MacKenny also writes that feminist performance Art had a large presence "in the late '60s and early '70s in America when, in the climate of protest constituted by the civil rights movement and second wave feminism."
[3] Another strategy that was commonly used by feminist performance artists during the postmodernist movement was “removing of the mask,” which was utilized to demonstrate the consequences of female representations in the media, on the psyche of women.
She writes, “This 'masquerade' or 'masking' occurs when women play with their assigned gender roles in multiple, often contradictory ways - adopting, adapting, overlaying and subverting the hegemonic discourse in the process.” During the late 1960s and early 1970s in East Los Angeles, American citizens of Mexican descent protested against the Vietnam War and the disproportionate deaths of Chicanos in it.
The art group Asco, based in East LA, commented on the impacts of the war on queer and brown identities, as well as the tragedies that occurred in the protests discussed above due to police brutality.
Some of their most famous performances experiment with gender roles, for example, one male identifying artist attended a club wearing “booty shorts, pink platforms, and a shirt that said ‘just turned 21.’”[4] The group continued to make performance and visual art that engaged with concepts related to queer and ethnic identity in East LA.
MacKenny asserts that the artist Tracey Rose, alludes to Western societies exploitation of people of colour in scientific study and analysis, and the "dissection and embalming of body parts of native 'others' (the most pertinent to the South African context being Saartje Baartman, a young Khoisan woman displayed as the "Venus Hottentot" for her unique genitalia and steatopygia, or enlarged buttocks)," through her own display of her body.
The sociologist Rachel V. Kutz-Flamenbaum writes about two major players in the anti-war performance art movement during the George W. Bush administration.
Code Pink and Raging Grannies challenge and subvert gender norms in their performances, and thus, use very similar tactics and strategies.
Kutz-Flamenbaum argues that "Code Pink’s use of civil disobedience and aggressive trailing of public officials confound and challenge normative gender expectations of women as passive, polite, and well-behaved.
Kutz-Flamenbaum explains that their mission statement "illustrates the way Raging Grannies use norm- embracing stereotypes of 'little old ladies' and 'grannies' to challenge the gendered assumptions of their audiences."
She stated in an article that the notion of female body in performance art has contained "the private and intimacy...of the public arena... allowing the viewer to experience a sense of strangeness".
[8] Galindo use body to explore "female sexuality, notions of feminine beauty, race or domestic and national violence".
Sue-Ellen Case, author of Feminism and Theatre (1988), has suggested that the image of female performers would have been projected as "courtesan" by the desire from male audience.