Feminist Visual Activism and the Body 2020037743, 2020037744, 9780367278991, 9780429298615

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Feminist Visual Activism and the Body

This book examines contemporary feminist visual activism(s) through the lens of embodiment(s). The contributors explore how the arts articulate and engage with the current sense of crisis and political concerns (e.g. equality, decolonisation, social justice, democracy, precarity, vulnerability), negotiated with and through the body. Drawing upon the legacy of feminist art historical critique, the book scrutinises activist strategies, practices and resilience techniques in intersectional and transnational frameworks. It interrogates how the arts enable the creation of civil and political resilience, become engaged with politics as a response to disaster capitalism and attempt to reform and improve society. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, fne arts, women’s studies, gender studies, feminism and cultural studies. Basia Sliwinska is Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Historical Studies at the University of the Arts London. She is a member of the Committee on Women in the Arts of the College of Art Association and the Steering Group for the PARADOX Fine Art European Forum.

Photograph showing a hand-made sign featuring iconography of the female medic that was accidentally blinded by the police at the #ProtestToo rally in Hong Kong in November 2019. Photograph by Evelyn Kwok (2019)

Routledge Research in Gender and Art

Routledge Research in Gender and Art is a new series in art history and visual studies, focusing on gender, sexuality, and feminism. Proposals for monographs and edited collections on this topic are welcomed. Representing Duchess Anna Amalia’s Bildung A Visual Metamorphosis in Portraiture from Political to Personal in EighteenthCentury Germany Christina K. Lindeman Virgin Sacrifce in Classical Art Women, Agency, and the Trojan War Anthony F. Mangieri Emma Hamilton and Late Eighteenth-Century European Art Agency, Performance, and Representation Ersy Contogouris Female Body Image in Contemporary Art Dieting, Eating Disorders, Self-Harm, and Fatness Emily L. Newman Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy Valerie Hedquist Feminist Subjectivities in Fiber Art and Craft Shadows of Afect John Corso Esquivel Artist-Parents in Contemporary Art Gender, Identity, and Domesticity Barbara Kutis Feminist Visual Activism and the Body Edited by Basia Sliwinska For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/RoutledgeResearch-in-Gender-and-Art/book-series/RRGA

Feminist Visual Activism and the Body Edited by Basia Sliwinska

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Basia Sliwinska to be identifed as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sliwinska, Basia, editor. Title: Feminist visual activism and the body / edited by Basia Sliwinska. Description: New York : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2020037743 (print) | LCCN 2020037744 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367278991 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429298615 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Feminism and art. | Art and social action. Classifcation: LCC N72.F45 F456 2021 (print) | LCC N72.F45 (ebook) | DDC 701/.03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037743 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037744 ISBN: 978-0-367-27899-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-29861-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For my mother, Helena

Contents

List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Not White, Not Male, and Not New York: Race, Feminism and Artists in Pittsburgh

ix xiii xvii 1 14

HILARY ROBINSON

2 Activist Intension: Mona Hatoum and Morehshin Allahyari’s Disruptive Bodies

31

ASTRID N. KORPORAAL

3 Activating Agential Collective: Anna Baumgart’s Table Talks— Her-Stories, Solidarity and Feminist Corporeal-Materialism

46

BASIA SLIWINSKA

4 The Absent Image: Resisting the Erosion of Public Trust in Syrian Activists’ Evidential Visuality

62

MARIO HAMAD

5 Bodies, Sovereignties, Futurities: On Adelita Husni-Bey’s Practice

75

ANASTASIA MURNEY

6 Domestic Fronts: Arrangements for Feminist Living, or Survival Is Not a Metaphor

88

ALEXANDRA KOKOLI

7 A Care-Full Re-Membering of Australian Settler Colonial Homemaking Traditions SERA WATERS

104

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Contents

8 Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance: Activating Feral Materiality

121

PAULA CHAMBERS

9 When Theodorah Met Dolly: Gender and Visual Activism in Works by Senzeni Marasela

136

BRENDA SCHMAHMANN

10 Be-Longing: Filipina Women Artists in Israel Negotiating Self, Body and Place

150

TAL DEKEL

11 Women to the Front: Women’s Participation and Visual Activism in Hong Kong’s Protest Movement 2019

165

EVELYN KWOK

12 ¡Madres!: Reconfguring ‘Abducted Motherhood’ in Mónica Mayer’s Personal and Collective Artwork

182

KAREN CORDERO REIMAN

13 Corpo-Afective Politics of Anxious Breathing: On the Agential Force of Bodies and Afects in Vulnerable Protest

198

MAGDALENA GÓRSKA

14 The Revolutionist: Gendered Violence, Black Radical Feminism and the Decolonial Creative Revolution

212

NOMUSA MAKHUBU

15 Fragmented Traces. . . The Tactile Feminist Un-Monuments of Sheila Levrant de Bretteville

226

CAROLINE WALLACE

Index

241

Figures

1.1 Vanessa German, Untitled, 2012, 37 x 14¼ x 15” (84 x 36 x 38 cm) 1.2 Vanessa German, Miracles and Glories Abound, 2019, exhibition installation, Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI 1.3 Screenshot from Vanessa German’s Facebook page, 27 November 2019 1.4 #notwhite collective, Manifesto presentation at Keyword: International, 20 October 2018, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Pittsburgh, PA 1.5 Alisha Wormsley, ‘There Are Black People in the Future’, Pittsburgh, 2018, billboard (metal with wooden letters) 2.1 Mona Hatoum, Roadworks, 1985, performed for ‘Roadworks’, Brixton Art Gallery, London 2.2 Mona Hatoum, The Negotiating Table, 1983, performed at The Western Front, Vancouver 2.3 Morehshin Allahyari, She Who Sees the Unknown: The Laughing Snake, 2017–2020, still image from Net Art piece, co-commissioned by Liverpool Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art and FACT 2.4 Morehshin Allahyari, Material Speculation: ISIS – Lamassu, 2016, 3D printed sculpture and fash drive 3.1 Anna Baumgart, Sprawa kobieca w Polsce. Łódź 2018 (The Woman Question in Poland. Łódź 2018), 8 September 2018, Teatr Nowy im. Kazimierza Dejmka (Kazimierz Dejmek New Theatre), Łódz 3.2 Anna Baumgart, Sprawa kobieca w Polsce. Łódź 2018 (The Woman Question in Poland. Łódź 2018), 8 September 2018, Teatr Nowy im. Kazimierza Dejmka (Kazimierz Dejmek New Theatre), Łódz 3.3 Anna Baumgart, Sprawa kobieca w Polsce. Łódź 2018 (The Woman Question in Poland. Łódź 2018), 8 September 2018, Teatr Nowy im. Kazimierza Dejmka (Kazimierz Dejmek New Theatre), Łódz 3.4 Anna Baumgart, Sprawa kobieca w Polsce. Łódź 2018 (The Woman Question in Poland. Łódź 2018), 8 September 2018, Teatr Nowy im. Kazimierza Dejmka (Kazimierz Dejmek New Theatre), Łódz 5.1 Adelita Husni-Bey, The Reading/La Seduta, 2017, video still. Zavitsanos and the participants sit in a circle around the tarot spread. 5.2 Adelita Husni-Bey, The Reading/La Seduta, 2017, video still. A close-up of the ‘Real Threat’ tarot card. 5.3 Adelita Husni-Bey, The Reading/La Seduta, 2017, video still. A participant shows the ‘Vulnerability’ tarot card to the rest of the group

18 20 21 26 26 34 35 39 41 47 50 51 51 77 80 84

x

Figures 6.1 Decorated Bender, Greenham Common women’s peace camp, 1980s 6.2 Wool interventions on the perimeter fence, Blue Gate, Greenham Common, April 2019 6.3 Paula Chambers, Domestic Front, 2016, installation view, Dye House Gallery, Bradford, April 2018 6.4 Paula Chambers, Domestic Front, 2016, installation view, detail, Dye House Gallery, Bradford, April 2018 7.1 Sera Waters, Basking, 2017, linen, cotton, sequins, tablecloth, handmade glow-in-the-dark beads, 92 x 60 cm 7.2 Sera Waters, Leaky Sleep of the Sullied, 2017, found bedspread, hand-dyed bed sheets, cotton, stufng, rope, found handles, 250 x 190 cm 7.3 Sera Waters, White (bread) Winner, 2017, cotton, linen, trim, 48 x 37 cm 7.4 Sera Waters, Sampler for a Colonised Land, 2019, cotton on linen, 141 x 52 cm 7.5 Sera Waters, Boundary Wreath, 2017, found woollen needlework, wool, velveteen, beanfll, hooks, 210 x 130 cm 7.6 Sera Waters, Falling: Line by Line, 2018, vinyl wallpaper, woollen long-stitches, 200 x 700 cm 7.7 Sera Waters, Banner of Mine: Cultivation, 2017, towels, woollen blanket, trim, glow-in-the-dark thread, metallic thread, cotton, brass poles, 320 x 260 cm 8.1 Paula Chambers, Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance, 2017, still, ‘For Squatters and Street Life’. The folding chair hangs out with discarded others 8.2 Paula Chambers, Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance, 2017, still, ‘For Protests, Demonstrations and Sit-ins’. The folding chair occupies the street 8.3 Paula Chambers, Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance, 2017, still, ‘Low End Shopping Emporiums’. The folding chair, an undervalued object 8.4 Paula Chambers, Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance, 2017, still, ‘Circumstances of Instability’. The folding chair as liminal materiality 8.5 Paula Chambers, Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance, 2017, still, ‘Autonomy and Adaptability’. The folding chair inhabits the spaces of transient domesticity 8.6 Paula Chambers, Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance, 2017, still, ‘Heading up the Feminist Resistance’. The folding chair as activist 9.1 Senzeni Marasela, Untitled work from the ‘Theodorah and Gebane: Dolly Parton’ series, 2016, photocollage and ink on paper, 29.7 x 42 cm, private collection

89 91 95 96 108 111 112 114 115 116 117 125 126 129 130 132 133 137

Figures 9.2 Senzeni Marasela, four untitled works from the ‘Theodorah and Gebane: Dolly Parton’ series on display in the Tofee Gallery, 2018, photocollage and ink on paper, each 29.7 x 42 cm, private collection 9.3 Senzeni Marasela, four untitled works from the ‘Theodorah in Johannesburg’ project, 2004–ongoing, digital prints 9.4 Senzeni Marasela, Our Mother, 1998, dress, pins, police baton in wooden container, photocopies, 150 x 100 x 11.5 cm (59 x 39¼ x 4½ inches), BHP Billiton Collection, Johannesburg 10.1 Sharon Miguel, Untitled, 2016 10.2 Angie Robels, Untitled, 2015 10.3 Esther Socalo, Untitled, 2017 10.4 Marita Reyes, Untitled, 2011 10.5 Sharon Miguel, Untitled, 2019 11.1 Little Thunder, poster seen in many public spaces throughout Hong Kong, depicting a female protestor with the slogan ‘Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times’ in the background, October 2019 11.2 Local artist known as Daxiong, illustration depicting a saintly female fgure with the Hong Kong regional emblem watching over a protestor, November 2019 11.3 Group of anonymous artists known as the Harcourtromanticist, Justice in Compromise, May 2020, digital image. The image has gained much praise on social media for its dramatic symbolism of the quashing of justice in Hong Kong during the protest movement 11.4 Anonymous, one of the posters from a series exhibited in Yellow Objects, November 2019, Openground, Hong Kong. An exhibition featuring eighteen anonymous local artists 11.5 A collection of images of activist paraphernalia, May 2020 12.1 Mónica Mayer, Genealogías (Genealogies), 1979, mixed media, 66.5 x 51 cm. Polyptych (1 of 4) 12.2 Mónica Mayer, Mito #1 (Myth #1), 1981, mixed media, 41 x 31 cm 12.3 Polvo de Gallina Negra (Mónica Mayer and Maris Bustamante), ‘Madre por un día’ 1987, still from the television programme Nuestro Mundo (Our World) with Guillermo Ochoa 12.4 Polvo de Gallina Negra (Mónica Mayer and Maris Bustamante), ‘Madre por un día’, 1987, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City 12.5 Mónica Mayer, La Protesta del Día Después (Protest of the Day After), 11 May 2012, Zócalo (Central Plaza), Mexico City 13.1 Screenshot of Sia, Big Girls Cry, 2015, caption of YouTube video 13.2 Screenshot of Sia, Big Girls Cry, 2015, caption of YouTube video 13.3 Screenshot of Sia, Big Girls Cry, 2015, caption of YouTube video 13.4 Screenshot of Sia, Big Girls Cry, 2015, caption of YouTube video 13.5 Screenshot of Sia, Big Girls Cry, 2015, caption of YouTube video 14.1 Gabrielle Goliath, Elegy/Joan Thabeng, 2018, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, part of series Elegy (2015–ongoing) 15.1 Sheila Levrant de Bretteville posting Pink, 1973, Echo Park, Los Angeles, CA

xi

137 140 141 153 154 156 158 160 172 173

174 176 178 186 187 190 191 192 200 201 202 203 204 217 230

xii

Figures

15.2 Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Biddy Mason: Time & Place, 1989, Los Angeles, CA 15.3 Detail, Biddy Mason: Time & Place, 1989 15.4 Sheila Levrant de Bretteville with Henk vanEssen, Workers Constellation: Take a Break . . . Out to Lunch . . . Back to Work, 2000, Cranston, RI

233 233 235

Contributors

Paula Chambers is an artist, academic and arts educator. She has exhibited widely, including Shoplifting at Woolworths: And Other Acts of Material Disobedience at Barnsley Civic. Paula is Subject Leader for Sculpture on BA(Hons) Fine Art at Leeds Arts University. Paula has presented at national and international conferences on feminism, contemporary art and the domestic; she has a chapter included in Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms (2020), and articles published in Performance/ Research Journal (special issue ‘On the Maternal’) and in JourMS. Karen Cordero Reiman is an art historian, curator and writer based in Mexico City. She has authored numerous publications in her areas of specialisation: twentiethand twenty-frst-century Mexican art; the relationship between the so-called fne arts and popular arts in Mexico; the historiography of Mexican art; body, gender and sexual identity; museological and curatorial discourses in Mexico. Currently she works as an independent researcher, curator and advisor, as well as on personal creative projects that relate art, literature and history. Tal Dekel is Head of the Visual Literacy Studies Program and Head of the Curating Program at Kibbutzim College in Israel. She also teaches in the Art History Department at Tel Aviv University. She specialises in feminist theories, transnationalism and ageism. Her books are Gendered: Art and Feminist Theory (2013); Transnational Identities: Women, Art and Migration in Contemporary Israel (2016); and Critical Looks at Ageism and Gender in Israeli Art (2020) [Hebrew]. Magdalena Górska is Assistant Professor at the Graduate Gender Program at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on breathing and feminist politics of vulnerability. Her work ofers intersectional and anthropo-situated while post-humanist discussions of human embodiment, afect and agency and focuses on the quotidian practices of living as political matters. She is the founder of the Breathing Matters Network. Mario Hamad is an activist–flmmaker based at University of the Arts London. His research focuses on the use of audio-visual and intermedial strategies as forms of resistance in the context of genocide in Syria. Alexandra Kokoli is an art historian who researches aesthetic mobilisations of discomfort to political ends, focusing on art practices informed by and committed to feminism. She works as Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at Middlesex University

xiv

Contributors

London and Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. Her research into the aesthetics of feminist anti-nuclear activism at Greenham Common is supported by the Paul Mellon Centre (2019) and the Leverhulme Trust (2020). She has published widely, including the monograph The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (2016). Astrid N. Korporaal is a curator, writer and researcher. She has worked as founding Director of the exhibition space Almanac Projects in London and Turin; as Curator of Education Partnerships at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; and as Lecturer at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, as well as the University of Groningen. She has written articles for numerous publications, including Kaleidoscope, Art Monthly and Rekto Verso. She is currently pursuing an AHRC-funded PhD on the subject of ‘Peripheral Visions’ in transcultural moving image alliances at Kingston University, London. Evelyn Kwok  has a research background in spatial design and socio-spatial activism. As a Hong Kong-born Chinese Australian, Kwok focuses on the intercultural aspects of design and spatial practices. Her PhD project explored the political economy and the socio-spatial condition of a minority group through their use of public spaces, which serves as a foundation for her frst monograph as part of the series ‘Urban Political Economy’. She is currently Research Assistant Professor at the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University. Nomusa Makhubu is Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on social engagement art and popular culture. She received the American Council of Learned Societies African Humanities Program fellowship award and was selected as an African Studies Association Presidential Fellow in 2016. In 2017, she was also a UCT-Harvard Mandela fellow at the Hutchins Centre, Harvard University. Recognising the need for mentorship, collaborative practice and socially responsive art, she established the Creative Knowledge Resources project. Anastasia Murney is a Sydney-based PhD candidate and sessional academic at the University of New South Wales. She has published her research in Third Text and presented at the annual conferences of the Art Association of Australia  & New Zealand and the College Art Association. Her doctoral thesis, titled “Messing with Men in Space: The Speculative Imagination in Contemporary Art,” examines an emerging intersection between speculative fction, geopolitical complexities and anarcha-feminist subjectivities. Hilary Robinson is Professor of Feminism, Art and Theory, Loughborough University, UK; former Dean, College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA; former Head, School of Art and Design, University of Ulster, Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is the author of Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women (2006); co-author of The Art of Feminism: Images that Shaped the Fight for Equality 1857–2017 (2018); co-editor of A Companion to Feminist Art (2019); and editor of Feminism–Art–Theory 1968–2014 (2015). Brenda Schmahmann is Professor and the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg. She has a specialist interest in women artists and gender as well as the politics of public art in South Africa. The

Contributors

xv

author of four volumes as well as over 70 articles or book chapters, she has edited or co-edited four volumes and curated two travelling exhibitions. Basia Sliwinska is an art historian and theorist whose research is engaged with feminist visual activism(s) and transnational and intersectional fgurations in contemporary women’s art practice. Basia works as Senior Lecturer at the University of the Arts London and is Associate Research Fellow at the HDK-Valand Academy at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is on the research team of the Visual Activism and Sexual Diversity in Vietnam project, funded by the AHRC/GCRF Research Networking grant. Caroline Wallace is Lecturer in Visual Art at La Trobe University, Australia. Her research focuses on the relationship between artists and society, centred on ways that cultures of display contribute to ideas of gender, class and race. She has published on American art and museums, with a particular interest in the politicised art and activism of the 1960s and 1970s. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the social space of New York museums in the late 1960s. Sera Waters is an artist and writer living in Kaurna Country, South Australia. Her writing, embroideries and hand-crafted sculptures dwell within historical gaps to examine settler colonial homemaking patterns and repetitive practices. In 2017, she was recipient of the inaugural ACE Open South Australian artist commission and created her solo exhibition, Domestic Arts, which will tour regional South Australia with Country Arts SA from late 2020. Waters exhibits across Australia and is represented by Hugo Michell Gallery.

