Tal Dekel (Hebrew: טל דקל; born February 1, 1968) is an art historian, curator and academic, who serves as an Associate Professor at Kibbutzim College.
Her research focuses on issues of visual culture, analyzing its interrelations with race, class, gender, sexuality and nationality, while using feminist theories and transnationalism.
It was especially influential in the United States, during a decade that witnessed the emergence and growth of the Women's Liberation, Civil Rights, LGBT, and hippie movements, as well as the protest against the Vietnam War.
In response to these events, large numbers of women artists joined the ranks of contemporary political-feminist activists, their art directly reflecting the concerns of feminist theory and practice.
Challenging traditional disciplinary boundaries, it moves beyond an art-history survey to discuss the artistic field in relation to feminist theory and politics, revealing their continuing relevance for the contemporary reader.
The book follows an up-to-date theoretical model, adopting critical tools from a wide range of fields and weaving them together through an in-depth qualitative study that includes the use of open interviews, critical theories, and analysis of artworks, offering a unique and compelling perspective from which to discuss this complex subject of citizenship and cultural belonging in an ethno-national state.
The book is divided into sections, each of which aims a spotlight on women artists belonging to a distinct groups of immigrants — the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia, and the Philippines — and shows how their artwork reflects various conflicts regarding citizenship and identity-related processes, dynamics of inclusion-exclusion, and power relations that characterize their experiences.
To lay the groundwork for an analysis of the themes that recur in their artworks, Dekel briefly discusses the notions of global migration and transnationalism and then examines gender and several other identity-related categories, notably religion, race, and class.