When approached to write a statement for the ArtWomen.org website based on my contribution to the Roundtable session at the National Women's Studies Association, I had intended to transcribe my visual 'talk' into a straightforward paper. However, when at last I had the chance to turn my thoughts to this, I began to re-evaluate my decision. I had put one particular case study together for the panel, based upon a section of my recent book on women's art in the Weimar Republic, which looked at women artists and the use of the trope of the prostitute. Through the problematic that the use of this trope has presented to scholars, I sought to illuminate some of the interesting dialogues which 'women's studies' and 'art history' can have at the nexus of art produced by women, both historical and contemporary.

However, the panel paper I presented was very much based upon visual recognition and response and, with little hope of reproducing the images I used at that moment within this new context, there now seems little point in reworking that text exactly. Moreover, the debates which preceded my presentation, both through the website and on the women's studies list to which I belong, in addition to the other papers delivered at the Roundtable, have decisively marked my responses to the problematic which Mary Jo Aagerstoun and MaryRoss Taylor first set into motion by suggesting the forum. So I have decided here to trace, briefly, my thinking as I approached the session and some responses to the discussions raised on the day.

Both 'women's studies' and 'art history' are disciplines which offer significant theoretical and methodological tools to me in researching and teaching the subject of women's art. Although I rarely experience a divide between the two frames of reference, personally or professionally, I am aware that there can be such a chasm in certain circumstances and I think it is important to address such tensions, even when they appear to be superficial. In the case of women's studies and art history as they contest the site of women's art, a set of rather hackneyed old arguments emerge - that women's art needs to be studied within the context of women's specific contributions to culture at all levels and this can be effected best (or only) through a social science methodology which traces the material conditions in which women made art, versus the fact that women's art is 'art', a product which requires sophisticated visual analysis to understand and decipher its power and its presence in culture.

While these lines may seem too simplistic to pose a problem to any contemporary scholars who recognise the significant interchanges between material and discursive constructions of women/woman in particular historical locations, they are but the crude surface of more lasting dichotomies in the field. That is, the fragile bridge built within women's studies between social scientists and literary/visual studies scholars is easily destabilised by any theoretical approach which seems to rest too heavily upon either a 'real' or 'unmediated' truth of women's experience or a dissolution of historical presence and subjectivity into the realm of pure 'discourse'. This is a very real challenge for any feminist thinker today who maintains a link between thought, knowledge, and action - ethical or political - and should not be dismissed too quickly.

Similarly, within art history, the introduction of feminist criticism, today so decisive an area of research, was hard-won and remains a point of strong defensive action. As part of the feminist art historical project (only one part, but a key one), the study of women's art has been contentious. There is clearly much at stake in ensuring that art history, as a discipline, takes the work of women seriously as a subject of interpretation, criticism and, not least, worthy of exhibition, collection and patronage. Hence, any too easy appropriations of the study of women's art by disciplines which seemingly ignore the visual languages of art and the extensive development of theoretical approaches to the visual, undermine the feminist art historical project and are rejected out of hand.

This is not to mention the disciplinary tensions which reside within institutions themselves; clearly, the relationship between feminist art history and women's studies varies from institution to institution and for reasons which have very little to do with research or pedagogy. What is interesting to me in thinking about this topic is the mode of address. Just three short anecdotes will suffice to explain what I have learned through participating in the Roundtable.

The preparation of my own talk was affected by modes of address in two ways: by Mary Jo and MaryRoss making it imperative to use images and by toying with positive and negative structures. Taking the latter first, I struggled for some time in thinking about the topic of the Roundtable since I could recognise the tensions described in the proposal, and yet had no immediate experience of them. I wished to be relevant to the topic, but wanted to explore the productive relationship of the areas - make a positive statement about the ways in which knowledge is not contained by disciplinary boundaries or the in-fighting which maintains these. What was amazing in light of this point refers to my other theme; oddly, I had first thought of making the relationship between the two areas more positive by speaking without visuals. This troubled me a great deal in later stages, since I realised that I could produce an accommodation between the two areas so much more easily by obliterating their most obvious point of difference and tension - the works of art themselves - and forming a field of words.

The second anecdote is the most negative, and has since made me think a great deal about the problem it described and about my 'address' to that. Briefly, toward the time of the Roundtable itself, I visited the ArtWomen.org website to see what issues seemed to be developing before the panel was due to meet and found a very interesting strand concerning the teaching of women's art. The contributors to this part of the discussion were debating an 'inclusive/exclusive' paradigm with great sincerity and commitment and this fascinated me - should one teach separate courses entirely devoted to women's art, or should one ensure that the work of women is always taught within courses which also discuss the work of men? The relative merits of the positions were explored and, to my mind, some excellent political points made about ensuring that students (male and female) felt that women's art was relevant and important in culture, rather than a 'ghettoised' sub-topic. However, the one thing which I found very unlike my experience of these questions (i.e. how to teach women's art and to what effect) was the fact that there seemed to be a singular choice to be made - you either taught separatist courses or you taught inclusive ones. My experience and sense is that both are wholly useful and appropriate in varying contexts. So I wrote in to the site stating this and expecting a whole range of debate to ensue about the contexts, but, to my complete disbelief, the whole debate ended. Again, it seemed to be about the mode of address, about the means by which we accommodate these differing ways of exploring women's art, and somehow, I had either been so boring as to end discussion or I had posed an inexplicable problem. I never found out just what.

My final anecdote lets me leave on a positive note, since it concerns the absolute brilliance of the papers presented at the Roundtable itself. My lasting impression (confirmed again as I reviewed my notes from the event) was of the diversity and creativity with which the topic was addressed by my colleagues on the panel. From papers which made you laugh, cry or cringe with recognition of the difficulties facing visual artists and art historians committed to exploring feminist themes of sexuality, subjectivity and difference, to fantastic glimpses of theory and practice (including the important practice of curating), these talks all affirmed the incredible work which is being done at the intersection of 'women's studies' and 'art history'. The speakers themselves seemed both unhindered in their own work, yet all too aware in the institutional sense, of the problems which remain part of this intersection. Overall, the Roundtable seemed to suggest a temporal disjunction; the work itself has long since moved beyond the limits of the institutional power structures which seek to define it, retrospectively. The necessity of the now is not for scholarship to slow, but for the machine to catch up.

I had put one particular case-study together for the panel, based upon a section of my recent book on women's art in the Weimar Republic, which looked at women artists and the use of the trope of the prostitute. [Note: If readers are interested in this case study, I have developed the arguments concerning the prostitute trope and German modernism more fully in chapter one of We Weren't Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press and London: I.B.Tauris, 1999) and in an essay 'No Place for a Lady: Women Artists and Urban Prostitution in the Weimar Republic' in Spier, Steven (ed), Urban Visions: Experiencing and Envisioning the City (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000)] Through the problematic that the use of this trope has presented to scholars, I sought to illuminate some of the interesting dialogues which 'women's studies' and 'art history' can have at the nexus of art produced by women, both historical and contemporary.