Acknowledgements

A volume such as this one is hugely rewarding and even more so in the current context of the global COVID-19 pandemic. It is not the intention of this book, shaped before the global health emergency, to explore what this crisis means at bodily and sensory levels. However, it cannot be ignored that most of the chapters were written under duress and pressures of ‘performance’ and ‘productivity’, dealing with unimaginable workloads as well as professional and private pressures, while doing the labour of care and afect, and trying to stay focused and have the headspace needed for critical distance and negotiation. I have been humbled by the generosity of brilliant and kind contributors, their openness to collaboration and sharing. I am indebted to all of you– Alexandra, Anastasia, Astrid, Brenda, Caroline, Evelyn, Hilary, Karen, Magdalena, Mario, Nomusa, Paula, Sera and Tal. I thank you for joining this collective conversation with solidifed commitment and remarkable enthusiasm. This book is part of an ongoing conversation about our active being in the world, and it departs from readings, friendships, organising, discussions and debates with people I have encountered in my professional and personal life. It not only is a platform to explore solidarity and entangled presents and histories by thinking across feminism, the visual, activism, and the body, but has also become a labour of solidarity which connects, materialises and mobilises collectivity and care. Each crisis sparks creative responses and the current pandemic enabled this collective conversation, in a form of this volume, prioritising connections between I and you towards we. Thank you all. A number of colleagues supported this journey. I owe more than I can ever acknowledge to Dr Catherine Dormor and Jason E. Bowman, who read and reread the drafts of my own chapter contribution and provided me with invaluable comments and generous suggestions for improvement. Catherine has been instrumental in helping me develop and strengthen my argument. Her close reading of my text and our conversations made my ideas grow. I thank her also for the company of her intelligence and her support and friendship in this unfathomable and unsettling situation. I am grateful to Jason for his astute criticism and remarkable editing work, and for his collegiality and fairness. I  also thank Anna Baumgart and Agata Araszkiewicz for the focused and alert conversations we had. Finally, I thank all individuals whose activist visual practices disrupt existing socio-political confgurations and develop new participative and communal pathways for us all to expand how we see and experience the world, and how we live it. You continuously demonstrate that modalities based on feminist politics founded upon solidarity and collaboration, sharing and trust, create conditions for alternative futures—equal and just.

xviii

Acknowledgements

The majority of this book was completed while I was at home in lockdown, adjusting to the new reality and demands of the everyday that collapsed professional and private spaces into one. A very special thank you goes to Dr Michal Fornalczyk for the many walks—under COVID-19 my moments of freedom—embodied presence in motion, presence with myself, with you and with the world. Walking is important to me; to quote Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001: 5), Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals. I thank my mother’s circle of friends, strong and resilient women in Poland who have been dear to me and who have always supported me in walking my life. I am particularly indebted to Barbara Rossochacka-Rostalska, an incredible woman whose skilful and brave surgeon hands recently took care of my body and healed it into recovery. I thank my aunt, Barbara Karwat, for her alertness and care to the world around us, and I thank Barbara Bułat and Barbara Muniak for their caring concern. I thank all four of you and my mother for the female strength and wisdom you generously share with me, your commitment and perseverance. You are my role models as potent, brave and resilient women. Last but not least, I wholeheartedly thank my mother, Helena Śliwińska, who gave me my life, who is my life and whom I love more than I can put into words. You have always given me courage and motivation to act and move with/in the world, walking multiple itineraries. You are the most generous, inspirational and committed companion and friend. Thank you. I would also like to thank Routledge for giving me the opportunity to publish with them. In particular I thank Isabella Vitti and Katie Armstrong for guiding this book into publication and the reviewers of my book proposal for ofering valuable feedback. I am grateful to everyone for their relentless eforts to make this book happen, and all individuals and institutions that generously provided images for it. I am greatly indebted to University of the Arts London (UAL) for funding my ten weeks of sabbatical leave, allowing me time to work on this project. I would like to thank all my students who attended my classes in academic years 2018/2019 and 2019/2020 at London College of Fashion UAL, who have been a source of inspiration to me and whose engagement and observations made me see the world diferently. I also thank my colleagues from the Cultural and Historical Studies Department who supported this project, and Lezley George, whose academic practice, driven by feminist solidarity, social justice and activist intention, I respect and admire.

Introduction

This book was conceived before the global pandemic of COVID-19 in winter/spring 2020. Yet, the time of writing the majority of contributions to this volume and editing work has coincided with the coronavirus crisis. It highlights issues, such as solidarity, collectivity and distancing, specifc not only to this health emergency but also to posthuman culture and the current neoliberal disintegration of society, politics of austerity and inequality, mainstreaming of a misogynist and homophobic extreme right and individuation that commodifes lives of many. These issues frame the conversation in this book—or perhaps collective is a better term to use. It has been conceived with a feminist intention and is founded and focused on solidarity, highlighting the need for shared activities and experiences of being in the world, appearing but also occupying spaces. This plurality of efort and bodies acting in concert manifest, coalesce and catalyse spatiality of presences, non-presences and co-presences that create networks and collaborative commons despite distance(s). It seems to me that in year 2020 I have been witnessing the world at a distance, and yet in proximity. Physical manifestation of people’s (un)presences has been accompanied by physical occupation, or lack, of various spaces. The mitigation measures implemented worldwide restricted our movements and mobilities, infltrating space, exploding boundaries and imposing new ones. The experience of the world has become spatialised on micro and macro levels that separate but also protect us. Social distancing measures make it hard to re-imagine the world where the two-metre recommended rule does not exist.1 It governs the space around us, appearing on pavements outside of shops and inside on shop foors for those queuing to reach the tills. There are notices in shop windows, on public transport and in public spaces, reminding us to keep distance. The rule seems to be drawn in the air, policing those of us outside to stay away from each other. It borders of spaces and non-spaces, unsettling assumptions and laying bare the precarious and vulnerable circumstances of many. The outbreak of the COVID-19 has crystallised ways in which our bodies are policed and governed by social distancing and states of emergency. It has also revealed the uneven precarity of the pandemic and its implications—the coalescence of the private and the public, virtual and physical spaces, professional and intimate, spaces of safety and of danger, comfort and discomfort. The crisis has revealed and re-imagined the multiplicity of vulnerabilities and growing uncertainties pertaining to our social lives. It revitalised our concerns around global social and economic inequalities and distinctions. Mundane acts, such as queuing, standing on the street or walking, have become political, re-imagining the 1970s feminist adage ‘the personal is political’ with a renewed sense of urgency that concerns human rights, democracy, right to care

2

Introduction

and individual freedom. The two-metre social distancing rule has become a boundary to keep us apart. And yet, in April 2020, I witnessed this rule becoming grafted to orchestrate a protest on the streets in Poland by an assembled collective of bodies, demanding that the Polish government does not support the bill to tighten already extremely restrictive abortion laws.2 The coronavirus pandemic was exploited by the right-wing ruling party, Prawo i Sprawiedliość (PiS; Law and Justice), to yet again try and push a law restricting women’s reproductive rights. These tactics illustrate what Naomi Klein (2007) calls ‘a shock doctrine’, which describes situations of chaos that are exploited by those in power to implement policies and tactics which remake the world to their proft and for purpose of their dominance. The notion of doctrine referring to a set of beliefs taught by a church (or another political or ideological group) is particularly interesting in the Polish context, in which the government repeatedly references Catholic values concerning marriage and the traditional family model (based on heteronormative politics) to target the LGBTQI+ community. Klein uses specifc language, where ‘shock’ is synonymous with life-threatening conditions, to talk about major and chilling events such as tsunami or war but also veiled threats and pernicious doctrines. She (ibid.: 17) explains, That is how the shock doctrine works: the original disaster—the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown, the war, the tsunami, the hurricane—puts the entire population into a state of collective shock. The falling bombs, the bursts of terror, the pounding winds serve to soften up whole societies much as the blaring music and blows in the torture cells soften up prisoners. Like the terrorized prisoner who gives up the names of comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise fercely protect. In Poland, the disaster of the COVID-19 pandemic caused a deep disorientation, providing an opportunity for PiS to attempt to enforce unwanted policies, among them, yet again, an anti-abortion bill. Since 2016, the government has on a number of occasions proposed to completely outlaw abortion, which has been protested against by Polish women. With social distancing in place and the country in lockdown, it seemed it might be possible to pass a law that had been fercely rejected and rebelled against. Klein refers to the example of 9/11 and argues that shock doctrine mimics the process of torture, ‘attempting to achieve on a mass scale what torture does one on one in the interrogation cell’ (ibid.: 16). And yet, in Poland, the COVID-19 distraction did not stop women from protesting against the government’s harmful attempt to push through dangerous legislation, which since 2018 has been stalled in parliament, due for a mandatory review. On Tuesday 14 and Wednesday 15 April 2020, women in urban spaces in Poznań, Warszawa and Wrocław, among other Polish cities, gathered on foot, in cars and on bicycles, holding posters calling to reject the bill. They kept two metres from each other, abiding to social distancing rules. At that time, public gatherings of more than two people were banned in Poland, in the hopes that the government would prevent any protests. However, Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet (Polish Women’s Strike) group encouraged alternative forms of dissent and provided templates for posters, banners and logos for makeshift paraphernalia women prepared at home.3 Protesters took their right to leave homes to shop for essential items and gathered in queues outside

Introduction

3

of shops (the protests are now called ‘queues for abortion rights’ and ‘queues for freedom’). They dressed in black and held umbrellas, visually referencing earlier 2016 and 2018 anti-abortion protests. Daily twitterstorms between 11 am and 12 pm along with Facebook and Instagram posts fooded social media with protest-related content tagging leading politicians. An online petition opposing the bill (#ProtestAtHome) gained more than 700,000 signatures. Apart from showing Klein’s ‘shock doctrine’ in motion, the protests demonstrated that two metres will not keep people apart. Individuals were prohibited from gathering in groups, but they used the rule of law to operate against itself. Despite the two-metre distance, they gathered, demonstrating the power of spatiality. Deploying mechanisms of performativity, they were conscious of one another. An ‘I’ and ‘you’ became a ‘we’. The government did not succeed in pushing the bill through. This unpredicted assembly of bodies performed power and expressed the political potential of the people and what Judith Butler (2018: 4) terms an ‘assembly’ or an ‘orchestrated collectivity’. It also proved strength in the common. In Hannah Arendt’s (1977: 217) words, ‘truly political activities . . . cannot be performed at all without the presence of others, without the public, without a space constituted by the many’. Jean Luc Nancy (2020) suggests that the virus ‘communizes us’, enables an alternative way of experiencing our community: ‘it essentially puts us on a basis of equality, bringing us together in the need to make a common stand’. The pandemic, Nancy (ibid.) claims, calls for solidarity, reminding us of the need for ‘our togetherness, interdependence’. The coordinated action of Polish women visibilised and materialised solidarity, as a transformative connectivity, reconstituting plural forms of agency within space and resisting the proposed law by putting their bodies in motion, in relation to other bodies, between I and you towards we. When I saw photographs of women queuing outside of Polish shops at a two-metre distance from each other, I thought about Butler’s notion of acting in concert, which embodies precarity and freedom to challenge norms and existing infrastructures. Polish women exercised their plural and performative right to appear in public space as a collective because of the ban on social gatherings and despite the two-metre social distancing rule. This is a story about what it means when bodies assemble into an agentic collective. It is also a story of how messages were communicated via visual means. It is a story of literally making visible political potential and sharing visual means to form alliances and support common ethics and politics. As much as it is a story of a government terrorising citizens, it is also a story of determination and solidarity, and hope. Since the 2008 global fnancial crisis, we have observed a number of other visual phenomena accompanying and/or driving political and social activism. These global acts of resistance are often led by women. I am not going to list examples, as there are too many and a selection of some would not do justice to their sheer quantity and diversity, existing intersections, rich methodologies and the varied and often siteresponsive tools and parameters that characterise them. A selection of those feminist visual activist embodied practices are discussed by contributors to this book. Its title interweaves and puts in conversation feminism, the visual, activism and the body. Sarah Ahmed (2017: 3) proclaims, ‘feminism is a movement in many senses. We are moved to become feminists. Perhaps we are moved by something: a sense of injustice, that something is wrong. . . . A feminist movement is a collective political movement’.

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Elizabeth Grosz (2012: 15) further emphasises the transformative potential of feminism as a mode of enactment of new forces and of a new world: Feminist theory is essential, not as a plan or an anticipation of action to come, but as the addition of ideality or incorporeality to the horrifying materiality of the present as patriarchal, racist, ethnocentric, a ballast to enable the present to be transformed. Claire Pajaczkowska and Fiona Carson (2000) intertwines feminism with visual culture to complicate the relationship between ways of seeing, systems of representation and constructions of diference. Such problematisation identifes asymmetries in seeing, unseeing and non-seeing, which in Nicholas Mirzoef’s (2015) positioning of visual culture is manifested in questioning of the ways in which we see the world. He calls the visual culture of the now ‘visual thinking’, which materialises engagement, an active practising of visual culture, a way to create change (ibid.: 289). Mirzoef (ibid.: 297) suggests that ‘in visual activist projects, there is an alternative visual vocabulary emerging’, which catalyses ‘new ways to see and be seen, and new ways to see the world’. Activism, etymologically deriving from the Proto-Indo-European root ‘ag’, meaning to drive, move, traces back to the Latin word actus, signifying setting in motion, stirring up and performing. It is a collective embodied behaviour. A body is a biological entity, a material organism, a physical structure, but it is also constitutive of subjectivity. The body in space is one of the most efective and afective ways of communication and often becomes a source and a vehicle of activism. Through bodily acts of perception, we experience the world around us. And we learn and understand it together. Bodies assemble, enabling embodied forms of action and mobility. Feminist visual activism is a collective, performative and embodied enactment of social justice and an agentic, termed by Butler (2018: 9), ‘acting in concert’. This volume is an outcome of a collective efort enacted by generous contributors occupying diverse critical, methodological, disciplinary and geographic positions that nuance and expand potentialities inherent in feminist visual activism concerted through and with the body and the bodies, queer, socially or fnancially disadvantaged, othered and marginalised, indigenous. In itself, it is a political gesture performed in a bodily and plural form, drawing critical attention to a topic which to many of us is lived and experienced, and which points to ongoing crises and varied and multiple ruptures in democratic lives, showing urgencies and emergencies of our present that demand action. This is an opening of a conversation that is common. It is a collective, embodied, plural efort open to be continued; to expand and multiply in response to local and global urgencies. Our [the contributors to this volume] stories are interlaced with one another. It is a shared activity framed by plural efort to think through bodily activism, in which acting in concert catalyses new ways of collective being in the word, seeing and looking, occupying and making a change. The ontology of feminist visual activism is embodied in the way we speak with each other, alongside each other, together. The tapestry that emerges is rich and open to further threads to weave into a dialogue that positions feminist visual activism and the body at the intersection of varied challenges and potentialities. This project is driven not by chronological or geographical positioning but rather by a set of themes and organising principles, as manifested above, which coalesce around visual actions that catalyse feminist politics and ethics through corporeal,

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performative and spatial embodiments. Its point of departure may be located in the varied and diverse publications and events focused on visual activism—which, however, are often led by white, educated men based in the USA and the UK. Our conversation here hopes to disrupt and redress power imbalances within the feld. For example, in March  2014 the International Association of Visual Culture’s (IAVC) third biennial conference was hosted by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). It engaged with interesting discursive threads, which makes it even more disappointing that many contributors from the southern hemisphere were only able to join via online communication tools. The conference focused on the concept of visual activism as a catalyst for change and transformation, investigating the relationships between visual activism and activist practices and visual forms embedded within activism. Artists, visual critics, curators and scholars questioned modalities of visual activism, its boundaries and travelling beyond local and geographical specifc spaces, and the strategies deployed to confront social hegemonies and infrastructures based on heteronormative narratives. In their keynote speech, Zanele Muholi, a South African artist and visual activist, addressed visual activism as a journey along alternative ways of visual agitating that open up spaces for black queer visibility. The politics of witnessing and exposing silences was also explored by Vietnamese flmmaker and literary theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha in her keynote. Minh-ha (in Jackson et al. 2014) interrogated ‘how to work with the invisible within the visible’ not only rendering visible the invisible but opening spaces within power relations that subjugated. These hidden spaces articulate absent presences. The conversation initiated at the conference continued in the 2016 themed issue of the Journal of Visual Culture on ‘Visual Activism’, edited by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jennifer González and Dominic Willsdon. In the Introduction the editors explain, ‘we take the term visual activism directly from Muholi, and we credit her for inventing this phrase as a fexible, spacious rubric to describe her own practice, which documents and makes visible black lesbian communities in South Africa’ (Bryan-Wilson et  al. 2016: 7). They are referring to Muholi’s photographs from the ZaVa series (ongoing since 2013), which ‘trafcs in the politics of intimacy and the activism of afective and interpersonal exchange’ (ibid.). Further, they open the term of visual activism, which puts pressure on its constitutive words and raises questions about how we defne both the regimes of the visible and the boundaries of activism. Can there be invisible activism? Are other senses or modes of perceiving eclipsed in this phrase? . . . And does an emphasis on activism imply a straightforward measure of ‘efectiveness’, as if art had to have a clearly articulated end-goal and could be judged according to some rigid rubric of failure or success? (ibid.) This ambiguity of visual activism highlights the gaps and nuances existing at the intersection of visual culture, artistic practice, social actions and movements. It also provokes further engagement with the term, which has been taken on by many academics, critics, curators, artists and activists. The strategies used are common, and yet they difer. What brings them into proximity is Nicholas Mirzoef’s appropriation of Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘the space of appearance’, referring to the ancient Greek polis that was founded upon politics of exclusion of those vulnerable, for example women, where speech and action situate all men together (Arendt 1998: 199–200). Arendt’s

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term is closer to a space of representation according to Mirzoef (2011), which is normative masculine and white. However, the space of appearance is suggestive of ‘the very possibility of appearing directly’, outside norms, to claim justice. Mirzoef’s ‘right to look’ builds on Arendt’s phrase and draws from Butler’s (2018: 26) ‘right to appear’ constrained by normative hierarchies and exclusions. The space of appearance emerges in a moment of rupture, your body in a space where it not supposed to be and to stay there. If it works, a space of appearance is formed that coalesces common sensation. That is to say, frst, I see you and you see me and a space is formed by that exchange, which generates no surplus for expropriation, but by our consent it is possible to mediate that dialogic space into materially shareable and distributable form. . . . The space of appearance is not universal and it is not unchanging. It is where a crack in the society of control becomes visible. Through this crack, it can become possible to look back and discover new genealogies of the present that were not previously perceptible, as well as look forward to the possibility of another world(s). (Mirzoef 2017: 32) Mirzoef prioritises the right to look within the space of appearance. Arendt (1998: 198) discusses people acting and speaking together and the space between people that belongs to their alliance, and not necessarily to a particular location within public space. Politics requires space of appearance, but this space also catalyses politics; ‘it is the space of appearance . . . where I appear to others as others appear to me’ (ibid.: 199). This plurality of action is manifested in Butler’s notion of ‘space of appearance’ that is bodily; bodies act in concert. Butler (2018: 73, 74) insists that to rethink the space of appearance in order to understand the power and efect of public demonstrations of our time, we will need to consider more closely the bodily dimensions of action, what the body requires, and what the body can do, especially when we must think about bodies together in a historical space that undergoes a historical transformation by virtue of their collective action. What holds them together there, and what are their conditions of persistence and of power in relation to their precarity and exposure? She then explores the dynamic between the space of appearance and ‘the contemporary politics of the street’. These are moments that coalesce and manifest themselves through bodies that gather and perform through action, movement, gestures, persistence and exposure, in some cases in response to the instances described by Klein when ‘shock doctrine’ is executed on communities. In this context, visual activism is bodily and catalyses an intimate exploration of vision, visibility and visuality, and counter-visuality, which through claims to materiality reconfgures space of politics and collapses the boundaries between private and public spaces and spaces of non-, co- and presence. Political action is conditioned not by bodies producing spaces of appearance but by also claiming spaces that already exist and redeploying them while questioning existing forms of political legitimacy. New alliances that form in-between re-signify meanings and operations of existing spaces of power, for a radical democratic change to establish conditions of liveability for all. Appearance and occupation of spaces catalyse absences beyond the visual that are connected to conditions

