The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Friday June 1 2007  We said in error in the article below that Judy Chicago's "megasculpture", The Dinner Party, had been in storage for more than 20 years after its first showing in San Francisco in 1979. In fact it went on tour in the US, Europe and Australia from 1980 to 1986 and was shown once more in Los Angeles in 1996, then stored again until it was donated to the Brooklyn Museum in 2003.  Standing on the top floor of the Camden arts centre in north London, I find myself in an eerie, unwelcoming space, empty except for a chandelier nailed, upside down, to the middle of the floor. Footage of a sparsely furnished 18th-century room flickers on a huge wall to my left, while, to my right, an upside-down mirror is attached to the wall. Disoriented, I sink to the floor.  Suddenly the film springs to life and an actor dressed as proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, pristine white gown billowing about her ankles, wanders into the frame, upside down, walking on the ceiling. When she starts to talk, reading from her classic call for women's liberation, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), it sounds like someone muttering in a corner: I have to strain to hear her. Then I realise she is reciting the lines with a twist: the artist who created this piece, Matthew Buckingham, has put the text into the past tense. Instead of an argument for women's liberation then, this fictional Wollstonecraft seems to suggest that female oppression has long been consigned to history, as though all of feminism's battles have been won. This is confusing and irritating, which seems to be the whole point.  "As the viewer listens," Buckingham explains to me later, "hopefully they juxtapose then and now, and ask, 'Has it actually changed? What's the present condition?'" He certainly achieves his purpose. The effect of being addressed by this ghostly, topsy-turvy figure is disturbing and very clearly political.  Given the themes of Buckingham's work, the timing of this exhibition could not be better. In recent months, art with feminist themes has undergone a massive resurgence, dominating the cultural agenda in the United States and being dubbed "the feminaissance". The Feminist Future, a two-day symposium held at New York's Museum of Modern Art in January, sold out weeks in advance, with the panel including two of the Guerrilla Girls, the famous feminist artists and self-styled "conscience of the arts world" who formed in 1985, operate in gorilla masks and use the names of dead women artists - Frida Kahlo, Lee Krasner, Emily Carr - as pseudonyms. (Over the years, one of their key strategies has been to create traffic-stopping billboards and posters, such as the image of Ingres' The Grand Odalisque in a gorilla mask, alongside the slogan Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?)  In March, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. It is a huge show, featuring 430 works made by women artists in the late 1960s and the 70s, a time usually considered the heyday of feminist art, and, of course, of second-wave feminist activism. The artists include Louise Bourgeois, Assia Djebar, Eva Hesse, Betye Saar, Cindy Sherman and Yoko Ono. Underlining his enthusiasm, Jeremy Strick, director of the museum, declared feminist art the most important artistic movement since the second world war.  This was followed a few weeks later by Global Feminisms, an exhibition that launches a permanent new wing of New York's Brooklyn Museum, the Elizabeth A Sackler Centre for Feminist Art. This show features women artists from around the world - 80 in total - all born since 1960. So, for instance, it includes Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004) by photographer Catherine Opie, a take on the Madonna and child image, shown left.  As Buckingham's work indicates, this excitement is not confined to the US, or, indeed, to women artists. Jenni Sorkin, an art historian at Yale and exhibition coordinator of WACK!, believes that, as a way of seeing the world, feminism is available to artists of both genders. The March issue of the British contemporary art magazine, Frieze, was dedicated to feminism, with curator Polly Staple reporting that, at a recent arts symposium in Utrecht, one audience member had asked: "Why is feminism suddenly so hip right now?"  It is a good question, although Sorkin says that interest never really went away. "Feminist art is not suddenly 'hot'," she tells me. "There has always been a supreme interest in the subject. And, as women's reproductive rights become increasingly challenged in the US, the radicalism and passionate activism of 1970s activist-artists seem particularly relevant."  Definitions of feminist art have varied over the years, but Sorkin offers a robust, direct one: "The body as a site of inquiry, exploration and protest, characterised by extreme wit and biting social critique." The terms are often broader though, and another theory of feminist art is that it is about subverting the primacy of the male gaze (described by art critic John Berger in 1972 as, "Men look at women. Women catch themselves being looked at"), instead instituting and celebrating the female gaze.  