of course, such pornographic fantasies are not progressive. They reveal the limited vocabulary available to imagine a feminist iconography without collapsing women into their imagined anatomy or to patriarchal fantasies of lesbian ghosts.

But perhaps we can fantasize to different ends, as well. Mullarkey’s earlier, acerbic review is oddly generative here. An artist and critic, Mullarkey bristles at Chicago’s feminist politics and metaphorical imagery, as her review repositions The Dinner Party as Protestant, as part of a folksy religion committed to simplicity and sincerity. But Mullarkey’s language is so creatively excessive—“a fundamentalism of the vagina”—that one might find it hard not to laugh. It led me to wonder: what if we leaned into this reading of The Dinner Party as being kind of kitschy, too sincere, or even exhibiting “flamboyant excess,” as Amelia Jones has offered (Jones 1996, 24–25)? Butler argues that “it is important to risk losing control of the ways in which the categories of women and homosexuality are represented” (Butler 1990, 121). In Gender Trouble, they elevate the parody often seen in camp, especially in drag performances, as one potential site for new representations to proliferate.⁷ What work might campy readings of The Dinner Party do?

To be sure, The Dinner Party offers some tension between sincerity and humor. One the one hand, Chicago has presented it as an earnest lesson in women’s history. But it also offers its own drag performances—a Jewish feminist’s revisioning of The Last Supper, a piece that is already kitsch-adjacent, given its mass paint-by-numbers appeal (Ryan and Rubin 2002). The Dinner Party presents key women throughout history in symbolic butterfly/vulvar drag—and not only women but also mythic goddesses invited to this Passover seder. Refusing the way Susan Sontag partitions camp as a gay aesthetic from Jewish moral seriousness, Ann Pellegrini explores the potential for Jewish camp, noting how “Christian dominance and heteronormativity” remain “interrelated structures of dominance” (Pellegrini 2007, 176). Gail Levin describes how Jewish feminists often draw on sexual imagery to celebrate “both sexuality and female agency,” though such work is frequently “misread as merely erotic” (Levin 2007b, 67). There is something excessive about The Dinner Party, including its exhibition and reception—an excess of imagination, of sensuality, of seriousness, of hushed tones and choreographed devotions, of polarized commentary—that works alongside its pedagogical sincerity. I do not intend such camp inklings simply to recuperate The Dinner Party (or to denigrate it) but to underscore the various ways some have seen and ways we might newly see the work it does and the work it may do, the “giddiness” (Butler [1990] 2007, 187) it might invoke, perhaps even the possibility for conversions and subversions to come.

If anything, I want to insist that we have underthought how religious iconography animates The Dinner Party in creative and perhaps subversive ways. Serving up vulvar drag at the Last Supper suggests not only a didactic move but a theological one—not an “abuse of sincerity,” a critique that Christianizes the piece, but feminist political humor stylized through religious forms. Butler writes in Gender Trouble about the difficulty of knowing in advance when parodic repetitions become “effectively disruptive, truly troubling,” rather than “domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony” (Butler [1990] 2007, 189). Indeed, “parodic laughter,” they continue, “depends on a context and reception in which subversive confusions can be fostered” (Butler [1990] 2007). If Butler teaches us not to mistake a gender foundation for a style, The Dinner Party provides an occasion to witness the habits of reading and seeing that surface the work of some styles over others and to intervene in the unfinished business of resignification that cultural production affords. It becomes a site to foster subversive confusions toward a more feminist fantasy.

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