"The" may be more definite and thus exclusionary than "a", but one cannot use "a" before a plural noun as one can "the."
"The", then, is open to and carries the capacity for plurality. And, indeed, this essay is occasioned by a second The Revolutionary Power of Women's Laughter (or is it the fourth, since the first had three slightly different incarnations in
New York, Toronto, and Maryland) in which some of its definitions, frames and limits have been rearranged.

With apologies, then, some memories of the opening of the first The Revolutionary Power of Women's Laughter.

There was no smell of fresh oil paint.

A spirit of contagious protectiveness erupted around Spero's scrolls; a wave or warnings to keep a clear space for the fragile paper oscillated along the edges of the crowd, a rare instance of custodial viewing.

The gallery was mobbed, but some of the work was "skied"; consequently, necks craned upward in the attitude necessary for viewing portraits of hero-workers, which seemed appropriate given the "socialist," agitprop presentation, with so many of the contributions unframed and sloganeering.

- William Henry Seward, 1850

How revolutionary can a second (or fourth) Revolutionary Power show be?

Revolution need not be violent, of course, but there is rough force in the "re" that turns away from a quiet "evolution". It is the violence of repetition, always an unavoidable compulsion. There is no choice but to repeat, since to assume the "new" is to fall prey to the fallacy of the original. "We have only the poor freedom ... to sign the pact that others have written for us" (Isaak). But "again" is never quite the same. We cannot repeat exactly; it is a nonidentical, discrepant repetition. And in that "never quite" and "not exactly" there is turning again, adjustment, tuning, change.

One of the earliest practical attempts to locate art within the arena of theoretical discourse was the 1983 exhibition entitled The Revolutionary Power of Women's Laughter, organized by Jo Anna Isaak. The show explored aspects of women's work that addressed not our exclusion from the world but our difference, our position as "Other". The exhibition provided an analysis of how meaning is constructed by focusing on specifically feminist strategies in the work while subverting gender identification. Much of the work for example, resisted stereotypical female-male identity by emphasizing instead the importance of the viewer's relationship to the image (whom is the image addressing, how and why?); by proposing a self that is neither basic nor fixed but constituted through images that represent it; by seeing language as crucial in the formation of our identity; and by using images in a literal, unambiguous way as a deconstructive and ultimately subversive device. Changing the focus from women artists' marginalization to the underlying meaning of images themselves and that meaning can be reconstituted provided a very different vantage point for feminists. It eliminated much of the "male hating" stereotype previously used to denigrate feminists and substituted a more sophisticated theoretical approach that reverberated in the prevalent culture and political discourse of postmodernism. Thus the debated centering on feminist issues, formerly seen as being of concern only to women, became potentially interesting to men as well and viable to an intellectual community at large.

Introductory Essay by Jo Anna Isaak / Pictures from the Exhibition / List of Works 
Excerpts of Essays included in the Catalog / History of the Exhibition / How to order
a print copy of the catalog / About the Curator / Website Credits / Related Links