Education Quote by Judy Chicago

Getting “eviscerated” isn’t critique; it’s a ritual. Judy Chicago’s line captures how art school gatekeeping used to operate as a gendered sorting mechanism: not simply evaluating work, but disciplining ambition. The verb is surgical and humiliating, suggesting a studio culture where authority is masculine, public, and punishing. When she pivots to “you learned to disguise your impulses,” she slips into the second person, turning autobiography into a shared manual for survival. It’s a quiet indictment: women didn’t lack vision, they learned camouflage.

The subtext is about taste masquerading as neutrality. “Male professors” stands in for an entire institutional sensorium that read women’s subject matter, materials, and scale as unserious, decorative, too emotional, too bodily. Chicago’s own trajectory makes the context legible: emerging in mid-century American modernism, she confronted a canon that prized “universal” (read: male) form while treating explicitly female experience as niche or propagandistic. Disguise becomes strategy: soften the edges, adopt the approved idiom, edit out rage, ornament, sexuality, domestic references - anything that might be dismissed as “women’s work.”

Then the kicker: “And that’s definitely changed.” It lands with cautious triumph, not naivete. Chicago knows progress is uneven, but she’s marking a real shift: feminist art’s decades-long insistence that the personal is material, that craft is concept, that bodies and histories belong in the museum. The line isn’t just about kinder classrooms; it’s about permission. The impulse no longer has to pass as something else to be legible.