Lippy Women: Feminist Art Activism on A cAthoLic cAmpus Sheila haSSell hugheS Karen Keifer-Boyd & Deborah Smith-Shank, editors. Published by Hyphen-UnPress an annual peer-reviewed international multimedia journal Abstract Claiming public space—and challenging the relegation of women’s bod- ies and lives to the private sphere—is an old feminist strategy, one which works by heightening anxieties around the gendered contradictions of the public/private divide. Including images of paintings as well as clips from the artist’s video statement and interview, this multi-media essay examines how a women’s studies program, a campus women’s center, and an undergraduate student at a Catholic university in the Midwest gar- nered institutional support for a sexually explicit program of feminist art and public pedagogy. The centerpiece of the program, an exhibit of the student’s original mixed-media paintings of genital labia, was an activist installation designed to highlight and critique both the consumption of pornography by male students on campus and the little-known but grow- ing trend of labiaplasty (female genital cosmetic surgery), which, the artist and her collaborators argue, is encouraged by pornography itself. Catholic and other religiously-affliated campuses can present a unique double bind for women in so far as they foster anxieties about female agency—and sexual agency, in particular—while also participating in the larger society’s increasingly pornographic visual culture. Situating this campus case study as an instance of feminist art activism, the essay argues that feminist pedagogy can be an effective strategy for navigating institutional and cultural constraints, such as those operating at religious- ly-affliated colleges and universities. Keywords: feminist art; feminist pedagogy; activism; pornography; Catholic colleges and universities Lippy Women 1 : Feminist Art Activism on a Catholic University … [W]hat is meant by “transformative” depends on the stan- dards one applies to measure art’s success in enabling change. For some, anything less than achieving a utopian goal may be deemed insuffcient. Activists holding long-term views may conceive of such interventions in more strategic terms, viewing cultural work as an ongoing process requiring continual negotiation, compro- mise, and adaptation to specifc contexts and historical moments. (M. Machida in Flanagan et al., 2005, p. 11) Emerging from what is often referred to as the “second-wave women’s movement” and “the academic arm” of the women’s movement (Raitt & Phillips, 2008, p. 375; Boxer, 1982, p. 676), women’s studies has always both been informed by and sought to inform feminist social transformation. The degree to which individual programs, faculty, curri- cula, and extra-curricular activities embody an activist stance, of course, varies across institutional, cultural, and historical contexts. This varia- tion has sometimes contributed to conficts within the feld (Boxer, 1982; Messer-Davidow, 2004). Faced with multiple and potentially competing demands for self-justifcation from different constituencies, women’s 1. The “lippy women” honorifc applies to all the women who contributed to the “Claiming the Labia” exhibit and accompanying program at the University of Dayton in spring 2006. I owe special thanks and acknowledgement to Rachel Ann Dennis, the original “lippy woman,” whose visionary art and radical feminism were the center of the project and the inspiration for this essay. I also owe special thanks to our Women’s Center Director, Lisa Rismiller and to feminist art historian Judith Huacuja (now chair of the Visual Arts Department), who collaborated with Rachel and me to plan the entire program. The names of these and other collaborators are used here with their permis- sion.