The concept of `the feminine' has generally been employed to denigrate the work of women artists. A central project of feminist art historians, therefore, has been to challenge the use of the term. This article argues instead that the term can be mobilized in a more productive way, to investigate the very constitution of discourses of gender and, in particular, the discursive production of modernism as itself `masculine'. Reading for `inscriptions in the feminine', as well as for tensions and contradictions (...) in `the masculine', allows for a critical practice which is based on interrogation rather than correction, and which refuses the idea of modernism as monolithic. The article approaches these questions about modern art through a discussion of gender and modernity and, in particular, through an exploration of the prospects of such a critique available in some of the writings of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin. (shrink)