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of precarity and vulnerability. Bodies acting in concert manifest feminist solidarity as a transformative connectivity enacted within spaces of appearance. The spatiality of feminism is not a single story or singular event but rather a narration of belonging premised on the commons. Bodily visual activism is a performative enactment of assembly on the grounds of equality and insistence on interdependency. Not a single body but a plurality of bodies emerge together and become a precondition of political demands. Bodies assemble before making claims. To survive, bodies need other bodies for support: between I and you towards a we. The phenomenon and practice of opening up spaces of visibility has international appeal, which is refected in multiple events addressing the topic, such as the conference Now! Visual Culture, which was organised by Nicholas Mirzoef at New York University in 2012 and which brought together visual culture studies with visual culture practice, and engaged with issues of justice, protest and change; or the 2014 SFMOMA event mentioned above. The Art & Activism: Resilience Techniques in Times of Crisis conference in Leiden, the Netherlands in 2017 focused on the arts and social activism as sites of resistance. Art/Politics/Action, a 2017 symposium organised by the Melbourne project A Centre for Everything, questioned the barrier between art that is politically engaged and that which is politically active. In April 2018 qUCL, in collaboration with the UCL Gender and Feminism Network, organised a symposium Art+Activism: Queer and Feminist Sensibilities, exploring the long tradition of employing images and performance as a mode of activism. In 2018 I convened two events, which initiated this book project; in July I  chaired an event at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London focused on feminist visual activism, and in December I organised a session on contemporary art practice, feminist activism and social justice at the 2018 Art Association of Australia and New Zealand conference at RMIT University in Melbourne. Other events addressing this area of study include, among others, a July 2018 conference at Middlesex University, UK: Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms, organised by Katy Deepwell, which turned into a recently published anthology under the same title. In the Introduction, Deepwell (2020: 11) asks to what extent art with a social purpose is ‘ofering us a diferent kind of argument, or is it just a diferent type of engagement with visual politics and visible political histories?’ She also problematises the distinction between art activisms and artivisms, ‘where art approaches, develops or transforms into activism and its converse, where activism becomes artivisms’ (ibid.: 18–19). This book, drawing upon existing discourses, focuses on the plurality of actions, activisms and agential ways of being in the world that are founded upon and driven by feminist modalities and ethical sensibilities, coalescing around modalities of solidarity and collective action. Contributors are interested in the ways in which these are embodied and highlight invisibilities. Explorations of praxis tend to approach visual activism though a feminist lens or to discuss activist strategies. This collective volume operates within this threshold space and catalyses the dialogic and embodied relationship between and across feminism, activism and the visual. It is where the visual collapses visual culture, artistic practice and para- or extra-artistic engagements, fostering plurality in the way we think about activism but also think out of it towards poly-activisms characterised by the multitudinousness of actions, strategies and tools. It ofers a platform that gives voice to multiple difering perspectives, often interlaced with one another, that de-centre single narratives and address imbalances of

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power, and ofers strategies for alternative organising and transformation with/in arts enabling social change. Activist strategies explored by contributors are underscored by fve permeating key themes engaged with/in space: vulnerable communalities, feminist survivalism, domesticity and material activism, lived bodies and activism of afect. Space here is revitalised as a heterogeneous linkage between vicinities. It is, as Doreen Massey argues (2013), alive and dynamic, and it ‘cut[s] through the myriad stories in which we are all living at any one moment’. It concerns ‘our relations with each other and in fact social space . . . is a product of our relations with each other, our connections with each other’ (ibid.). In activist practices, space is a dimension that is produced through relations between vicinities, visibilising and appearing, presenting the multiplicity of the world and its stories and laying bare the intertwinement between politics and power. The broad range of activist models, strategies, methods and practices discussed by contributors is overarched by the spatial dimension of overlapping and interlaced experiences, which pertains to what is (in)visible, how it appears and how it afects the agency of subjects. Massey (ibid.) asks how things change ‘over space’ rather than time. In the context of this book, the contention inherent in ‘spaces of appearance’ is that appearance produces visibility but is not necessarily dependent on the transformation of a pre-existing space. It is not as much a question of how appearance may generate a space anew or change ‘over space’ but rather what activist visual practices, as opening spaces of appearance, mean as spatialisation rather than as space itself. This visibilises solidarities in relation to the connectivity, materiality and mobility that graft this collective conversation on feminist topological relations with and through the body. What are the choreographies which navigate our conversation? Hilary Robinson discusses ‘artists [who] are producing the possibility of assembling new subject positions’. Astrid N. Korporaal, referring to a mode of solidarity she terms ‘intentional activism’, explores the visual as ‘a catalyst for seeing-with and feeling-with the revolutionary interval between absence and presence’. I (Basia Sliwinska) talk about ‘budding, emergent activism’, which is ‘a pernicious and persistent collaborative act grounded in solidarity’. Mario Hamad proposes an idea of ‘the absence of image’, which ‘denotes the intention that lies behind the Assadist propaganda campaign: a strategy of rumour-making and doubt, all sustained by the spoken, literary and crucially non-visual efort of a few key infuencers’ who support the erosion of the Syrian activists’ visual evidence. Anastasia Murney traces vulnerability in an intimate form of activism, which ‘negotiates immediate and oblique activisms unfolding within the uneven Anthropocene, experimenting with resistance and survival’. Alexandra Kokoli, in the context of domestic materiality, links activism with feminist survivalism, which may ‘be much more than the simple preservation of biological life but a personal and political commitment to caring about and for each other’. Sera Waters, discussing her practice as textile activism, suggests that domestic materiality opens ‘possibilities for a feminist and activist strategy of what I [she] call ‘care-full re-membering’. Paula Chambers talks about ‘the material culture of domesticity as vibrant and agentic of feminist activism’. Feminist visual activism manifested in lived experience is analysed by Brenda Schmahmann in relation to a construction ‘of appropriate womanliness in such a way as to transgress and question it’. Tal Dekel traces bodily experiences of Filipina migrant workers in Israel in photographic activist work that uncovers their social position as marginalised subjects. Evelyn Kwok refers to ‘visual activism [of

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pro-democratic protests] that refect perceptions of women’s roles, their bodily autonomy and vulnerability’. Karen Cordero Reiman argues for ‘feminist art [that] becomes a vehicle of activism’ by ‘giving voice to the experience of womanhood in Mexico from the vantage point of women’s bodies, emotions and social interactions’. Magdalena Górska argues for ‘the agential signifcance of quotidian corpomaterial and afective actions in enacting political resistance’. Nomusa Makhubu, drawing from politics of afect, coins the term ‘decolonial creative revolution’, which ‘embodies a distinct set of struggle repertoires that counter the abiding ethos of hypermasculine coloniality and its reinforcement of gender disparity’. Caroline Wallace explores un-monuments ‘to absence and omission’, adopting ‘a spatial and social ellipsis as feminist strategy, an intersubjective ethics of embodiment’, which opens afective spaces between touching and feeling. Vulnerability reveals and critiques paternalistic power infrastructures and hierarchies as well as conditions of inequality, engendering demands for change and strategies to which we need to attend. Vulnerable bodies open a political problem of managing diferences via preservation and protection, enforcing precarity and further division of social fabric. Shared conditions of vulnerability expose frameworks of inequality but also forms of interconnectedness that have the potential to produce alternatives generative other spaces and typologies of appearance than those that already occupy ‘spaces of appearance’. Robinson, Korporaal, myself and Hamad explore issues connected to such spaces of (non)appearance and vulnerable communalities, engaging with ways in which we inhabit the common world with/in vulnerable bodies. Feminism is enacted through acts of profound political care. In her chapter, Robinson focuses on the work of Vanessa German in the context of other visual practices and explores the interlaced relationship between feminism, activism and art. She engages with three terms—‘not white, not male, and not New York’—to problematise complex identifcations manifested through the body in a particular geographical location. Robinson challenges the prioritisation and continuous dominance of a 1970s–1980s American/Anglo-centric narrative concerning artworks, networks and lived experiences to navigate feminism, activism and art, while de-centring the privileges of masculinity, racial and ethnic identity and art-world governing locations. Korporaal traces artistic performances of vulnerability in selected works of Mona Hatoum and Morehshin Allahyari. She argues the embodied experience central to those works has the potential to negotiate territories of access, visibility and belonging through what she terms ‘intensional activism’. Plural bodies that emerge re-imagine solidarity via embodied disruptions of representations. My engagement with the politics of solidarity, togetherness and feminist corporeal-materialism prioritises acts of collaboration, underpinning activism that is emergent, persistent and insistent. I focus on one of Anna Baumgart’s projects, in which she re-imagines 1989 Roundtable Talks in Poland, precipitating the unravelling of the communist bloc, in order to ofer a performative and discursive space to amplify women’s voices with/in her-stories, and to address the inequalities in women’s visibility in debates across socio-political infrastructures in Poland. Hamad takes on Mirzoef’s notion of ‘spaces of nonappearance’ and explores how these spaces become images that ‘create’ appearance. Focusing on the Assad dictatorship in Syria, the chapter investigates the regime’s strategies for absenting evidentiary evidence in the narrative disinformation campaign. This leads to an erosion of international public trust in audio-visual manifestations of Syrian revolutionary activism documenting the regime’s acts of violence. Analysing Wujoud

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Collective’s short activist flm Testimony of a Former Detainee (2017), Hamad explores reconceptualisations of Syrian visual activism in response to the regime’s absent image strategy. Survival, in Ahmed’s words (2017: 235), ‘refers not only to living on, but to keep going in the more profound sense of keeping going with one’s commitments’. Butler (2018: 134) argues that ‘the demand for survival is bound up with the demand for a livable life’. Murney and Kokoli re-imagine feminist survivalism in the context of the transformative potential embodied within it being a common experience and a collective form of performing care and caring. They reach out to the performative dimension of politics to expose conditions of precarity and political and social opposition to that precarity. Murney explores new modalities for collective resistance and survival while focusing on the project of Adelita Husni-Bey, which is engaged with magical practices that may be suggestive of an existential crisis. Visual activism is negotiated in response to bodily vulnerabilities and environmental crisis. Husni-Bey’s work prioritises anarcho-communist pedagogies that materialise dialogic approaches and complicate spatialities and temporalities of the Anthropocene. The survival of vulnerable bodies, symbolised and materialised by a necessity of dwelling, is refected upon by Kokoli. Exploring the intersection between feminist art and activism, Kokoli engages with practices of homemaking, care, labour, bodies and domestic materialities to test the potential for feminist nurturing subjects. The Greenham Common’s protestors’ dwellings and the artistic work of Paula Chambers, Małgorzata Markiewicz and Sera Waters are discussed in the context of domesticity and its feminist restaging, reclaiming and critique. Waters and Chambers explore vitalist understandings of materiality and embodiment as a feminist concern with activist interventions in relation to their own artistic practice, while also focusing on domesticity activating matter as a dynamic force challenging the limits of subjectivity. Vital matter, as dynamic and imperative, articulates and materialises subjects otherwise reconfguring the concept of agency in relation to objects. Domesticity, as a foundational myth unravelling the potent oppositions between, among others, safety and violence, stability and exile, objects and subjects, domestic and foreign or home and nation, entangles feminist activism within the collapsed subject-object boundaries. The enmeshment between corporeal feminism, new materialism and ethics challenges agency beyond the conceptions and limits of human-centred systems, opening up multiple and dynamic confgurations generative of active ways of being and becoming in the world. Waters practices truth-telling in the context of accumulated colonising traumas for Australia’s First Nations people and country. Engaging with settler colonisation, she reckons with ghosts from the past and questions the ghost-making role of settler colonial homemaking through her own practice-based activism. Complicating the relationship between bodies and matter, Waters explores domestic materiality as a possibility for a feminist and activist strategy that she calls ‘care-full re-membering’, manifesting untold truths. Chambers investigates agentic potentialities of domestic materiality or more specifcally feral materiality. Analysing her own flm, she suggests that found objects, as feminist, activist, political, disruptive and resistant, manifest material activism. Chambers explores the material culture of political activism via the intentional activist gestures performed by objects. Performing resistance and dissent activates feral materiality. Concepts of embodied subjectivity and situated knowledge as destabilising normative defnitions and contextualisations are mobilised in the chapters of Schmahmann,

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Dekel and Kwok, who focus on lived bodies and agential cuts that operate erasures of women in or from representation. Attentive to forms of spatially located inequalities of gender, they explore contexts for the social forces and structures that map power dynamics, which are often exploitative and/or oppressive. Spatiality of gender reveals social relations co-constitutive of politics, in which the normative subject positions are ambiguous and complicate the dialogue about representation and the everyday. They emphasise the movement of becoming as a multidirectional and reversible motion dependent on what happens in its vicinity. Destabilising signifers of womanliness allow new confgurations of power and resistance to emerge. Schmahmann analyses selected series of Senzeni Marasela’s works in which a dress worn by the artist performs a form of camp artifce. She questions constructs about appropriate womanliness in the context of South African state structures developed after the abolishment of apartheid. Schmahmann argues that Marasela’s project manifests feminist visual activism via not only produced images but also the artist’s personal and lived experiences in order to refect on entanglements between personal histories and shared social experiences. In her chapter, Dekel addresses lived realities of Filipina migrant women in Israel who are marginalised from the public sphere. Engaging with photographic work of four Filipina women artists—Sharon Miguel, Angie Robels, Esther Socalo and Marita Reyes—Dekel explores subversive and activist strategies they use to manifest their agency as women and claim their belonging within the State of Israel. She argues for an alternative and radical form of feminist solidarity negotiated with the body. Kwok examines bodily activism, focusing on women’s participation and their representation in the Hong Kong pro-democratic protests of 2019. She argues that women are portrayed using art historical tropes of femininity that depict them as mothers or virginal saints and do not acknowledge women’s active involvement in the movement. Using her feldwork observations, Kwok highlights women’s agency while addressing their social and bodily vulnerability and suggests that women’s activism in Hong Kong expands beyond the 2019 protest movement. Cordero Reiman, Górska, Makhubu and Wallace negotiate the activism of afect with/in space as an articulation and register of confgurations of attention and mattering, subjectivation and subjectifcation, who trace bodily registers of the world enabling political thinking and afect. This ontological dimension of afect links corporeality and subjectivity and accounts for perceptions of the world that are specifc to labours of culture, social norms and signifcations. Such positioning produces alternatives for agency and resistance as a form of power, with its possible efect meaning that it does not necessarily reproduce power but rather has the potential to transform efects of power. Reaching to notions such as vulnerability, they look at performances, gestures and images that engender spaces of appearances and reframe politics of visibility via an orchestration of afective tonalities distinctive of our lives. Cordero Reiman explores the specifcity of feminist visual activism in Mexico, focusing on the artistic practice of Mónica Mayer and contextualising it within feminist activism pedagogy. She interrogates models of motherhood (as experience and institution) and the importance of religious iconography for Mexican conceptions and representations of archetypes of femininity. Cordero Reiman demonstrates that Mayer’s practice reveals complex afective refgurations of motherhood in relation to activism, in which women are portrayed as active agents in a process of social change. Górska argues for recognition of agential signifcance of corpomaterial and afective agency as a form of political resistance that does not prioritise collective presence. Bodily

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and afective vulnerability may restrict engagement in political action. Focusing on anxious breathing in one of Sia’s music videos, Górska suggests that quotidian corpomaterial and afective practices such as breathing may transform ways in which social power relations are experienced and lived. Makhubu approaches politics of afect via her analysis of interventionist art by Milumbe Haimbe, Gabrielle Goliath and Sethembile Msezane, questioning the precarious position of womxn and the interplay between giving voice and silencing. Afect and feeling with others as a decolonial praxis is countered with the destructive continuity of racialised, classed and sexualised violence in South Africa. Proposing a ‘decolonial creative revolution’ as an embodiment of a distinct set of struggle repertoires against hypermasculine coloniality, Makhubu emphasises multivocality in collective action and argues that black radical feminism is central to decolonial Fallism. In her chapter, Wallace focuses on the spatial practice of Sheila Levrant de Bretteville in the context of afective monuments, un-monuments and counter-monuments. She rethinks the form and function of the monument, drawing upon the metaphor of a spatial ellipsis and highlighting its afective and tactile qualities in producing spaces in-between, complicating absences and presences. Wallace argues that Bretteville’s activ(e)ist, open and elliptical memorials question the hegemony of visibility within the urban environment, highlighting absences and omissions.

Notes 1. The recommended distance varies across countries, where it may be 1.5 or 1.8 m, while the World Health Organization advises 1 m; there is no consensus and no conclusive scientifc advice with regard to a specifc distance that keeps us safe from contracting COVID-19. 2. In Poland, abortion is illegal except in cases of rape, incest, severe foetal abnormalities or danger to the mother’s life. 3. The links to download templates were available on the Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet Facebook page: www.facebook.com/ogolnopolskistrajkkobiet/posts/4360636220629009/, where it was also explained in what types of protest one can engage.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1977 [1961]. ‘The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Signifcance’, in Arendt, Hannah (ed.) Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin Books. Arendt, Hannah. 1998 [1958]. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Bryan-Wilson, Julia, González, Jennifer and Willsdon, Dominic. 2016. ‘Editors’ Introduction: Themed Issue on Visual Activism’, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 5–23. Butler, Judith. 2018. Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Deepwell, Katy. 2020. ‘Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms. Introduction’, in Deepwell, Katy (ed.) Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms. Amsterdam: Plural Valiz. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2012. ‘The Future of Feminist Theory: Dreams for New Knowledges’, in Gunkel, Henriette, Chrysanthi, Nigianni and Söderbäck, Fanny (eds) Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 13–22. Jackson, Danielle, Catasús, Natalie, Partch, Colin and Mismar, Omar. 2014. ‘Notes on Visual Activism’. Available at: www.artpractical.com/review/notes-on-visual-activism/, accessed 30 April 2020.

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Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books. Massey, Doreen. 2013. ‘Doreen Massey on Space’. Available at: www.socialsciencespace. com/2013/02/podcastdoreen-massey-on-space/, accessed 12 May 2020. Mirzoef, Nicholas. 2011. ‘The Right to Look’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 473–496. Mirzoef, Nicholas. 2015. How to See the World. New York: Penguin Random House. Mirzoef, Nicholas. 2017. ‘The Appearance of Black Lives Matter’. Available at: https:// namepublications.org/item/2017/the-appearance-of-black-lives-matter/, accessed 18 March 2020. Nancy, Jean Luc. 2020, ‘Communovirus’. Available at: www.versobooks.com/blogs/4626communovirus, accessed 7 May 2020. Pajaczkowska, Claire and Carson, Fiona (eds). 2000. Feminist Visual Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Not White, Not Male, and Not New York Race, Feminism and Artists in Pittsburgh Hilary Robinson I’m reaching out to share an idea, I’m very interested in a concept, one I have sat on for over a decade. I’m reaching out because I respect your work, your ferceness, and think you may be interested. Loosely and roughly I’m interested in creating an experience, ritual, poetic, musical, that highlights and/or explores identity from a biracial, multiracial, frst and second-generation immigrant experience in America. I feel as this country slowly moves forward on the discourse of race, our experiences are not considered or included. For me, if change is to happen, all voices need to be heard, listened to. . . . The present title is #notwhite, and I confess it may take much to budge me from that.  Thank you for listening. —Christiane Dolores, email to a number of women artists she knew, 14 February 2016

What follows is part of a longer essay (‘essay’ as in the original English usage: an attempt to organise, or trial, thoughts) around feminism, activism and art. In particular, it emerges from my recognition that the stories told about the histories of feminist art generally imply that its foundations were in the east and west coasts of the territory presently known as the United States of America.1 This narrative then suggests that ‘feminist art’ spread to London and thence to Europe and other Anglophone countries like Australia and Canada. Finally, it was taken up by ‘others’, whether those were in ‘further’ geographical locations or were ‘western’ feminist identifcations of diference (from privileged positions in the art world, feminism and Anglophone publishing). However, tracing lived experiences, memories, artworks, networks and exhibitions of the 1960s–1980s demonstrates that this American/Anglo-centric view is a problematic, unreliable narrative. In the 2010s, complications of narrative dominance continued, particularly under increasing assumptions that ‘we’ all know what is happening, thanks to online communication. This Anglophone, geographic narrative dominance continues to be a problematic element, frst, because of the same privileged norms in the art world, in feminism and in publishing; second, due to the sheer numbers of artists, publications, exhibitions, academics in America that need to be considered; and third, because of the dominance of New York and Los Angeles in global contemporary art markets and publishing. All these produce the dominance of the Anglosphere, particularly America, in international art and feminist discourses. Addressing this part of the problem, emerging questions in my longer essay are: what happens to discussions of feminism, art and activism if the privileges of masculinity are de-centred? And, similarly, if the privileges of race/ethnicity/faith/heritage are de-centred? And furthermore, if the privileges of those art-world-dominant cities are de-centred?

