Gloria Feman Orenstein


Gloria Feman Orenstein is a feminist art critic, pioneer in the field of the women of Surrealism and scholar of ecofeminism in the arts. Orenstein's Reweaving the World is considered a seminal ecofeminist text which has had "a crucial role in the development of U.S. ecofeminism as a political position".

Biography

Orenstein received a B.A. in Romance Languages and Literature from Brandeis University in 1959 and an M.A. in Slavic Languages and Literature from Radcliffe Graduate School of Harvard University in 1961. She studied in abroad in 1957 and 1958 completing courses at both the Sorbonne, University of Paris and Ecole du Louvre. Orenstein began her teaching career in 1963, when she accepted a position teaching High school French in Lexington, MA. She returned to New York University to continue her education, completing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1971. From 1975 to 1981 she was faculty of Rutgers University where she also served as the chair of the Women's Studies Program from 1976 to 1978. She was hired as Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California in 1981 where she taught until she retired. She is a professor emerita of the University of Southern California.
Orenstein was the apprentice of the Shaman of Samiland. Orenstein received a Lifetime Achievement award from the Women's Caucus for Art in February 2018 in Los Angeles, CA.

Work

Orenstein's early work focuses on the women of Surrealism. Her first book The Theater of the Marvelous: Surrealism and The Contemporary Stage established her as a pioneer of the field.

Important writings

''Reweaving the World''

Reweaving the World, co-edited by Orenstein and Irene Diamond, posits an ecofeminist movement that brings together “the environmental, feminist, and women’s spirituality movements out of a shared concern for the well-being of the Earth and all forms of life that our Earth supports.” In the book, Orenstein described “’ecofeminist arts’ function ceremonially to connect us with the two powerful worlds from which the Enlightenment severed us—nature and the spirit world.” She suggested such arts often invoked the symbol of the Great Mother to emphasize three levels of creation “imaged as female outside patriarchy: cosmic creation, procreation, and artistic creation.” Orenstein explored the work of artists, poets and authors such as Helène Aylon, Ellen Marit Gaup Dunfjeld, Ursula Le Guin, Rachel Rosenthal, Fern Shaffer, Vijali Hamilton, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who used ritual, ceremony, performance and writing to enact transformation, reconnection and restoration of harmony.

''The Reflowering of the Goddess''

Orenstein calls for a reorganization of civilization based on the return to Goddess focused culture. She makes a radical ecofeminist argument which "considers the return of the Goddess as a sign of the return to an attitude of reverence for the Earth...and of an ecological as well as a non-sexist consciousness" detailing a plan of action which relies less on a Utopian model than on the creative works of visual and literary artists of the era. For her, storytelling is the key to transforming the cosmic mythos, and works created out of "the artistic culture inaugurated by the contemporary women's movement", reveal an already extant body of "feminist matristic" mythology providing a path to a new mythic paradigm that will save the planet.

''The theater of the marvelous: Surrealism and the contemporary stage''

Orenstein joins the formerly disparate theatre and surrealism in articulating her conception of The Theater of the Marvelous. She works to differentiate a neosurrealist theatre from the Dadaist Theater of the Absurd, out of which it grew, exploring a transnational collection of playwrights including: Elena Garro, Teofilo Cid, Octavio Paz, Robert Benayoun, Aimé Césaire and Leonora Carrington to combat the tendency to view affiliation with the Bretonist school as the main criteria in defining a work as surrealist. Instead the oneiric vision, the invocation of a dream world, the breaking down of reality to reveal interior imaginative truths, becomes the defining criteria. Orenstein seeks to convince the reader that these works have transcended the traditional goal of theater, to conjure a convincing likeness of the real; that they possess the power to effect inner change, transformative consciousness expansion, in the spectator.

Critiques of writings

Orenstein's Reweaving the World has received criticism for gender essentialism.

Selected bibliography

Orenstein has authored and edited several books. Her articles have been published in art and literary journals and translated into many languages.

Books