In the early 1970s feminist art glorified the female experience: common themes included reclaiming embroidery as a superior artistic skill, use of menstrual blood and, of course, vaginal imagery. And, with its edgy installations, ideas-driven paintings and early video projects, it is not surprising that classic feminist art is finding favour in today's modern art scene. US art critic Holland Cotter described feminist art as "the formative art of the last four decades ... without it identity-based art, crafts-derived art, performance art and much political art would not exist in the form it does, if it existed at all."  From its beginnings, feminist art was primarily conceptual, with feminists cataloguing the contents of their babies' nappies long before the 1998 Turner prize winner, Chris Ofili, discovered elephant dung. One of the star exhibits at the Wack! show is Mary Kelly's 1974 Analyzed Fecal Stains and Feeding Charts, consisting of 28 framed nappies and their contents, with a list below of the food items ("Two teaspoons cereal, one teaspoon carrot") consumed by her infant son.  Probably the most famous work of specifically feminist art is Judy Chicago's "megasculpture" The Dinner Party, which is the centrepiece of Global Feminisms and will have a permanent home in the Sackler wing.  First exhibited at the end of the 1970s, this is a gigantic triangular dinner table with 48ft sides, a Last Supper where "women are the honoured guests". Each of the 39 place settings commemorates a famous woman, from the female pharaoh Hatshepsut and Eleanor of Aquitaine to Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. And while the idea of honouring women was revolutionary in itself when the piece was first shown, Chicago's work was also immediately controversial for what was painted on each dinner plate. Namely, expressive representations of, well, vaginas.  The piece took more than five years to complete, with Chicago working on it alone for two years and then being assisted by more than 400 women (and a few men). "One of my aims in creating this work was to end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women's achievements are repeatedly written out of the historic record," she has said. The piece was a massive hit when it premiered at the San Franscisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979, but disappeared shortly afterwards, ending up in storage in New Mexico for more than 20 years. Reviewing the piece recently in the New York Times, Roberta Smith described it as "one-stop consciousness-raising and historical immersion ... Study The Dinner Party close enough and your bra, if you're wearing one, may spontaneously combust".  During the past two decades the movement of feminist art seemed to become confused, with many of the best-known artists associated with it not necessarily identifying themselves as feminists - Cindy Sherman, for example, whose work centres around self-portraits with themes such as Centerfolds and Clowns. Helen Chadwick, whose art concentrates on the limits of the body - with pieces including Piss Flowers (bronze mouldings of where she had urinated in the snow) and Stilled Lives (photographs of dead embryos) - has been willing to define herself as a feminist, but with caution: "I don't want the work to be seen as a propagandist message, there are placards that can do that job," she said in 1986. "I would hope that it would work on the individual in a private and intimate way. That it would, if you like, prick their conscience."  Last year the radical American online arts journal Ratsalad Deluxe commissioned a survey of 25 women artists, with the question "Are you a feminist artist?" proving difficult for many. "Being a woman informs my work just as any other life experience would, but I deliberately try to complicate the 'gender' of my work," replied one. "The minute you define your art in those terms, people dismiss it as something they have seen before," said another. And most agreed that feminist politics do not attract younger women, and, as such, are better avoided in descriptions of their work: "It's a cliche," commented one, "but I think there is still the perception that being a feminist means hating men or at least having too much body hair."  With the opening of these new exhibitions though, the title "feminist artist" looks set to become a badge of honour again, just as it was a few decades back. At the opening of WACK! the curator, Connie Butler, joked that women artists who have previously distanced themselves from the label will now start claiming, "Oh no, I'm a feminist artist. I've always been a feminist artist."  · Matthew Buckingham: Play the Story runs at the Camden Arts Centre until 01 July 2007. Admission is free.
For years feminist artists have been sidelined, or even derided. But now, almost overnight, the art world can't get enough of them. Viv Groskop reports.