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This leads to the clumsy main title of this chapter—‘not white, not male, and not New York’—with its three problematic terms. In reverse order: ‘not New York’ stands in for what is beyond the major cities in America; ‘not male’ indicates all those who do not identify as male; and ‘not white’ indicates all those living in America who identify as American but not as white, or as not American and not white, or as not American but identifed as white outside America. These are problematic terms as they inevitably re-centre New York, maleness and whiteness through naming them; but I chose to use them here as they also indicate all further identifcations that are manifest primarily through the body and, in particular, the body in a geographical location. This provokes another set of questions: if those with bodies that are white and/or male recognise everyone else as ‘other’, how can we mobilise that ‘otherness’ in our activist art practices? How can we shift from centring as naming to recognition of the links between that which essentialises (‘white’, ‘male’) and that which is political and ideological (white supremacy, patriarchy)? And how does this emerge through our material practices? Importantly, also in my title there is a nod to the #notwhite collective, founded 2016 in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is the geographic location for this chapter: my home from 2005 to 2012, I both know it well enough and am currently distanced enough from it to recognise an emergence since the early 2010s of activist feminist practices by artists of colour there. My prime focus here is the work of Vanessa German, with indication of the broader context of others such as Alisha Wormsley, Chris Ivey and the #notwhite collective (all of whom will be given more space in the longer essay).2 My theoretical framework is developed through the work of Stuart Hall on assembly and conjuncture, along with a USA-based reading of that work by Paul C. Taylor. *** In ‘Assembling the 1980s: The Deluge and After’, the late Jamaican-British cultural theorist Stuart Hall (2005, p. 3) warns us against assuming easy similarities between antiracism in the African-American context and the Black British context. He also outlines ways in which we can understand diasporic cultures as such. Born 1932 in Jamaica, Hall moved to Britain aged 19, three years after the frst-invited of the so-called Windrush generation had arrived in 1948.3 Thus, he experienced both an established majority Black diasporic community and two ‘young’ minority Black ones: while there have been people of African and of Asian descent in the UK for centuries, the Windrush years (late 1940s–early 1950s) and the Ugandan Asian refugee crisis (1972) saw the arrival, constructed through state politics, of many more. Hall was the frst editor (1960–1962) of the infuential socialist academic journal New Left Review, and the second director (1968–1979) of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, through which he and his colleagues established Cultural Studies as a major Anglophone academic feld. In the 1980s, he was a supporter of the emerging Black Arts Movement, which was formed of both a born-British generation of artists and of transnational artists who had moved to Britain. I draw from two of Hall’s papers on the Black British arts movement: ‘Assembling the 1980s’, mentioned above (2005); and the related ‘Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three “Moments” in Post-war History’ (2006). As with other UK movements of the time, ‘Black’ was coined as an inclusive political identity, referring not only to people of African descent.4 Hall says he uses the term ‘with a deliberate imprecision

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deriving from the ’70s, when the term encompassed all the minority migrant communities’. He goes on to elucidate: it is used here not as the sign of an ineradicable genetic imprint but as a signifer of diference: a diference which, being historical, is therefore always changing, always located, always articulated with other signifying elements: but which, nevertheless, continues—persistently—to register its disturbing efects. (Hall 2006, p. 2) This is also how I am using the term: recognising that the terminology and shifts in its usage in America is distinct, more likely to refer to the African diaspora only. I will capitalise Black to indicate my usage of the word as a political term, rather than a bodily description indicating an Afro-Caribbean or African-American identity, while respecting original usage in quotes. Hall (2005, p. 2) understands the Black Arts Movement as ‘driven by the struggles of peoples, marginalized in relation to the world system, to resist exclusion, reverse the historical gaze, come into visibility’, part of a global struggle to transform culture: a struggle that is ‘lateral, diasporic, transnational’. To do this, he treats his subject (1980s Britain) ‘as a conjuncture . . . a fusion of contradictory forces that nevertheless cohere enough to constitute a defnite confguration’. He treats his method of writing ‘Assembling the 1980s’ as an assembling of elements, ‘not as a unity, but in all their contradictory dispersion’, allowing the artwork to appear ‘not in its fullness as an aesthetic object, but as a constitutive element in the fabric of the wider world of ideas, movements, and events, while at the same time ofering us a privileged vantage point on that world’ (Hall 2005, pp. 1; 4). The four elements that Hall (2006, p. 21) argues ‘fused together’ in a conjuncture to make possible the emergence of the Black Art Movement in 1980s Britain were, frst, a ‘collapse of “class” as the master analytic category’ and the ‘rise of the so-called “new social movements”’; second, ‘the rise of gender and sexual politics’; third, Thatcherism and free-market neoliberalism; and, fourth, ‘the theoretical deluge which swept across the 1970s and 1980s’. The weakness with Hall’s two papers is their positioning of women and feminism. While ‘the rise of gender and sexual politics’ are one of the conjunctural elements, his defnition of this is limited to ‘feminine, personal, familial and domestic themes’, ‘masculinity, the homo-erotic gaze and gay desire’ and ‘black male desire’ (Hall 2006, p. 21), evoking a relational interdependency of women contrasted with the bodily, desirous, autonomy of men. While he notes rightly that ‘Black women did not slot easily into a feminism led largely by white women’, this appears to sidestep foundational feminist theory by such as Audre Lorde in America, and activism like the strike for Union recognition by the mainly Asian female workforce at the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories, London, 1976–1978.5 Likewise, in identifying the frst post-war Black Art Movement in the UK, Hall names 16 men and no women (ibid., p. 4). Finally, his comments on the exhibition Five Black Women (Africa Centre, London, 1983) imply that feminism was a new disruptor of the Black Art Movement rather than a result of existing exclusions and fssures both within the movement and beyond.6 My assembling (to echo Hall) of difering practices in this chapter is intended also to construct a reading of a collective moment in 2010s Pittsburgh and work towards identifying the conjunctural elements that have produced it ‘not as a unity, but in all

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their contradictory dispersion’ (Hall 2005, p. 1). As Hall (2005, 2006, and in Hall and Massey 2010 and elsewhere) argues, a conjuncture of contradictory elements can cohere into a broad cultural–political era, and he ofers assembly as a method of observation: a map of diverse elements allowing interconnections to be made and for which a particular point of view can be ofered. In Black Is Beautiful: A  Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, Paul C. Taylor picks up this proposition. Assembly, he says (2016, p. 3), ‘refuses the quest for defnitive interpretation . . . makes it easier to credit the complexity of historically emergent social phenomena’ and ‘allows us to see and account for the coherence of the confguration without glossing over the respects in which it remains, in a sense, incoherent’. Assembly, not birth, is what we need to attend to, he argues (2016, pp. 1–31). Taylor develops his understanding of diasporic Black cultures specifcally in an American context: for him, ‘Black’ means African-American cultures. These cultures are undertaking this charge of assembly visually, materially, performatively and verbally, not only as written language but also in music, flm, hair and dress, advertising and art. Taylor explores these felds of cultural practices, suggesting how American-domiciled diasporic artists are following a similar path to that outlined by Hall in making their analyses and reconfgurations of their reality and experience. The phrase ‘assembly, not birth’ also moves us to the cultural and away from the presumed natural, the bodily and the female, although Taylor does not explore this. *** One of Vanessa German’s power fgures lives with me, in the main living space of my home. She has been with me since 2012, the day that Vanessa brought her to my apartment in Pittsburgh; the day that two packers were there, getting my seven-years-worth of academic life in America ready to move back across the Atlantic. They watched wide-eyed as Vanessa unwrapped her: ‘You can do it’, she said to them; ‘I used to be a packer too’. The next day the packers brought a wooden crate they had made specially for the sculpture. They rewrapped her carefully, placed her in the crate and put her in the back of the truck. She arrived in England safely, adorned with electrical sockets for power, a fsh for the ocean we both crossed and keys to unlock the way forward. Her big toes are lifted. She has a bird fying from her chest for joy; and the pedestal on which she stands shows a photograph of my Barbadian-British Great Aunt Bird, Marcia Reid. She has a halo with the words painted on it: ‘I see you Hilary’. She watches over me (see Figure 1.1). *** Vanessa German’s exhibition 21st Century Juju opened at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, 10 August 2012. Filling four galleries of the Center, this was a major oneperson exhibition celebrating German being named ‘Emerging Artist of the Year’. As her nominator, it was my honour to present German to the people gathered that night. I noted that ‘anyone who has spent even a minute in Vanessa’s company would recognise that there is nothing “emerging” about her: she is all there’. My point was not that artists are already-formed, beyond social, cultural and political context, but rather that German is all there, fully present, committed, in the ways she engages with her social, cultural and political context, and with critique of it through her practices.

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Figure 1.1 Vanessa German, Untitled, 2012, 37 x 14¼ x 15” (84 x 36 x 38 cm) Source: Courtesy of the artist and Hilary Robinson

A product of that context, she is also a producer—assembler—of it, and of new subject positions. German identifes this as being a ‘citizen artist’. Before moving on to explore how she does this, I want to outline this use of assembly. In my short comments at the opening of 21st Century Juju, I  situated German’s practices in a context and an aesthetic tradition within work by African-American artists: Assemblage. Assemblage is employed by artists like Dindga McCannon, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar and Renée Stout, to name but a few. White American artists like Joseph Cornell or Robert Rauschenberg also employed something like this method, as have white European artists, including those best known for two-dimensional Collage like Max Ernst, John Heartfeld and Hanna Höch. It is notable, scanning such names, that many known for using Assemblage or Collage make work that speaks of resistance. Further, as well as those who are African-American, many have other marginalised cultural, political or subject identities, including sexualities historically regarded as deviant and criminalised (Cornell was clinically reclusive;

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Rauschenberg, gay; and Höch, bisexual, often wore men’s clothes). Collage in European art history, however, has nuanced distinctions from African-American Assemblage as we might understand it from Hall’s and Taylor’s theorisations of assembly. Dadaists, Surrealists, Cubists and others used Collage as a deliberately revolutionary means of rupturing visual understandings, representations and realities to produce new ways of seeing. For poet and theorist Trista Tzara, it was a ‘fusion of means and expression’ to produce a residue he named poésie: ‘neither a “quotation” of reality, nor a means of signifying it. Rather it was the irruption of the everyday into the fction created by the mind’ (Brown 2019, p. 547). For Höch (who in today’s context might identify as queer), Collage was ‘a means by which elements from contrasting realms . . . could be “alienated” from their usual function for the purpose of generating “a newly created entity”’ (ibid.). Here, Collage is the deliberate tool for disrupting established cultural and representational processes. Hall, however, identifes assembly in diaspora cultures as the coming together of disparate, possibly contradictory cultural elements, already alienated, in order to create new cultural realities and subject positions: disruption, displacement or alienation is the reality from which new subject positions have to be assembled. Indeed, Hall teases out a relationship between the collective project of 1950s–1960s UK-based diaspora artists and that of Modernism. He locates it in the overlap between anticolonial thinking and modernity, recognising it in western Africa, South Africa, India, Latin America (particularly Brazil) and America’s Harlem Renaissance (Hall 2006, pp. 5–6). Following Hall’s observation, the strength of Assemblage as a mode of artmaking among American diasporic artists is striking. While the styles, concerns, and intent of the artists named above are distinct, there is an impulse to work in this way that demands attention and adds further meaning and legibility to German’s work. Assembly brings us closer to her way of working: her work is a coherent confguration in the understanding of diasporic culture ofered by Hall and Taylor as an assembly of peoples and cultures into something always-becoming. It is an act of Assemblage. As Taylor (2016, pp. 1–31) says: ‘Assembly, not birth’. German is rooted within African-American diasporic assembly. She spent her childhood in Mid-City, Los Angeles, settling in Pittsburgh aged 24 in 2000. The deep ‘situatedness’ of her work in Pittsburgh positions her also as a consciously American artist. In the exhibition Miracles and Glories Abound (27 January–20 April 2019, Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan; see Figure 1.2), she took the iconic representation of a foundational story about the birth of the nation, America: Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851). This painting ofers an apparently coherent narrative of a triumphant turning point in the American Revolution (1765–1783). The painting has a tight, triangular composition, where the whole structure speaks of a unifed sense of purpose. The only thing higher than General Washington is the fag; his profle directs viewers’ attention out of the shadows to the bright new dawn towards which he leads the fotilla. Although this depiction is ofered as a non-negotiable visual argument, it is, however, a construction, too: a mythic representation. It depicts an event of 1776, but the stars and stripes painted in it were not used until 1777. The hats are different from the then current tricorns. This crew deliberately anticipates the diasporic make-up of America, with one man of African descent, another wearing a Scottish tam o’shanter, and another wearing Native clothing; soldiers, farmers, and possibly one woman in men’s clothing. Washington’s stance would be all-but-impossible in this boat: he would fall. The 12-strong crew echoes the disciples without a Judas, united

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under the command of George Washington fulflling his vision of the new dawn: the birth of America. African-American artist Robert Colescott’s take on the painting, George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page From an American History Textbook (1975), insists we recognise W.E.B. du Bois’ much-quoted identifcation of double consciousness.7 Colescott removes the Black man and the man wearing Native American clothing from the boat; Washington is transformed into the agricultural scientist and former slave, George Washington Carver; his crew are caricatures of racist stereotypes of Black people. Thus, Colescott exposes the single consciousness, or white supremacy, of Leutze’s original painting, and its mythic representation given as a form of reality: a birth, not assembly, of the nation America. German assembles at least a triple consciousness in her work, or what Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith (1982) identifed as bravery and Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) named as intersectional positioning. Her work elicits not only the double consciousness of being Black and being American, but also the third consciousness of being sexed and gendered. In the central assemblage for the exhibition Miracles and Glories Abound (the title ousting that other MAGA, Trump’s slogan ‘make America great again’), the boat is preceded by a magnifcent female fgure in a blue robe that tumbles into and becomes one with the blue waters on which the boat foats (Figure 1.2). She strides onwards adorned with blue prayer beads, blue medicine bottles, blue boxing gloves. A blue ibis perches atop her head, wings raised, watching back over the boat and its serious-faced inhabitants. The catalogue for the exhibition includes photographs for some of the fgures that are in the boat. These individual sculptural elements (all 2018) have titles such as Will I Get a New Name When I Get There?, LaQuisha Washington Crosses the Day Aware and We Go This Way, Let Us Dance. ***

Figure 1.2 Vanessa German, Miracles and Glories Abound, 2019, exhibition installation, Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI Source: Courtesy of the artist and Pavel Zoubok Fine Art

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Figure 1.3 Screenshot from Vanessa German’s Facebook page, 27 November 2019 Source: Courtesy of the artist

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Homewood, in Pittsburgh, is where German matured as an artist. Homewood has many family homes, in conditions from neat and proudly cared for, through to disrepair or abandonment. The sense of space in Homewood comes from abandoned, ruined houses being demolished and the lots grassed over. It was described by Rachel Maddow (2011) of the MSNBC television station as ‘America’s most dangerous neighbourhood’. Shootings are a regular occurrence. German witnessed a man shoot and kill a neighbour: an echo of a shooting she witnessed in Mid-City LA as a child. Homewood is one of America’s poorest neighbourhoods and one of the only neighbourhoods in Pittsburgh that is affordable for single African-American mothers. Here is the most shocking and obscene of conjunctural elements: from 2010 to 2020, Pittsburgh was repeatedly ranked as the most liveable city in mainland USA by The Economist Group and by Forbes (bizjournal 2010; Eberson, 2018), yet the question remains: most liveable for whom? African-American women in Pittsburgh have the lowest life expectancy of all women in the top 25 metro areas of America: just 75 years, or 6.1 years fewer than white women in the city, on a level with life expectancy in Honduras.8 This is the cost of having bodies marked Black and female, and is a situation that Pittsburgh’s leadership apparently finds impossible to see, much less to address. The streets of Homewood are a constituent part of what drives German to produce her work. They are the catalyst for what the largely white, institutional art establishment of Pittsburgh and beyond might tidily categorise as her ‘social practice’ work. On Homewood’s Hamilton Avenue, amid the red brick, is a bright blue house, covered with mosaics of figures, flowers, hands, eyes; this is ARThouse, created by German for local Homewood children. In 2011, German’s artwork had outgrown the studio in her house, so she began using the porch to make her work. Local kids passing by on their way home from school would ask her what she was doing and if they could help. Rather than have them work on her sculptures, German gathered boards and materials from demolished houses and fly-tipped waste, and paints and brushes left over from friends’ theatre projects. She would say to the children: ‘You need to make a decision. You need to choose a colour and a purpose. What do you want to make today?’ While she got back to her work, the children would start making things, and then call their friends as they passed by to join them, repeating to them the same challenge: ‘You need to choose a colour and a purpose. What do you want to make today?’ It became a regular after-school activity for some, an alternative to impersonating gang members or to burying the trauma of violence within. German named the gathering, the making, the practice, Love Front Porch. 9 In 2012, at 3.00 one afternoon as school buses were bringing children home from school, German heard 21 shots fred. Fearful and angered in the time following this shooting, and with the help of Love Front Porch children, German made signs saying ‘STOP SHOOTING—WE LOVE YOU’ and stuck them in her front yard in the style of the political placards seen in American front yards before elections: two sturdy wires with a small banner between them. Neighbours and others in Pittsburgh asked her for signs for their own homes; with the help of the children to make them, over 2,500 signs were distributed.

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Following a tenant’s eviction, the house opposite German’s home lay empty. She negotiated with the public housing ofce to use it on a temporary basis, to extend Love Front Porch activity. This became the frst ARThouse. It provided a regular place for children to make things, to explore their creativity and potential. For the children, experiencing the power of making art as unconditional love was life-changing. Knowing that the time to use the house was limited, German began raising funds, including from sales of her sculpture and crowdsourcing, to purchase a foreclosed house a few doors down the road. This became a permanent home for ARThouse in 2015. On the risers of steps leading up to the porch are mosaiced words The ARThouse Poem: Being at the ARThouse Where You Realize You Had Wings The Whole Time. I suggested above that this part of German’s work might be categorised by the art world as ‘social practice’. However, I think we can better understand German’s practice in totality as what Felicity Allen (2019) calls, after discussing the work of Samella Lewis, the ‘disoeuvre’. This is Allen’s term for all art and art-related work that women artists undertake, including in institutions and communities, that both is and is not their ‘oeuvre’, or body of artwork. Lewis, says Allen (ibid., p. 334), never stopped negotiating a practice which necessarily crossed between the studio, the social and the institutional. Lacking privilege and being the object of prejudice, an artist needs to transform the infrastructure while also needing to earn an income, so the totality of her artistic work is considerably more complex than the objects produced from her studio. Exemplifed by Lewis (an African-American woman), the disoeuvre is another form of Assemblage, which we can see resonating throughout German’s work. Love Front Porch and ARThouse were a consequence of her studio and life practices. Through these projects, she allows children to imagine diferent futures, and to process their present experiences. I would name her local Pittsburgh work, her determination to argue with the purportedly unarguable in American culture, her disoeuvre, her assembled practices in her life and her practice of her sculptural work, as an Assemblage of radical generosity. *** I am not interested in simply celebrating the presence of a Black, queer woman artist in Pittsburgh for the sake of it: while she and her work are both magnifcent and exceptional, German is not a decontextualised ‘magnifcent exception’ in Pittsburgh, nor is she isolated as a woman artist of colour. German is embedded in communities, even as parts of the city ignore and abuse parts of the communities that surround her. Rather, I want to understand the conjuncture there that allows German and other artists to make sharp work in the late 2010s. In the fnal section of this chapter, I want to read this moment politically and in a context.

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Pittsburgh has had some not-for-proft support for Black artists. To indicate the three most prominent examples: the Multi-Cultural Arts Initiative (MCAI) was launched 1990 by Pittsburgh’s foundation community, and re-named as Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh (ABAP), 2010. Second, the August Wilson African-American Cultural Center opened downtown, September  2009. In 2014, following near-bankruptcy, it was sold to a non-proft consortium led by three Pittsburgh foundations (Moore 2014; Belko 2014). It continues to have the support of artists of colour in Pittsburgh. Third, Kelly Strayhorn Theatre (KST) in East Liberty, Pittsburgh, is named for two mid-century Pittsburgh artists: white Hollywood actor Gene Kelly, born nearby; and Black jazz composer Billy Strayhorn, whose family settled in Homewood. Under the leadership (2008–2019) of janera solomon, KST built its reputation and local community support. There is also crucial broader not-for-proft support for Black women and girls like New Voices Pittsburgh/New Voices for Reproductive Justice.10 These examples acknowledged, there remains much discussion voicing anger, frustration and dismay among Pittsburgh artists of colour about the efective support that they get from the not-for-proft sector. Some said to me that they had given up applying to the foundations for money; others questioned the names of various schemes: had MCAI been truly multicultural? Did ABAP include Asian, South Asian or Latinx artists? Could artists of colour apply to other funding schemes with meaningful success or were those by default ‘white artists’ awards? What I am identifying, however, goes far beyond what the not-for-proft communities do. The conjunctures that permit artists to make their work are those of massive movements in politics, in specifc political–geographical situations: the tectonic plates of culture shifting, bringing together for a short while the intellectual and emotional feld for particular artworks and practices to fnd their questions and voices. The history of race in Pittsburgh is complex, resonating today in egregious inequalities and assumptions.11 Pittsburgh in the 2010s was being gentrifed: having lost about a third of its population following the closure of nearly all its steel mills, it was in the process of change, but change that was clearly benefting white communities and harming Black communities. To give three examples, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) has drawn major tech companies to Pittsburgh but can still in 2019 issue a schematic map to students indicating the main city neighbourhoods, minus the Black ones. Following the appalling 2018 shootings at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, which left 11 dead and lead to vigils and international media coverage, some wondered why the shooting of fve African-Americans (four women, one man) in Pittsburgh, 9 March 2016, scarcely made local press coverage and was subject to a mistrial (Reed Ward 2020; Idia 2018). One of the best-loved of Pittsburgh’s renowned murals (one of the few that featured people [children] of colour) was peremptorily painted over by the tech company that owned the building, pending a rebuild: part of the gentrifcation of East Liberty which has efectively meant the removal of Black bodies from home and business ownership. This is not to say that such struggle is good for art. Just the opposite. These are the conditions that might ensure that (Black, women) artists may actually leave a city (artists like LaToya Ruby Frasier, who in 2004 left Braddock, Pittsburgh, to take up an MFA programme; or Ayanah Moor, who lived in Pittsburgh 2001–2014 while teaching at CMU and exhibiting internationally). But the questions, politics, events and anger that erupt at certain moments inevitably inform and can sharpen art practices. Stuart Hall recognised 1980s UK as producing ‘a moment’ for Black British artists; I recognise a similar ‘moment’ for 2010s Black Pittsburgh artists. German is but one.

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Others I will briefy mention, pending further discussion elsewhere, include Chris Ivey, the #notwhite collective, and Alisha Wormsley. On 28 July 2018, flmmaker Chris Ivey screened a video installation at Pittsburgh’s Mattress Factory museum and afterwards hosted, facilitated and flmed a discussion. Finding Beauty in the Raw was part of the exhibition Civil Rights and Civil Wrongs: South Africa and Us (25 May–29 July 2018). It was a four-screen installation, part of Ivey’s much longer project, We Are Here (Mattress Factory 2018), which has involved flming in Pittsburgh, Cape Town, Charlottesville, NC, New Orleans and London (with survivors of the Grenfell Tower fre). Finding Beauty in the Raw focused on unsolved killings of Black women in Pittsburgh. Sound guided viewer’s attention from one wall to another, while more contemplative images on the other three walls never quite faded away. We heard personal testimony, recollections, community leaders speaking, and at one point the unaccompanied voice of a young woman video-recording a song of love: ‘You are my father, my only father. . .’ She was one of many Black women in Pittsburgh who had been murdered, and whose murderer was never apprehended. Ivey’s particular genius is two-fold: for allowing people to speak, and for editing the results to allow a community to be heard beyond its immediate members. The conversation after the screening was between about 20 Black women and femmes. Ivey, feminist in his practices, has built trust with this community over the years. Only occasionally carefully prompting the conversation, he flmed while another man recorded the sound. On 14 February 2016, artist, musician and arts worker Christiane Dolores sent the email used as the epigram for this chapter to a number of women she knew in Pittsburgh. Through the summer the #notwhite collective formed of artists of Latinx, Asian, migrant and/or mixed (including African diaspora) heritage: Alison Zapata; Amber Epps; Carolina Loyola-Garcia; Fran Flaherty; Geña Musica; Liana Maneese; Christiane Dolores (Madam Dolores); Maggie Negrete; Maritza Mosquera; Sara Tang; Sarika Goulatia; Veronica Corpuz; Zena Ruiz. (#notwhitecollective n.d.). They spent time talking, sharing food, practicing co-escucha (a form of co-listening and co-counselling) led by artist Maritza Mosquera, organising a community event for children, and talking more. After Trump was elected president, November 2016, the work shifted. #notwhite collective worked collectively and individually on a manifesto, which was verbally presented during Keyword: International, KST, 20 October 2018 (a symposium accompanying the Carnegie International) (Figure 1.4). Collectively they read: WE ARE THE GLOBAL MAJORITY Internationality is not being another, it is being part of the whole world. The bridge to internationality is to embody our humanity. How will you become? How will you build your muscles of empathy? What will you dream?12 Through 2019, each #notwhite collective member’s individual manifesto was excerpted in a series of 12 presentations in Sidewall, a small mural exhibition space; the manifesto will inform their frst exhibition of collectively produced work at Space Gallery, Pittsburgh. If I have foregrounded here the #notwhite collective’s process of work rather than artefacts, it is because that is where their political work is rooted: in a process of collective trust that is moving to witness. On 3 March 2016, Alisha Wormsley installed a work as part of The Last Billboard, a project established by artist Jon Rubin, 2008 (Figure  1.5). A  billboard on top of a

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Figure 1.4 #notwhite collective, Manifesto  presentation at Keyword: International, 20 October 2018, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Pittsburgh, PA Source: By permission of the photographer Many Goulatia and #notwhite collective

Figure 1.5 Alisha Wormsley, ‘There Are Black People in the Future’, Pittsburgh, 2018, billboard (metal with wooden letters) Source: Photograph courtesy of The Last Billboard

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building near a main intersection in East Liberty was given to a succession of artists to display a verbal message. A series of enigmatic, poetic, political, cryptic and funny messages were displayed. Wormsley’s message was: ‘THERE ARE BLACK PEOPLE IN THE FUTURE’. After three weeks, the landlord (a development company, We Do Property) asked Rubin to remove the message, saying they had received complaints, citing a not-before-used approval clause in Rubin’s contract. On 3 April, it was removed. The local community, Pittsburgh’s art community and national art press responded vociferously. A town hall meeting was held at the nearby KST. Three days later, We Do Property said the sign could be replaced; but Wormsley and Rubin decided against it. Rubin subsequently ended The Last Billboard project. Wormsley exhibited the work as a billboard in Manifest Destiny, Detroit (2019). On 24 October 2019, Wormsley and Pittsburgh’s Ofce of Public Art presented the There Are Black People in the Future Artwork-In-Residence project. The project awarded 11 artists and educators with microgrants to engage the community in dialogue about implications of what had happened. That evening, Chris Ivey screened a video about the artwork-in-residence project and process. janera solomon (in O’Driscoll 2018), then director of KST, said of Wormsley’s project: ‘It’s beautiful when you have a moment where an artwork helps a community better understand itself, and understand what it’s about. And seeing the response to the billboard makes me optimistic’. This takes me back to Stuart Hall’s (2006, p. 4) identifcation of moments: It is as if every historical moment posed a set of cognitive, political—and I would add, artistic—questions which together create a ‘horizon’ of possible futures within which we ‘think the present’, and to which our practices constitute a reply; a moment defned as much by the questions posed as by the ‘answers’ we seem constrained or ‘conscripted’ to give. When the historical conjuncture changes . . . the problem space, and thus the practices, also change since, as David Scott puts it, what was a ‘horizon of the future’ for them has become our ‘futures past’—a horizon which we can ‘no longer imagine, seek after, inhabit’, or indeed create in, see, or represent in the same way. As Alisha Wormsley (in Cage Conley 2016) says: ‘I’m making work that is the future, and the past, and the present, simultaneously’. The historical moment in Pittsburgh has been posing an intense set of questions about race, gender and culture in America that present themselves as a conjuncture: ‘a period during which the diferent social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society come together to give it a specifc and distinctive shape’ (Hall in Hall and Massey 2010, p. 57). We have, frst, America’s ‘most liveable city’ with an untenable death rate for Black women; second, gentrifcation which displaces communities of colour; third, a generous foundation community which both celebrates artists of colour and segregates them; fourth, rightly, the world’s attention when a Jewish community is targeted and sufers multiple fatalities; but, ffth, almost total silence about mass murders in Black communities and their mistrials; sixth, a secondary city, Democrat-led since the 1930s, hosting such inequalities during, seventh, the rise and rule of a far-right-wing and racially divisive president. This conjuncture highlights the rights of not-white bodies, not-male bodies, to be in particular urban spaces; issues about money to house, provide and care for those bodies; about the rights of those bodies to equitable life expectancy; about the rights of those bodies, marked as not white and not male, to live and work in communities

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through generations; about the political representation of those bodies (the shift from marked identity to representation in and of culture); about access to education, cultural institutions and agency as cultural producers; about power. Emerging at the time of this conjuncture (in this moment) is the extraordinary and multi-valent work of Vanessa German, in the broader context of the production of extraordinary work by Black artists. This conjuncture, historically constructed and time- and locationspecifc, is provoking sets of practices that, while diverse, are all deeply rooted in community, in listening, and in imagining the future. These artists are producing the possibility of assembling new subject positions. The moment will be shifted, history will be turned, by those who are engaging with it; but in this moment, these artists have practices which are grounded in context, think the present, form a reply and represent the horizon.

Notes 1. Thank you to Elke Krasny for this formulation of geographic naming, shortened hereafter to America or USA. The ‘recognition of stories’ is hugely infuenced by reading Hemmings (2011) against the catalogue narratives of a series of exhibitions surveying feminist art in major museums, including Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: 86 Steps in 45 Years of Art and Feminism, Museo de Bellas Artes De Bilbao, 2007; WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art 2007; elles@centrepompidou, Centre Pompidou, 2009; Rebelle: Art & Feminism 1969–2009, Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, 2009. 2. Robinson (forthcoming). Some of the thoughts in this chapter were frst outlined in a short catalogue essay, Robinson (2019). 3. So-named for the ship, the Empire Windrush, that brought the frst 802 workers from the Caribbean, invited by the then-government to help rebuild war-damaged Britain. The Guardian newspaper has been particularly assiduous in reporting the mistreatment of them and their families by the UK Home Ofce. See Gentleman (2018) and other related stories, and Gentleman (2019). 4. See Southall Black Sisters (n.d.) today describing itself as ‘established in 1979 to meet the needs of Black (Asian and African-Caribbean) women’, https://southallblacksisters.org.uk/ about/. For a longer discussion, see Chambers (2012), particularly the ‘Preliminary note’ pp. xv–xviii and ‘Introduction: You Were the Future Once’ pp. xix–xlix. 5 See www.leeds.ac.uk/strikingwomen/grunwick/chronology for a collation of information about the Grunwick strike. Accessed 4 January 2020. 6. ‘The decision of fve black women to exhibit separately may have been a harbinger of trouble to come’ (Hall 2006, p. 18). Yet ‘the trouble’ became apparent earlier at The First National Black Art Convention, 28 October  1982; Claudette Johnson was the last presenter and the only woman. She focused on the representation of Black women in her work and in art by others, from white European men to what she called traditional African images. The event was then scheduled to break up into smaller seminar groups. However, after Johnson’s presentation, there was interest in carrying on talking about these issues after the scant question time allowed. Discussion ensued about staying together in the main lecture theatre or breaking into the groups. This then diverged into having a majority decision, by vote, to stay in the main lecture theatre while those who wished to talk about the issues Johnson had raised went into a separate seminar room. Thus, a fssure on the lines of sexual politics was created. An audio recording of the conference has been archived online: The First National Black Art Convention 1982 (2012). 7. ‘It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. . . . He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows,

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without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.’ ‘Du Bois (1961 [1903], pp. 16–17)’ 8. See the Measure of America report Women’s Well-Being: Ranking America’s Top 25 Metro Areas (2013); Black women’s health and rights charity New Voices Pittsburgh (2020). 9. For German’s account of how Love Front Porch and ARThouse came into being and her vision that informed them, see (German 2015). 10. ‘New Voices Pittsburgh/New Voices for Reproductive Justice  – collective called New Voices – is the premier Reproductive Justice and Human Rights organization in the Greater Pittsburgh Region. The mission of New Voices is to build a social change movement dedicated to the health and well-being of Black women and girls through leadership development, Human Rights and Reproductive Justice. For the last 12 years, New Voices has served 20,000+ women of color through leadership development, community organizing, policy advocacy and culture change. We defne Reproductive Justice as the Human Right of all women/people to control all choices about our bodies, sexuality, gender, work and reproduction. (New Voices Pittsburgh 2020)’ 11. See Trotter and Day (2010) for an excellent account of the history of the African-American communities in that time frame; and the report from the Center on Race and Social Problems (2015). 12. Text supplied by Christiane Dolores in personal email to the author, 19 June 2020.

References Allen, Felicity. 2019. ‘Erasure, Transformation and the Politics of Pedagogy as Feminist Artistic/ Curatorial Practice’, in Buszek, Maria and Robinson, Hilary (eds) A Companion to Feminist Art. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 331–350. Belko, Mark. 2014. ‘Dollar Bank Sells August Wilson Center to Three Pittsburgh Foundations’, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 6 November. www.post-gazette.com/business/2014/11/05/DollarBank-sells-August-Wilson-Center-to-three-Pittsburgh-foundations/stories/201411050250, accessed 2 January 2020. Bizjournal. 2010. ‘Forbes Once Again Names Pittsburgh “Most Liveable City”’. www. bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/stories/2010/05/03/daily4.html, accessed 9 December 2020. Brown, Kathryn. 2019 ‘Collage as Form and Idea in the Art Criticism of Tristan Tzara’, French Studies, vol. 73, no. 4, pp. 544–560. Cage Conley, Tameka. 2016. ‘The Future Is Present and All Around: How Alisha B. Wormsley Remakes the World’, The Ofng, 16 February. https://theofngmag.com/enumerate/thefuture-is-present-and-all-around/, accessed 23 February 2020. Center on Race and Social Problems. 2015. Pittsburgh’s Racial Demographies 2015: Diferences and Disparities. University of Pittsburgh, PA: Center on Race and Social Problems. Chambers, Eddie. 2012. Things Done Change: The Cultural Politics of Recent Black Artists in Britain. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 1989, no. 1, article 8. du Bois, W. E. B. 1961 [1903]. The Souls of Black Folk. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications. Eberson, Sharon. 2018. ‘Pittsburgh Is the No. 2 Most Liveable City in America’, Pittsburgh PostGazette, 20 August. www.post-gazette.com/local/neighborhood/2018/08/20/Pittsburgh-No2-most-livable-city-America-32-global-liveability-index-Economist/stories/201808200090, accessed 13 March 2020. Gentleman, Amelia. 2018. ‘The Children of Windrush: “I’m Here Legally, But They’re Asking Me to Prove I’m British”’. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/15/why-the-children-ofwindrush-demand-an-immigration-amnesty, accessed 13 March 2020. Gentleman, Amelia. 2019. The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment. London: Guardian Faber.

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German, Vanessa. 2015. ‘Pittsburgh State Prison’, TEDx Talk, 21 July. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=aMTqKQPd7Yk, accessed 13 March 2020. Hall, Stuart. 2005. ‘Assembling the 1980s: The Deluge—and After’, in Bailey, David A., Bascom, Ian and Boyce, Sonia (eds) Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 1–19. Hall, Stuart. 2006. ‘Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three “Moments” in Post-War History’, History Workshop Journal, no. 61, pp. 1–24. Hall, Stuart and Massey, Doreen. 2010. ‘Interpreting the Crisis’, Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, no. 44, pp. 57–71. Hemmings, Clare. 2011. Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hull, Gloria T., Bell Scott, Patricia and Smith, Barbara (eds). 1982. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. New York: The Feminist Press. Idia, Tereneh. 2018. ‘The Tree of Life Shooting Devastated All of Pittsburgh. I Can’t Help But Ask: Why Aren’t Black Lives Mourned This Way?’. www.publicsource.org/the-tree-of-lifeshooting-devastated-all-of-pittsburgh-i-cant-help-but-ask-why-arent-black-lives-mournedthis-way/, accessed 23 February 2020. Maddow, Rachel. 2011. ‘The Rachel Maddow Show’, 26 May. www.youtube.com/watch?v= KTbDvAL51HI, accessed 13 March 2020. Mattress Factory. 2018. ‘WE ARE HERE: Finding Beauty in the Raw’. https://mattress.org/ archive/index.php/Detail/Collections/1453, accessed 22 February 2020. Moore, Daniel. 2014 ‘Dollar Bank Buys August Wilson Center for $1,912.50’, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 4 November. www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2014/11/03/Dollar-Bank-buysWilson-Center-for-1-912-50/stories/201411030164, accessed 13 March 2020. New Voices Pittsburgh. 2020. https://causes.benevity.org/causes/840-270570462, accessed 13 March 2020. #notwhite collective. n.d. ‘About’. www.notwhitecollective.com/, accessed 13 March 2020. O’Driscoll, Bill. 2018. ‘Forum on Removed Billboard Art Generates Protest of Gentrifcation and Racism’, 90.5 WESA: Pittsburgh’s NPR News Station, 19 April. www.wesa.fm/post/ forum-removed-billboard-art-generates-protest-gentrifcation-and-racism#stream/0, accessed 23 February 2020. Reed Ward, Paula. 2020. ‘Key Evidence in Wilkinsburg Mass Shooting Case Never Made It to Jurors’. www.post-gazette.com/news/crime-courts/2020/02/20/Wilkinsburg-mass-shootingtrial-evidence-district-attorney-police/stories/202002190158, accessed 23 February 2020. Robinson, Hilary. 2019. ‘Vanessa German: Assembling a Radical Generosity’, in Vanessa German: Miracles and Glories Abound. Flint, MI: Flint Institute of Art. Robinson, Hilary. forthcoming. ReSisters: Art, Activism, and Feminist Resistance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Southall Black Sisters. n.d. https://southallblacksisters.org.uk/about/, accessed 29 November 2019. Taylor, Paul C. 2016. Black Is Beautiful: A  Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. The First National Black Art Convention 1982. 2012. www.blkartgroup.info/oct82audio.html, accessed 26 January 2020. The Measure of America Report. 2013. ‘Women’s Well-Being: Ranking America’s Top 25 Metro Areas’. https://measureofamerica.org/womens_wellbeing/, accessed 17 March 2020. Trotter, Joe W. and Day, Jared N. 2010. Race and Renaissance: African Americans in Pittsburgh Since World War II. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

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Activist Intension Mona Hatoum and Morehshin Allahyari’s Disruptive Bodies Astrid N. Korporaal

In a global political landscape in which national borders are increasingly policed and surveilled, defnitions of citizenship, agency and solidarity are under pressure. How subjects claim the right to inhabit a place, move between sites of belonging and articulate transnational relationships has become a matter of resisting circumscription. Following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in the United States and the War on Terrorism throughout the Muslim world, the perceived threat of porous borders has been politically mobilised by ‘contemporary forms of national sovereignty’ as synonymous with the threat of porous identities and bodies. Judith Butler has argued that political aggressions ‘constitute eforts to overcome .  .  . ineradicable dimensions of human dependency and sociality’ (2009, p. xiv) by dehumanising particular populations, while Michelle Murphy and Nancy Chen point out that internally marginalised communities are increasingly surveilled and pathologised as ‘damaged and doomed’ or ‘toxic’ (Murphy 2017, p.  495; Chen 2012). According to this ideology, immigrant, female, queer, non-white, trans and other liminal subjects threaten to erode and contaminate national territories and economies, as well as individual security and identity.1 Furthermore, Butler argues that these vulnerable minorities are denied ‘livability’ and ‘grievability’ (2009). Their injuries and deaths remain largely unnamed and unmourned in the media. Through uninhabitable identifcations, these bodies are limited in their imaginative, relational and physical freedoms. Simultaneously, they are required to make themselves transparent to power by presenting evidence of their location and movement. They are expected to perform within the marginal identities allocated to them, in what Kobena Mercer (1990) and Stuart Hall (1996) call ‘the burden of representation’. Initially, the representational activism associated with identity politics promoted transnational advocacy, through exercises in consciousness-raising and reclaiming oppressive labels. Recently, however, this language has been progressively co-opted by neoliberal ideologies into exclusionary forms of socio-political tribalism (Dean 1996), biometric technologies of identifcation (Magnet 2011) and bioinformatic commodities (Nakamura and Chow-White 2012).2 Contemporary visual activism runs up against this complex virtual geography of borders, access and data, in which representations and objectifcations are entwined. Feminist scholars such as Butler have attempted to revive transcultural solidarity and representational agency via the shared experiences of vulnerability. Extending her research into the performativity of (gender) identity (1990), Butler has turned to embodied interdependencies as expressions of ‘the social network of hands that seeks to minimize the unlivability of lives’ (2009, p. 67). She argues that exposure to the

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need of others, whom we may not initially recognise or relate to, works to ‘disrupt any established notion of the “we”’ (2009, p. 14). Taking the Arab Spring and Occupy movements as key examples of this ‘politics of the street’, Butler studies bodies that gather in public assembly, ‘to express their indignation and enact their plural existence in public space’, demanding recognition and liveable conditions (2015, p. 26). As these embodied enunciations have become the subject of attention, artistic practices that enact vulnerability have also become associated with activism. Performancebased practices have become central to academic discussions of visual activism, ethics (Ridout and Schneider 2012) and ‘the social turn’ (Bishop 2006, 2012b) in art. However, an encounter with an artistic performance of vulnerability does not necessarily result in a process of social change or even solidarity. As Jane Blocker (2008) argues, performative disruption has become part of an ‘aesthetics of risk’, often transferring the experience of risk to dispossessed subjects, problematically echoing Western tactics of warfare and the spread of corporate capitalism. More broadly, Amelia Jones observes that contemporary performance art, while associated with interpersonal, authentic and transformative experiences, often takes place as ‘a kind of “redo” of “real life”’ (2011, p. 24) within a gallery. She argues that the live re-enactment ‘destroys presence (or makes the impossibility of its being secured evident)’ (2011, p. 18). Even participatory performances resemble, for Jones, ‘a simulation of relational exchange with others (not just the artist, but the other spectators, the guards, the “managers of the event)”’ (2011, p. 18). Butler’s ethical politics invites us to extend our consideration of visual culture as an activist tool for the embodied disruption of representations. Is it possible for artistic practices to enact the ‘plural performativity’ Butler advocates, and does this require the preservation of notions of authenticity and presence based on live physical encounters? Can artists expand our political notion of visual activism and ‘corporeal vulnerability’ by performing across spheres of liveness, representation and intimacy? What are the creative possibilities for articulating the sphere of appearance that Butler posits is ‘both mobilized and disabled’ (2015, p. 79) by the assembly of vulnerable bodies? How can visual activism connect bodies that are not entirely or identifably present, enabling transnational solidarity? The shift of public life to virtual arenas calls for a reinterpretation of the intimate exposures explored by female ‘body performance’ artists such as Marina Abramović, Lee Bul, Gina Pane, Coco Fusco, VALIE EXPORT and Carolee Schneemann, among others. Bernadette Wegenstein narrates the development of ‘the body as a medium’ as an evolution from performances of vulnerable embodiment and collective agency in the 1960s, towards performances of the ‘vulnerability of disembodiment’ and displaced or externally controlled agency in digital environments in the 1990s (2006, p. 76). As feminist theorists such as Donna Haraway and Jane Bennett have pointed out, however, digital territories are intertwined with physical power structures (Haraway 1991), and agency takes place in symbiosis with other human and non-human materialities (Bennett 2010). In this chapter, I argue that the transformative potential of artistic performances of vulnerability lies in the tension between embodiment and disembodiment, visibility and opacity, presence and absence. Focusing on two contemporary female artists of diferent generations, Mona Hatoum (a Palestinian artist) and Morehshin Allahyari (an Iranian media artist, activist and writer), I discuss a number of ways they avoid

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reproducing institutionally sanctioned representations of precarity, by directing their address across diferent scales of embodied experience. Furthermore, I compare the ways these two artists negotiate the increasing technological and social surveillance of marginalised bodies, by re-imagining solidarity across borders. I propose the term ‘intensional’ activism to describe these practices, to emphasise their active mobilisation of the tension carried by bodies when negotiating uneven territories of access, visibility and belonging. Furthermore, they incorporate feminist new materialist and post-humanist conceptions of the body as multiple, by extending its spheres of action as well as appearance. I argue that these ‘intensional’ practices support transcultural visual activism and solidarity by resisting neoliberal expectations of constant presence, physical exposure and public identifcation.

Performance, Separation and Allegiance Two bare feet, exposed by rolled-up trousers, stride across the centre of a screen. Followed by a camera, they slowly navigate the littered pavement of a crowded public road. Two large boots are tied to the ankles by their laces, almost kicking the unprotected heels with each step. The camera shifts to a wide shot from above. We can’t see what the walker sees, whether she is watching her feet or scanning the surroundings. She doesn’t seem to communicate with people around her. The walker’s movements are the only ones that appear out of the ordinary on this busy London street. As a performance of physical vulnerability, did this artwork disrupt the social fabric of its surroundings? Roadworks (1985) was an hour-long performance by Mona Hatoum, carried out in Brixton as part of an exhibition organised by the Brixton Arts Collective (18 May–8 June 1985). The piece was performed in the wake of the 1981 and 1985 riots. In Brixton, the predominantly Afro-Caribbean community struggled with unemployment and poor housing, and riots broke out in response to increasing police violence, raids and ‘stop and search’ practices. Like Hatoum’s other early performances, Roadworks was an exercise in bodily endurance. In Roadworks, the Doc Martens boots associated with police and skinheads inhibited Hatoum’s steps (Figure 2.1). In Under Siege (1982), the artist struggled in a transparent cube with liquid clay, painfully slipping for seven hours, and in The Negotiating Table (1983), she lay motionless, covered with blood, raw kidney meat and gauze, enclosed in a transparent body bag. Meanwhile, radio fragments discussing Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and Western declarations of peace played in the gallery space. In this same period, Hatoum’s Palestinian–Christian family were caught up in the Lebanese civil war, and Palestinians elsewhere struggled under military occupation by Israel, subjected to detention, surveillance, incarceration and torture. Stranded in the United Kingdom in the wake of the Lebanese civil war, Hatoum staged situations in which she was muted, trapped or constrained.3 A kind of aesthetic allegiance takes place in works such as Under Siege and The Negotiating Table, whose titles and settings reference geopolitical violence. What does it mean to re-perform these enclosures? These works recall Butler’s descriptions of corporeal vulnerability as an ethical address, an invitation to witness. But there are also distinct diferences, as Hatoum is physically and temporally removed from other ‘disposable’ and ‘ungrievable’ bodies, and seems to actively accentuate the separation from her direct surroundings.

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Figure 2.1 Mona Hatoum, Roadworks, 1985, performed for ‘Roadworks’, Brixton Art Gallery, London Source: © Mona Hatoum. Courtesy the artist (Photo: Patrick Gilbert)

Exposures, Remainders, Intervals Discussing Hatoum’s work in connection with Butler’s political ethics of vulnerability, Elena Tzelepis describes The Negotiating Table as a ‘becoming-carcass’ (2016, p. 151). For Tzelepis, Hatoum ‘performs the destruction of the human body’s integrity, thus exposing the utter superfuity and disposability of the confned bodies of Palestine’s occupation’ (2016, p. 164). The carcass is a symbol of the violated body and a departure from human individuality, as well as a remainder of that violence. For Tzelepis, Hatoum’s work is a performance of displacement and dismemberment, an embodied witnessing to loss. Refecting on her experience viewing The Negotiating Table in Athens in 2012, Tzelepis states that the work echoed local scenes of impoverishment and dispossession. She describes the artist’s body as imaginatively intertwining with the image of a homeless person, forming an ‘amorphous and dismembered mass’ (2016, p. 150).

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Figure 2.2 Mona Hatoum,  The Negotiating Table, 1983, performed at The Western Front, Vancouver Source: © Mona Hatoum. Courtesy The Western Front, Vancouver (Photo: Eric Metcalfe)

From Tzelepis’ perspective, the work is a reminder of a universal relationship to injury, and ‘the singularity of vulnerable bodies as they are exposed to each other’ (2016, p.  164). But the way this exposure works bears further analysis. Hatoum, after all, does not visibly or audibly address the audience, or the dispossessed outside. In fact, she emphasises the boundary between her physical presence and that of the audience. Both the plastic body bag in The Negotiation Table and the plastic sheeting in Under Siege are smeared with materials (blood and clay) that render them opaque, visually accessible only as a closed loop of repeated violence (Figure 2.2). Is there another way Hatoum’s body is communicating a relational vulnerability? How circuits of embodied afliation might disrupt their surroundings is a question that can also be asked of Butler’s politics: how the alliance between marginalised bodies translates into wider spaces ‘to live together, across diferences, sometimes in modes of unchosen proximity’ (Butler 2015, p. 27). To register the ways Hatoum’s works function beyond the representation or re-enactment of physical exposure, it is important to attend to their circulation. Refecting on the institutional collection of live acts, Rebecca Schneider (2016) posits that performances are ‘endlessly incomplete’, since their documentation carries them into an afterlife as ‘resonances circulating, like orature, in a complex network of cross-live, cross-temporal, cross-reference’ (2016, p. 99). Discussing Roadworks, Schneider wonders whether the interval between the performance and the photograph Performance Still (1985–1995) might be a continuation of its sense of ‘being out of step’ (2016, p. 106). Schneider routes our attention from a unique moment of liveness

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to ‘an interinanimacy that takes place across us’ (2016, p. 106). In her earlier book Performing Remains, Schneider referred to this interinanimation, as a constant (re)turn of, to, from and between states in animation .  .  . a critical mode of remaining, as well as a mode of remaining critical: passing on, staying alive, in order to pass on the past as past, not indeed, as (only) present. (2011, p. 7) From this perspective, Hatoum’s performance does not merely repeat violent enclosures. It animates the space of remainder as a durational interplay between moments, locations and lives. The artist exposes the audience to the urgent edge between the live and non-live, a porous sphere of potential contamination. Somatically addressed by this extended temporality of potential and past violence, life and afterlives, the audience is implicated in the interval, and the question of what will happen next.

Surveillance, Tension and Mobilisation A study of the video documentation of both Roadworks and The Negotiation Table reveals how the artist uses the virtual sphere to make palpable precisely what eludes the habitual, institutionalised gaze: the dispersal of the body into a feld of forces that resist fxed representation. In the video, the camera frame shifts between observational schemas of mapping and dissecting: constantly distancing and zooming in. The surveillance camera, when attempting to identify possible threats, misses the intervals between bodies: the invisible tension that remains in the air after every harassment and the looks shared by those followed and watched.4 The artist, dragging empty police boots, seems to carry this tension in her deliberately impeded steps. The work acknowledges a hidden presence, without revealing it. Studying photographic archives produced of ‘identifcation photographs’ created to track black and migrant communities, Tina M. Campt has argued for the importance of listening to the ‘sonic frequencies of images’ (2017, p. 71). Campt suggests that it is possible to register an ‘articulate quietness’ in these photos, originating from ‘practices that are pervasive and ever-present yet occluded by their seeming absence or erasure in repetition, routine, or internalization’ (2017, p. 4). Emphasising her restricted steps in Roadworks and breathing in The Negotiation Table, Hatoum works with and through the vulnerability of the body to evoke a similar mode of quiet resistance, mobilising almost imperceptible tensions as ‘psychic and physical responses (rather than submission)’ to structures of oppression (2017, p.  51). Slipping through the cracks of the representational regime, Roadworks performs a similar internalisation and dissemination of quiet resistance. Opening her body to outside agencies and experience, Hatoum taps into a sphere of what I  am calling ‘intensional’ activism. This in-tension involves an incorporation of a feld of forces and agencies into the artist’s performance. The acknowledgement of invisible oppressions makes them grievable, somewhat relieving their weight: a step towards more liveable conditions. The artist, by ‘dragging’ the disruptive trace of past dispossession and possession, to borrow Fred Moten’s term (2003, p.  22), makes it possible to imagine this intensity being translated across diferent spheres of time, space and materiality. In Roadworks, Hatoum simultaneously traces the isolating experience of minorities under surveillance, and passes underneath that gaze,

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(re-)animating the potentiality of resistance. She mobilises the concealed tension of past and present oppression, from the pavement to the body, from the body to the image, and from the image perhaps to a resonance in the viewer. Rather than repeating an aesthetic of poverty and precarity to produce uncritical images of creative survival, which Anna Dezeuze (2006) calls ‘slum chic’, Hatoum sets tension in motion. Intentionally, or rather ‘intensionally’, she inserts her own body as a fgure of solidarity and shifts the disruptive pressure of instability and insecurity towards the gallery audience.5

Materialities, Intentions and Occupations In the documentation of The Negotiation Table, the camera gradually zooms out from a bloodied detail to a shrinking mass, following the distancing gaze of surveillance. The image we start with, however, registers the almost imperceptible pulse of the artist’s breath. This breath mingles with animal fesh, blood, plastic and gauze and enhances the impression of the border of the body becoming porous, afecting the atmosphere. During the slow zoom out, this pulsing remains connected to the viewer’s gaze. As the artist struggles to breathe, both present and absent onlookers are held in subconscious suspense, their breaths coalescing imperceptibly in an expanded sphere of intensity. Dragged by the physical pull of the breath and the virtual pull of the camera, the audience is drawn into the space of interdependence, perhaps becoming aware that the recordings on the invasion of Lebanon drown out the sound of the artist’s breath. In order to keep the breath animated, to attend to this barely perceptible life, we become responsible for unchosen proximities, even if the ‘economy of visibility’ (Kuan Wood 2015) pushes us in another direction. Turning from the distancing operation of Western media narratives, we become exposed to a sense of complicity for the erasure of other lives. Smuggling the injured, enclosed, vulnerable and restricted body into the gallery, into the street and into our homes, Hatoum’s performances make their allegiance clear, while directing the contaminating force of instability towards internalised assumptions and embodied relations. Schneider, broadening her theory of performative remains into the feld of new materialism, refers to Karen Barad’s notion of ‘intra-action’ as a material confguration that enacts a performative ‘agential cut’ between subject and object (2003, p. 815). For Schneider, the ‘intra-inanimation’ of materialities translates into a diferentiation and co-becoming ‘through a cut, or interval . . . without the resultant distinction among intra-actants being essentially prior to or inherent in the interval of their exchange’ (2017, p.  265). Returning to Hatoum’s ‘intensional’ performances, we can observe that they reveal how arbitrary the borders we construct between human bodies are, without dissipating the intensity of individual sufering. As a form of visual activism, these embodied performances allow the artist to simultaneously express and take distance from personal experience, freeing up space for new alliances. These transcultural and cross-border connections are not simulated: the risk of responsibility for other lives remains a mobilising force, rather than becoming fxed into a symbolic memorial. Hatoum’s works invert the direction of performative ‘outsourcing’, which Claire Bishop describes as employing the ‘real’ bodies of marginalised communities, who produce ‘a guarantee of authenticity, through their proximity to everyday social reality, conventionally denied to the artist, who deals merely in representations’ (Bishop 2012a, p. 110). Instead, both artist and audience

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are liberated from the demand to perform a singular identity, becoming involved in a porous sphere of relation. This same porosity serves, almost imperceptibly, to pass on the activating tension of dissent and to create space to breathe and relieve pressures.

Myths and Animations A recent series of works by Iranian-American artist Morehshin Allahyari sets out from a similar activist position, by resisting the visual, physical and virtual occupations of women’s bodies and spaces of radical imagination. Titled She Who Sees the Unknown  (2017–2020), these works use 3D modelling and interactive storytelling to inter-animate female and queer fgures from Middle Eastern myths.6 One of these pieces, The Laughing Snake (2018), is mainly web-based, combining hyperlinked poetry, transcribed memories, soundscapes and 3D animations in an interactive online experience. The hypertext narrative takes the mythological fgure of the ‘laughing snake’, a female jinn, as its central protagonist. In this piece, Allahyari builds on a fourteenth-century myth recorded in the Arabic Kitab al-bulhan, or Book of Wonders, and the Book of Felicity. In these tales, the jinn takes over a city and spreads destruction, but is fnally defeated when shown her own refection by a group of men with a mirror. In Allahyari’s work, the mythical laughing snake becomes animated as a fgure that connects the pasts, presents and futures of real and imagined women, refecting experiences of patriarchy and germinating responses across geographical contexts. Extending the notion of possession to a radical openness, Allahyari’s fgure mediates between virtual and physical spaces. Upon entering the online environment, the reader is invited to click through narratives that branch of into multiple paths, depending on our actions. In an undulating darkness, a feminine voice introduces the jinn as one ‘who knows and sees the unknown, and lays them bare’. This prelude then shifts to textual descriptions of ‘She’ who: ‘stands rootless yet rooted’, as ‘destroyer of all occupiers’. Meanwhile, the jinn animates the screen as dark shadows, waves and curves. Clicking through the narrative, a mask-like face appears against the opaque background, while highlighted words lead to diferent routes. The distancing language collapses as the sentences starting with ‘she’ turn into declarations led by ‘I’, ‘me’ or ‘we’. In the background, 3D images of the jinn multiply, approaching and receding while rotating their snake-like bodies (Figure 2.3). Several declarations take the form of confessions drawn from the embodied experience of women in the Middle East. As readers, we are drawn into these accounts of sexual harassment, abuse, restrictions and racialised violence. We read these events from the position of the ‘I’ and are tethered to their unfolding through our clicks. At the same time, there is no illusion of being able to grasp these experiences completely or to form a clear image of the event. The accounts are short, and disjointed by altering words and phrases. Rather than a mappable territory, the work is a realm of expanding and contracting possibilities, of disorientating re-routings. Similar to Butler’s observations on the politics of public assemblies, Allahyari’s work de-centres the singular position of the individual. While Butler’s discussions focus on the disruptive agency of physical presence and exposure, however, The Laughing Snake explores inter-relational responsibility by mediating between the actual and the virtual. Although the narrative routes in the work are limited in number, neither

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Figure 2.3 Morehshin Allahyari, She Who Sees the Unknown: The Laughing Snake, 2017– 2020, still image from Net Art piece, co-commissioned by Liverpool Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art and FACT Source: Image courtesy artist, 2018

the artist nor the audience predetermines their order. The fgure of the laughing snake is not a reproduction of a single body or a representation of the vulnerabilities and expectations habitually circumscribed by the labels ‘female’, ‘Iranian’, ‘immigrant’ or ‘muslim’. Instead, the fgure circumvents origins by becoming repeatedly, performatively embodied by latent histories, personal experiences and subjective associations, by both the artist and the audience. Like the Guy Fawkes masks worn by many Occupy protestors, the visage of the laughing snake signals a common intent: to reignite the revolutionary charge of a mythical fgure, and to create a more liveable collective space or body. Furthermore, the artwork invites us to undergo a performative embodiment by inhabiting a diferent and destabilising perspective, mingling and fusing with our existing experiences. Partially incorporating the fragmented avatar, we are both present and absent, shaping and being shaped by the virtual event.

Digital Colonialism and Re-Figuration While Butler refers to bodies exposed to one another as a ‘social network’ (2009, p.  67), McKenzie Wark (2016) has observed that virtual representation should not merely be considered an extension of the public square. Wark argues that contemporary public spaces have become determined by global media imaginaries in ways that do not necessarily double the rules of physical space. The practice of solidarity must therefore also take into account the ‘virtual geography of the event’ and its production of proximities and distances (2016). Gatherings such as those on Tahrir Square or Occupy Wall Street demand media representation but also generate alternative structures of communication, some visible and audible, and some hidden or underground.

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The Laughing Snake disseminates episodes of embodied and gendered vulnerability that are often concealed by the patriarchal frame of representation. However, the artist is careful not to reproduce the tendency of what she terms ‘digital colonialism’ in her work. Allahyari notes that Western museums attempting to digitally preserve non-Western histories and cultural artifacts also often limit access to images, information and objects through legal and technological borders. These projects frequently reconstruct the meaning of artifacts superfcially, as a universally owned heritage, while restricting copyrights. In this way, the institutions conceal the complex histories of violence that led to the destruction of said artifacts, as well as the ongoing damage to the people and cultures associated with them.7 This is a violence of selective visibility, in which a few vulnerable objects (or bodies) are mobilised for political ends. As the artist (2019) argues: ISIS reclaims the object’s [sic] through destruction, through creating absence. The western governments and tech companies reclaim it after destruction, through a new kind of presence; and we fail to see the violence of that presence in the way we see the violence of the absence. What Allahyari (2019) terms ‘violent care’ recalls Eyal Weizman’s description of justice in the contemporary era of ‘forensics’ (2012, p. 5). While the era of the witness valued of presence and proximity, forensics demands afective detachment. Weizman explains: Forensic aesthetics is the mode of appearance of things in forums—the gestures, techniques, and technologies of demonstration; methods of theatricality, narrative, and dramatization; image enhancement and technologies of projection; the creation and demolition of reputation, credibility and competence. (2012, p. 10) Similarly, André Lepecki argues that neoliberal capitalism has appropriated afective performance into what he terms ‘dis-experience’: ‘the monitoring and monetizing of the ways participants–consumers feel, narrate and disseminate their experiences’ (2016, p. 170). Both modes of aesthetics rely on illusions of authenticity and collective participation, through forms of presentation and performance that are disconnected from subjective encounters and messy entanglements. Resisting these uses of media and technology, Allahyari attempts to ‘re-fgure’ the virtual objects and bodies occupied by the violence of representation. Retrieving lost or destroyed fgures in order to re-imagine alternative futures, to ‘collapse the political notion of space and time as an act of resistance’ (Allahyari and Paul 2019), Allahyari enacts a visual activism that takes infrastructures of care into consideration. In Material Speculation: ISIS (2015–2016), the artist recreated 12 objects from the Mosul Museum’s collection that were destroyed by ISIS in 2015. Inside each sculpture Allahyari embedded a fash drive containing all her research into the object’s history, including images, maps and videos, as well as the fle for the reproduction itself (Figure 2.4). These drives are visible through the translucent resin but unattainable until a museum or collection commits to preserve the object and make the archive open access. This interplay of transparency and opacity, accessibility and inaccessibility, attempts to disrupt the cycle of representational justice and reclamation, in which one

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Figure 2.4 Morehshin Allahyari, Material Speculation: ISIS – Lamassu, 2016, 3D printed sculpture and fash drive Source: Image courtesy of the artist

reality substitutes and destroys another. Allahyari’s replicas are non-identical traces of the original, carrying the potential to inspire diverging cultural associations without collapsing them into a fattened, universal signifer. At the same time, they remind us that revolutionary exchanges require sustained responsibility.

Possession and Dispersal In The Laughing Snake, Allahyari’s re-fguring turns to Islamic mythology and the revolutionary potential of female experiences. Its exploration of virtual possession rejects the tropes of self-identifcation, ownership and appropriation. Assembling the voices, memories and imaginations of the artist and audience, the work becomes a space of diversity. We could say that Allahyari’s re-fgured jinn breaks the mirror that works, as post-humanist theorist Donna Haraway argues, to ‘displace the same elsewhere’, in favour of difraction, which records ‘the history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, diference’ (1997, p.  273). Allahyari’s work refuses to recognise the image of the female body refected in the patriarchal mirror. As the mirror shatters, the jinn disperses into multiple bodies that can look back, speak back, translate their diferent perspectives and experiences into activist power. The reader becomes part of this process, without being in complete control. On one path, after clicking ‘I am sixteen’, we fnd a progression of tales of catcalling,

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unwanted touching, stalking, harassment and exposure by ‘young boys, middle-aged fathers and old old grandpas’. Each account contains the word ‘CASUALLY’, which, when clicked on, morphs into phrases such as ‘CAUSING HYSTERICAL PAROXYSM’, or ‘CAUSING EVENTUAL MONSTROSITY’, or ‘CAUSING A WINNABLE WAR’. The reference to ‘casual’ behaviour points to the normative acceptance and reproduction of sexual harassment and discrimination, which take place both in surreptitious and blatantly visible ways, structurally infltrating our (subconscious) preconceptions. While labels of hysteria and monstrosity refer to emotional and inhuman excesses, perhaps these intense responses, which can disrupt and contaminate the borders of what we consider normal, are needed to resist the cycle of violence. This resistance is both embodied and viral, as it becomes incorporated into our shared sense of self and reality, a changing notion of ‘we’. On other routes, every sentence on the screen becomes clickable, causing declarations such as: ‘LAUGH AT THE REVOLUTION—unless it’s our revolution’ to fll the screen. Readers are actively involved in uncovering these directives for the future and mantras of liberation, creating a silent but embodied echo. The tensions between the perspectives of she, I and we are not dissipated; the artist does not create a fnal image of resolution. We can choose to continue or repeat the journey of the narrative, making it present by adding fragments of our own experiences and projections, as we take responsibility for the story’s unfolding. The disorientation inherent in this fragmentary progression places an emphasis on embodied interaction, inviting the audience to feel our way through the interrelations and expand our notion of a shared body. This resulting attentivity exceeds the individual’s capacity to give account of oneself, much like Butler’s corporeal vulnerability. It turns towards interdependence and contaminates the acceptable, policed image of public space to transform the circulation of experiences and memories into correspondences and solidarities across national and cultural boundaries. What Allahyari ofers is a sphere of intensity and revolutionary intention, a work of art and an act of ‘intensional’ activism, infused by the potential circuited by this porous fgure: the laughing snake. This sphere ofers protection from the enclosing forces of social surveillance and physical borders. At the same time, it encourages the audience to creatively explore their proximity to the diverse agencies responsible for these pressures, as well as the agency needed to resist their continuation.

Intensional Activism, Multiple Futures In the works of Allahyari and Hatoum discussed above, comparable situations of instability are set up, through which the tension of past and present oppressions are activated and allowed to circulate. The artists address the vulnerability of marginalised bodies, including experiences of physical and psychological injury, alienation and enclosure, but they refuse the burden of representing and reproducing the identifying categories and societal borders meant to contain these experiences. In diferent ways, they create performative fgures that can gather the physical and virtual traces of these experiences, without circumscribing them to specifc labels or singular bodies. These artists enact what I term ‘intensional’ activism: a mode of solidarity that takes into account and redistributes the embodied pressures and barely perceptible gaps produced by unequal hierarchies of agency, visibility and movement. Intensional activism takes what Claire Waterton and Kathryn Yusof call the ‘double-edged sword of

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creative and violent cuts’ (2017, p. 7) of indeterminate embodiment and mobilises it to extend the porosity of identity, agency and solidary. Both artists work with the tension between bodies, positions and the dualistic separations created by geopolitical hierarchies. They explore this tension by attending to the gap between the image of the body and its experience. Rather than focusing on the physical assembly of vulnerable bodies as a way to occupy the public square and demand recognition in the frame of media representation, the practices discussed above develop another form of plural performativity. ‘Intensional’ activism gathers, drags and carries the fragments of embodied experience created by the trauma of being identifed, objectifed, tracked, categorised and erased, allowing them to extend into invisible and virtual spheres of relation. Through the connective tension and remote intimacy of repeated gestures, atmospheric exchanges, imaginative associations and repeated memories, a performative body is assembled. This inter-animated body does not attempt to reclaim an original, authentic or universal experience. It ofers the opportunity to communicate across perspectives and modes of attention, and expands the category of ‘othered’ identity through visible and invisible extensions, virtual and physical proximities. In a time when spheres of physical and digital solidarity are becoming increasingly polarised, performative artworks that invite us to extend the limits of our bodies and open to new perspectives are crucial to our ability to imagine and care for other futures. The practice of ‘intensional’ activism destabilises the virtual borders that interpenetrate every aspect of contemporary life, from surveillance and media to conservation and communication infrastructures. Visible and invisible impressions of the marginalised body are smuggled into the gallery, the streets and our homes, creating new sites for interpersonal awareness. Exceeding the singular image and representational occupation, these fgures bring with them a portable and porous space of unbelonging, which creates gaps for multiple bodies, voices and agencies to slip through. This space of ‘intensional’ encounters disrupts our habitual afliations and self-images, in order to re-imagine the visual as a passage for diverse traces, reorientations, absences, opacities and resistances. More than a process of resolution, recognition or consolidation, the visual becomes a catalyst for seeing-with and feeling-with the revolutionary interval between absence and presence.

Notes 1. This chapter was written in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when fear of contamination was used to boost police powers and border controls in many nations. 2. Nakamura and Chow-White specifcally discuss the spectacle of American commercial television shows in which genetic tests ‘reveal’ their subjects’ race as quantifed datasets (2012). 3. The artist, who was born in Beirut, was forced to stay in London when the Lebanese civil war broke out during a visit in 1975. 4. The Black Audio Film Collective’s experimental documentary Handsworth Songs (1986) explored how the media narrative of criminal activity, gang wars and clashes between immigrant groups in the wake of the 1985 riots in Birmingham served to cover up growing social unrest in an area plagued by the rise of white nationalism, violent racist attacks and police brutality. 5 Dezeuze (2006) surveys a number of artworks that draw on the survival strategies of shantytown dwellers. She argues that these works ambivalently aestheticise the signifers of precariousness or precariousness itself, with the danger of confating and romanticising diferent varieties of insecurity, while eliding political alternatives.

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6. More on this series and other works by the Allahyari can be found at: www.morehshin.com/. 7. One of the examples Allahyari gives of this ‘violent care’ is the collaboration between the UK-based Institute for Digital Archaeology, UNESCO and Dubai’s Museum of the Future to reconstruct Palmyra’s 1,800-year-old Arch after its destruction by ISIS. Regarding a video of the unveiling of the Arch’s replica in London’s Trafalgar Square in April 2016, Allahyari notes: People in audience applaud [sic]. Then they take turns to take selfes with the new Palmyra and they perhaps go back to their safe homes never thinking back at what it was that was wrong with that image; how ISIS formed in frst place as a result of U.S. and Europe invasion of the Middle-East. (2019)

Bibliography Allahyari, M. (2015). Material Speculation: ISIS – Lamassu [3D printed sculpture and fash drive]. At: Rhizome, The Download [Viewed 10 February  2020]. Available from: https:// rhizome.org/editorial/2016/feb/16/morehshin-allahyari/. Allahyari, M. (2018). The Laughing Snake [Net Art [piece]]. At: New York, Whitney ArtPort [Viewed 10 February 2020]. Available from: https://whitney.org/artport-commissions/ laughing-snake/index.html. Allahyari, M. (2019). Physical Tactics for Digital Colonialism. Transcript of PerformanceLecture at New Museum, New York, 28 February. Medium [online]. 7 June. [Viewed 10 February 2020]. Available from: https://medium.com/tag/digital-colonialism/archive. Allahyari, M. & Paul, C. (2019). Re-fguring Ourselves–A Conversation. Stages [online]. Liverpool Biennial. 8, 1–7 [Viewed 10 February  2020]. Available from: www.biennial.com/ journal/issue-8/refguring-ourselves-a-conversation. Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs. 28(3), 801–831. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A  Political Ecology of Things. London: Duke University Press. Bishop, C. (2006). The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents. Artforum. 44(6), 178–183. Bishop, C. (2012a). Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity. October. 140, 91–112. Bishop, C. (2012b). Artifcial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso. Black Audio Film Collective. (1986). Handsworth Songs [DVD Colour, Stereo, 4:3. Original format: 16mm, 58min 33s]. LUX Collection, London. Blocker, J. M. (2008). Aestheticizing Risk in Wartime: The SLA to Iraq. In: Welchman, J. (ed.) The Aesthetics of Risk. Zurich: JRP Ringier, pp. 191–224. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Butler, J. (2009). Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso Publishers. Butler, J. (2015). Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Campt, T. M. (2017). Listening to Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Afect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dean, J. (1996). Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism After Identity Politics. London: University of California Press. Dezeuze, A. (2006). Thriving on Adversity: The Art of Precariousness. Mute. 2(3), 74–87. Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge Press. Haraway, D. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_On coMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. London: Routledge.

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Hatoum, M. (1982). Under Siege [performance, sketchbook drawing, text, photograph (J. McPherson)]. At: re.act.feminism #2—a performing archive, HAT 1/P [Viewed 7 February 2020]. Available from: www.reactfeminism.org/entry.php?l=lb&id=65&wid=289&e=t& v=&a=&t=. Hatoum, M. (1983). The Negotiating Table [bétacam PAL, colour, sound, 20min 33s]. At: The Western Front Archive [Viewed 7 February  2020]. Available from: https://vimeo. com/217220004. Hatoum, M. (1985). Roadworks [video VHS, colour, 6min 45s]. At: Paris: Collection Centre Georges Pompidou. Hatoum, M. (1985 [1995]). Performance Still [gelatin silver print on paper mounted on aluminium]. London: Tate Modern Collection. Hall, S. (1996). New Ethnicities. In: Baker, H.A., Diawara, M. and Lindeborg, R.H. (eds) Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 163–172. Jones, A. (2011). ‘The Artist Is Present’ Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence. TDR: The Drama Review. 55(1), 16–45. Kuan Wood, B. (2015). Is It Heavy or Is It Light? E-fux Journal. 61 [viewed 7 February 2020]. Available from: www.e-fux.com/journal/61/61018/is-it-heavy-or-is-it-light/. Lepecki, A. (2016). Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance. Abingdon: Routledge. Magnet, S. A. (2011). When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race and the Technology of Identity. London: Duke University Press. Melamed, J. (2006). The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism. Social Text. 24, 1–24. Mercer, K. (1990). Black Art and the Burden of Representation. Third Text. 4(10), 61–78. Moten, F. (2003). In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. London: University of Minnesota Press. Murphy, M. (2017). Afterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations. Cultural Anthropology. 32(4), 494–503. Nakamura, L. and Chow-White, P.A. (eds). (2012). Race After the Internet. Abingdon: Routledge. Ridout, N. and Schneider, S. (2012). Precarity and Performance: An Introduction. TDR: The Drama Review. 56(4), 5–9. Schneider, R. (2011). Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. Abingdon: Routledge. Schneider, R. (2016). What Happened; or, Finishing Live. Representations. 136(1), 96–111. Schneider, R. (2017). Intra-inanimation. In: Braddock, C. (ed.) Animism in Art and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 153–175. Tzelepis, E. (2016). Vulnerable Corporealities and Precarious Belongings in Mona Hatoum’s Art. In: Butler, Judith, Gambetti, Zeynep and Sabsay, Leticia (eds) Vulnerability in Resistance. London: Duke University Press. Wark, M. (2016). What the Performative Can’t Perform: On Judith Butler [online]. Public Seminar [Viewed 10 January 2020]. Available from: http://publicseminar.org/2016/06/butler/. Waterton, K. and Yusof, W. (2017). Indeterminate Bodies: Introduction. Body  & Society. 23(3), 3–22. Wegenstein, B. (2006). Getting Under the Skin: Body and Media Theory. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Weizman, E. (2012). Forensic Architecture: Notes from Fields and Forums. Book 62 of the Series ‘100 Notes-100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen-100 Gedanken: Documenta (13)’. Kassel: Documenta Publishing.

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Activating Agential Collective Anna Baumgart’s Table Talks— Her-Stories, Solidarity and Feminist Corporeal-Materialism Basia Sliwinska

In her performative installation Sprawa kobieca  w  Polsce. Łódź 2018 (The  Woman Question in Poland. Łódź 2018), staged 8 September 2018 in Teatr Nowy im. Kamzimierza Dejmka (Kazimierz Dejmek New Theatre) in Łódź, Poland, Anna Baumgart, a Polish multimedia artist, explored inequality in women’s visibility and the absence and/ or silencing of their voices in debates across socio-political infrastructures in Poland. This para-artistic work, reimagining the 1989 Round Table talks precipitating Poland’s shift to democracy, initiated a series of evolving performative debates,1 driven by the same parameters. Each time a few women, carefully selected by the artist, are asked to invite guests to participate in a roundtable debate concerning women’s invisibility in Polish history and the post-1989 democracy. The project is site-responsive, inscribed and contextualised with/in local histories not only via historical references but also through performative interventions, which some guests are invited to prepare prior to the event. Three registers condition ways in which one can experience the project— synchronous debating (participating in the performative installation); synchronous listening (the audience); and asynchronous engagement (accessing the recordings and photographs of the event afterwards). I want to suggest here a fourth register—parachronous participation—afrming the position I am taking in this text; being nearby, alongside, across and in proximity; leaving the space of representation and acknowledging the gap between myself and the event while speaking with the debate initiated by Baumgart, her hosts and guests. I do not intend to speak for the artist or participants. Para-chronous positioning, by its proximate distancing, leaves a possibility of others entering and joining the conversation, flling the gaps or opening them wider. This text extends the invitation to join the debate, which, as I argue, embodies emergent and budding activism founded upon solidarity and agential collectivity. I imagine the space of Teatr Nowy in Łódź (Figure 3.1). First, when the audience enters to take their seats in the theatre stalls, the main stage is dark. The lights are dimmed. No one knows what to expect. The lights come on; at frst gently stroking the front of the stage and making visible a table made from cardboard with place settings—each accentuated with a plate and a glass. Then, over 50 guests come in, most of them wearing red balaclavas. They sit. At the beginning of this performative event a short video installation is screened, in which actresses Klara Bielawka and Anna Kłos read a poem, Girls are coming out of the woods (2018), by Indian poet Tishani Doshi: Girls are coming out of the woods, wrapped in cloaks and hoods, carrying iron bars and candles

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Figure 3.1 Anna Baumgart,  Sprawa kobieca  w  Polsce. Łódź 2018  (The  Woman  Question in Poland. Łódź 2018),  8 September 2018, Teatr Nowy im. Kazimierza Dejmka (Kazimierz Dejmek New Theatre), Łódz Source: Courtesy of Łódź of Four Cultures Festival, Poland; photo: HaWa

and a multitude of scars . . . Is the world speaking too?2 Baumgart asks the world to speak. *** In Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser (2019: 4–5) negotiate the ‘other’ feminism, ‘a feminism with a diferent defnition of what counts as a feminist issue, a diferent class orientation, and a diferent ethos—one that is radical and transformative’. They argue it uses strikes as tools to unite anti-capitalist and anti-systemic movements. The feminist strike movement they reference began in Poland in 2016, initiating a wave of further actions across the globe: ‘at frst a ripple, then a wave, it has become a massive tide: a new global feminist movement that may gain sufcient force to disrupt existing alliances and redraw the political map’ (ibid.: 6). In October  2016, for the frst time in Polish history, and at an unprecedented scale, approximately 120,000 women united in public demonstrations across Poland to protest against a further tightening of an already extremely restrictive anti-abortion law proposed by the Polish government.3 Participants of these manifestations against the erosion of reproductive rights were encouraged to wear black clothes or black accessories to show solidarity. This prompted the protests to be called ‘Czarny Protest’ (translated as Black Protest).4 Since the right-wing conservative–nationalist party Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS; Law and Justice) came to power in 2015, it started

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making changes supporting its nationalistic agenda, which include promoting antirefugee rhetoric, the dismantling of the Polish constitutional court and hampering independence of the judiciary via the government’s judicial reforms changing selection processes for the National Council of the Judiciary. PiS also periodically threatens to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention on the clause of preventing violence against women and domestic violence. Human Rights Watch (2019) published a 75-page report, highlighting attacks by the Polish government on women’s rights in Poland since PiS came to power. The report emphasises that Poland has continuously failed to implement the European Union policy on equality, women’s rights and violence against women and has to date not been held accountable for this failure. The government has also actively eroded Poland’s Constitution from 2 April  1997, which guaranteed all persons equal rights and prohibited discrimination (The Constitution of the Republic of Poland 1997; see Chapter II, articles 32 and 33). Under PiS, the ‘gender ideology’ campaign has gained momentum, galvanising support for implementing measures that would curb sexual and reproductive health and rights, and orchestrating smear campaigns against women’s and LGBTQI+ activism. The political crisis and the rise in nationalistic and right-wing politics in Poland ignited a resistance movement against new proposed laws. Rebecca Solnit (2016: 4) argues that any social transformations, ‘begin in the imagination, in hope. . . . Hope means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope’. Transformation is premised on a collective presence and voice, and Polish women’s protests defending women’s rights to their bodies demonstrated that change is possible and depends on whether we act, collectively and in solidarity. Since the 2016 protests, numerous visual interventions and artistic actions in Poland have been preoccupied with the violation of women’s rights and women’s invisibility and un-presences in the Polish public sphere and history, or rather his-story.5 Artistic practice with a social purpose engages with visual politics but also has the potential to intervene in everyday politics to resist and transform existing socio-political confgurations. This brings in new modalities based on feminist politics that expand how we see the world, visibilising what the dominant consensus has obliterated and obscured. Katy Deepwell (2020: 10) asks, ‘is feminist art activism only a visual response in art to existing “hot” topics in contemporary politics mimicking, copying or reproducing existing media representations of that struggle?’ She refers to Dimitris Papadopoulos (in ibid.: 18), who talks about ‘instituting direct changes on the material level of existence’, creating conditions for ‘alternative imaginaries’ and practices to contest power otherwise than via organised protests. Papadopoulos’ ‘alter-ontological organizing’ is ‘more-than-social-movements’ relying on small scale-actions, cross-national networks and localised, site-responsive micro-politics. Artistic practice ofers such ‘alter-ontological organizing’, strategising and developing new pathways, participative and communal, for action to re-present and embody women’s experiences in the world. This chapter works through Baumgart’s Sprawa kobieca  w  Polsce. Łódź 2018, which, by creating a repository of micro-narratives, amplifes women’s voices with/in her-stories and suggests activism that is budding, patient, persistent and insistent in its repetition, rather than salient, militant, aggressive, anarchist and revolting. Baumgart’s work is a collaborative act, not an object, as is the activism she encourages based on politics of solidarity. This means those participating in the project synchronously and asynchronously but also para-chronously, like myself, stand alongside it, talk with it

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and through it. Baumgart’s art ofers a performative and discursive space for persistence embodied with/in emergent and continuous activism. This chapter refects on Baumgart’s project creating another micro-narrative, my-her-our story, interwoven with theoretical and discursive perspectives of other women writers, artists, philosophers and critics, which contribute to the ever-expanding defnition, in this book, of an embodied feminist visual activism. Her-stories are explored focusing on politics of solidarity, togetherness and feminist corporeal-materialism.

*** her-stories Baumgart’s project re-performs the Round Table talks frst held on 6 February 1989 in the Council of Ministers Ofce in Warsaw, Poland, between Solidarność (Solidarity),6 the opposition faction, and the ruling communist government, at which only two women were present: Grażyna Staniszewska (pro opposition) and Anna Przecławska (pro government).7 The Round Table sessions radically altered the Polish government and social tissue, precipitating the unravelling of the communist bloc and paving the way to a free and democratic Poland. It was a transformative moment in Polish history. However, Mishtal (2015: 17–35) argues that Poland has never regained its sovereignty, as the ‘red’ regime has been replaced by the ‘black’ one (a reference to priests’ cassocks). The 1993 Concordat signed between the Polish state, its episcopate and the Vatican not only expanded the Catholic Church’s privileges but also undermined Polish political independence. Women’s rights were the frst to be sacrifced8 by the Left at the expense of good relations with the Church: 1989 was a moment of freedom but also the shackling of women. Sprawa kobieca w Polsce. Łódź 2018 initiated a series of ongoing, collective, embodied debates to tell and make her-stories via a collective subject. The project reverses the gender ratio of the talks, inviting 50 women and 2 men—among them activists, artists, social workers and researchers—to debate issues faced by women in post-1989 Poland and to refect on the inequality in women’s visibility revealed by the Round Table talks. The title of the work acknowledges Klub Polityczny Kobiet Postępowych (KPKP; Progressive Women’s Political Club), an often-forgotten Polish feminist organisation founded in May  1919, which contributed to the Conference of the International Woman Alliance Sufrage in Geneva in June 1920 with a report entitled ‘O Stanie Sprawy Kobiecej w Polsce’ (Concerning the  Woman Question in Poland).9 For the project in Łódź, the artist created a table made from cardboard—a material often signifying homelessness but also nomadism and mobility (Figure 3.2). The event began with a screened reading of Doshi’s poem, followed by actresses Klara Bielawka and Anna Kłos performing texts written by Katarzyna Bojarska, Agata Araszkiewicz and Wiktor Rusin. Bojarska wrote a letter to the artist, refecting on female agency and patriarchal progress. Araszkiewicz10 focused on phenomenological approaches to the body, which I discuss later. Rusin imagined a dialogue between two remarkable women not fully recognised in Polish history, Katarzyna Kobro (a Polish sculptor) and Rosa Luxemburg (a Polish anti-war activist and revolutionary socialist), debating the concept of revolution within creative practice. In response, Katarzyna Lewandowska read her essay concerning contemporary embodied revolt. After those initial creative refections, those sat at the table started debating the invisibility of women in Polish history. The proceedings, led by Araszkiewicz, were interwoven with earlier

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Figure 3.2 Anna Baumgart,  Sprawa kobieca  w  Polsce. Łódź 2018  (The  Woman  Question in Poland. Łódź 2018),  8 September 2018, Teatr Nowy im. Kazimierza Dejmka (Kazimierz Dejmek New Theatre), Łódz Source: Courtesy of Łódź of Four Cultures Festival, Poland; photo: HaWa

prepared interventions by some participants, who shared their own stories. For example, Pola Dwurnik talked about her mother, Teresa Gierzyńska, an artist living in the shadow of her famous artist husband. Małgorzata Tkacz-Janik approached the audience by asking about remarkable mothers in Polish history, and Ivka Macioszek responded to Wacław Kuczma, curator and director of the Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń, who questioned the importance of women’s creative practice. The purpose was to select 50 female candidates to visibilise in her-stories and thus amplify voices of women. Afterwards, in an online vote, 12 women were chosen as heroines in Polish history.11 Baumgart plans on honouring them by creating their portraits on the plates served at subsequent debates (Figure 3.3), which acknowledges Judy Chicago’s artwork The Dinner Table, as discussed later.12 Participants of the roundtable wore red balaclavas, prepared by the artists, embroidered with synthetic gemstones—a symbolic gesture, as Baumgart explained to me, referencing women’s protests in Spain and Latin America in spring 2018 against gender violence (Figure 3.4).13 The use of masks is a strategy adopted by activist artistic and guerrilla groups such as Guerrilla Girls or Pussy Riot. Guerrilla Girls (2020) wear masks ‘to expose gender and ethnic bias and corruption in politics, art, flm, and pop culture’, which allows anonymity while focusing on the issues. Maria Chehonadskih (2012) suggests that it is not the anonymity but the gesture of removing balaclavas, as in Pussy Riot‘s 2012 trial, that symbolises a multitude in revolt via an extreme individualism that recognises their personality. During Baumgart’s event, women take of the balaclavas, showing their ‘naked’ faces. Judith Butler (2004) argues that the

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Figure 3.3 Anna Baumgart,  Sprawa kobieca  w  Polsce. Łódź 2018  (The  Woman  Question in Poland. Łódź 2018),  8 September 2018, Teatr Nowy im. Kazimierza Dejmka (Kazimierz Dejmek New Theatre), Łódz Source: Courtesy of Łódź of Four Cultures Festival, Poland; photo: HaWa

Figure 3.4 Anna Baumgart,  Sprawa kobieca  w  Polsce. Łódź 2018  (The  Woman  Question in Poland. Łódź 2018),  8 September 2018, Teatr Nowy im. Kazimierza Dejmka (Kazimierz Dejmek New Theatre), Łódz Source: Courtesy of Łódź of Four Cultures Festival, Poland; photo: HaWa

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narrative of a victim begins from a frst-person perspective and that violence in the West has been framed by the post-9/11 narrative, which leads to an ill-informed conception of agency with an emphasis on the ‘I’. Drawing on the notion of agency she introduced in Gender Trouble (1990), Butler (2004: 5) argues that discourse focusing on the second or third person ‘works as a plausible and engaging narrative in part because it resituates agency in terms of a subject’. It also places responsibility for normative violence within a collective and not on an individual. Baumgart’s performative installation emphasises this collective subject, showing the individualised yet collective ‘I’ to challenge his-story and the invisibility of women in terms of their achievements but also rights. Elsa Dorlin (2016: 238–239) points to the etymological roots of the word persona that means ‘mask’ and explains, the struggle for recognition is thus each time a struggle for the mask, but this mask coincides with the ‘personality’ that society recognizes for each individual. . . . It is only from the latter {the identity of the individual} that the political history of the face could ‘begin’. Baumgart’s masks amplify contributors’ anonymity, highlighting their invisible positions and absent voices in post-1989 Poland. This demonstrates Butler’s framing of agency within collective responsibility and creates a counter-history, her-stories, in which women are not invisibilised. Baumgart’s performative gesture embodies resistance against masculinist discursive tactics and patriarchal discourse excluding women from public presence. It is a call, frst, to claim women’s agency and their recognition as subjects at the limits of recognisability, governed and policed by patriarchal collective memory; and, second, to visibilise asymmetries of the feld of appearance. The project can be read alongside Braidotti’s argument concerning the commercialisation and metaphorisation of women and, in extension, the trivialisation of feminist arguments. Valorisation of women’s bodies validates these based on the principle of visual pleasure. Braidotti (1991: 134) writes, the celebration of femininity reduced to metaphors of the void, lack, non-being, the valorization of woman as textual body, rather than female-sexed body, hides one of the most formidable types of discrimination exercised against women in recent years. What is missing from these ‘becomings’ are women, not only as a revolutionary political movement, but also as fesh-and-blood human beings, engaged for personal reasons in a collective process of subversion of the images and status of women. This void and non-being, a metaphor for active negation against the widespread relegation of women to passive and silent positions, is confronted by Baumgart. The narration of the event allowed all individuals sitting at the table to engage with and actively re-construct Polish history and women’s contributions to the country’s transformation. Each iteration of the performance is ephemeral, but their staging in diferent sites reconstructs her-story making and telling. Diferent participants are invited to each debate, which makes her-story evolve into a budding structure independent from the artist—narrativised by the participants’ micro-narratives and stories of own experiences. Shared stories speak with each other, creating an interconnected agential

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collective emerging together in solidarity. This emergence is where Baumgart’s activism happens. The intention behind inviting other people’s voices is to act against invisibility, which can be read alongside Nicholas Mirzoef’s (2017: 17–18) concept of the ‘space of appearance, where you and I can appear to each other and create a politics. What is to appear? It is frst to claim the right to exist, to own one’s body. . . . To appear is to matter’. Baumgart’s practice is founded upon participation of diferent groups of people from diferent socio-economic backgrounds. Each project takes place in specifc spaces (the importance of Łódź will be discussed further) loaded with histories, inequalities and invisibilities. The event in Łódź is underpinned by activism that is emergent and continues through repetition, enfolding iterations into the project. Gradual and granular rather than aggressive, it is pernicious, insistent and persistent. Baumgart’s activism is a collaborative act, adopting politics of solidarity and demanding the right to be seen and heard while we stand alongside each other, foregrounding horizontal relationships and forming a space of appearance coalesced into a common. The interconnected and interdependent character of the installation acknowledges and references two feminist artworks, The Dinner Table (1974–1979) by Judy Chicago and The Famous Women Dinner Service (1932–1934) by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, exposing male-centric paradigms of nationalist history but also creating a feminist archive as a source for recording her-stories. Baumgart’s work is budding; one project turns into another: evolving, returning and extending. Budding, a particular feminist organising structure, is processually oriented. It is an archetype of gradual development, forming new life through maternal relationship of care. New organisms develop from the parent organism, allowing both to grow together. The principle of budding and cohabitation is highlighted in the iterative nature of Baumgart’s multilayered work. Past, present and future tropes and fgures permeate and graft a growth bud, enabling dialogic relationships. With the event in Łódź, Baumgart revisited The Dinner Table, in which Chicago contributes to her-stories with 39 elaborate table place settings for mythical and historical women and foor tiles with the names of 998 women and one man; however, those represented belong predominantly to a Western-centric world. Baumgart’s plates are diferent; they are not as exclusive as Chicago’s, which can act as singular artworks. As reproductions, they can be multiplied. Some are layered from broken fragments, signalling fragmentation of identity and marginalisation. Baumgart is interested in the meaningfulness of margins, cast-out subjects and what Mary Douglas (1966: 118) terms ‘confused lines’. She explores peripheral spaces and subjectivities in terms of invisibilised women’s positions in socio-political and cultural infrastructures. Even though Douglas’ (ibid.: 3) notion of ‘dirt’ relates to matter out of place and order, it articulates spatial exclusions, marked by socio-cultural and legal boundaries that matter. Baumgart’s project disrupts and troubles the anonymity of the margins by bringing women together into an agential collective, and shows a transformative potential within micro-narratives and small-scale actions suggestive of Papadopoulos’ ‘alterontological organizing’. In the case of Bell and Grant’s project, only a few women from Central and Eastern Europe are included. Kurz (2019) suggests Baumgart not only provokes an establishment of a common genealogy through telling and making of her-story but also creates a space in which togetherness and intimacy are foundational. It is a revolutionary action in the sense that it uses symbolic and fgurative vocabulary of resistance in the Polish context and beyond (such as the 1989 Round Table, the mask, solidarity, hunger) to collapse representational strategies of Polish

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politics and history making women invisible. This is achieved by embodying vulnerability with/in collective subjectivity.

*** politics of togetherness and solidarity It is important to acknowledge that in 2018 Poland celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of both Poland’s independence and Polish women’s sufrage. Araszkiewicz and Czarnacka (2019) discuss ‘the absence of systematic refection and discursive remembrance of women’s resistance in Poland’. This lack of agency and a violent exclusion from political discourse creates a fragmented narrative in which each women’s rebellion is read as a singular event, rather than within a broader web of relations and continuous fghts for women’s rights. Poland’s transformation into a country supposedly supporting civil liberties, governed by the free market economy and a capitalistic set of tensions, seemed to have happened at the expense of women and their rights, and specifcally those rights that concern their bodies. Such conditioning of women’s roles extracts their agency and undermines equality. Elizabeth Grosz (1994: 142) says that ‘every body is marked by the history and specifcity of its existence’; and, I would add, its (in)visibility. What the phenomenon of the Black Protests demonstrated is that Polish togetherness, and specifcally women’s collectivity, can be forceful and transformative.14 Togetherness defnes social relations between subjects, where one is part of the other and where one self is implicated in another self, and where selves are implicated in each other’s lives, sustaining inter-constitutive relations. The protests also demonstrated that transformation is achieved through a development of local narrative tools and methods (such as the use of symbols specifc to the Polish context, e.g. umbrellas referencing the sufrage ‘Umbrella strike’ of 1918; colours such as black symbolising mourning; or disseminating demands via social media as in Black Protests15). It is noteworthy that at the time of writing Polish Parliament prepares to debate yet again a draconian bill called ‘Stop abortion’ proposed in 2017 by Kaja Godek.16 Black Protests can be positioned, to an extent, in parallel with early Solidarność as a grassroots mass uprising, in which women played a signifcant yet often forgotten role. Solidarity in its feminist modality of power has been the beating heart of Polish resistance movements and activism. For example, Paulina Kuczalska-Reinschmit, a Polish social reformer and founder of the periodical Ster, dedicated to women’s rights, wrote in 1907 about the importance of solidarity (in Kurz 2019). A  century later, women in Poland voice similar concerns and the need for solidarity and togetherness in their fght for equality and rights. The annual feminist demonstration Manifa has been organised across the country since 2000, in connection with International Women’s Day on 8 March and in response to current socio-political concerns. Each Manifa is under a diferent slogan, though each emphasises solidarity: for example ‘Solidarity in the crisis. Solidarity in our fght’ (2010), ‘There is no feminism without solidarity’ (2019). Solidarity means we act together as a collective subject situated beyond frst-person modality. It is a gathering enacted by and of bodies signifying persistence and resistance, as Butler (2018: 23) argues. Our acting in concert, interdependency and collective responsibility collapses singular narratives that perpetuate precariousness and vulnerabilities of each ‘I’. Solidarity defnes this mutual dependency, which afrms an embodied and plural performativity and our demand for ‘liveable lives’, as founded upon an egalitarian social and political order. Baumgart’s site-responsive project

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emphasises the solidarity of a collective fght for a shared cause and the importance of narratives that are localised and site specifc. For example, in Łódź the artist reaches out to histories, embedded in the tissue of the city, that acknowledge women’s contribution to the cultural and socio-economic fabric. In June  1905 women actively participated in Łódź Uprising, one of the most prominent revolutionary fghts against the Russian Empire. In February 1971 textile workers in the city, in majority women, began a strike action to demand democratic changes concerning low wages, rising food prices and water shortages. A  decade later, a widespread economic crisis and food shortages in Poland led to several hunger demonstrations, with the largest in Łódź on 30 July 1981. The residents held banners that stated, for example, ‘We want to split bread, not Poland’. Baumgart strategically left the plates on the table empty to reference the strikes and local history of food insecurity. She wants participants to belong to local communities, which foregrounds local urgencies and connections. The spatiality of the project allows those localities to travel outside of the singular event, which means that the local is established in circuitry that exceeds it, spreading through communities and emergent networks. The para-chronous participation makes it possible to summon and sustain those urgencies in an ongoing debate happening in proximity and adjacency open to others to join in. This proximity conditions encountering and enacting bonds of solidarity across space and time. Only in Łódź, the contributors to the debate included women from across Poland, among them well-known Polish feminists. In other events, women came from local geographies, usually already knowing each other. Baumgart told me that the structure of the debates is founded upon horizontal feminism. Horizontal conditioning enables us to see and hear each other and invent one another in a dialogic imagination. Araszkiewicz and Czarnacka (2019) argue that the 2016 protests also revealed ‘the underlying weakness of Polish feminism. . .: its inability to develop a central narrative that is able to reach the political mainstream or society as a whole’. By December 2018, the structures developed by the grassroots women’s movement in Poland were absorbed into political and activist movements such as Wiosna (Spring), a social liberal and pro-European political party founded in 2019; or Koalicja Obywatelska (Civic Coalition). At the same time, however, women’s creative practice has not only recorded the social revolution around personal freedoms but also actively rebelled against incremental and continuous withdrawal of rights. This is also one of the reasons why artistic practice has been the subject of attacks and censorship imposed by PiS. Baumgart confronts women’s invisibility and lack of equal rights in post-1989 Poland, signalling a crisis. By enabling a collective debate, she also opens up space within which women are re-presented and present themselves, and forms Mirzoef’s (2011, 2017) ‘space of appearance’. Building on Hannah Arendt’s notion of the right to appear developed in The Human Condition (1958), Mirzoef (2017, p. 17) argues that ‘the space of appearance, [is] where you and I can appear to each other and create a politics’. Similarly, Baumgart challenges the idea of representation, which is discriminatory and ofers a space in which being together, in solidarity, reconstitutes plural forms of agency and social practices of resistance, enabling equivocating relations between ‘I’ and ‘you’ and ‘we’, an equal living in space. Mirzoef (2011: 474) explains that ‘it is the claim to a subjectivity that has the autonomy to arrange the relations of the visible and the sayable’. This creates a possibility of commons based on encounters where we see and listen to each other and where unequal power structures

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are confronted. Baumgart’s collective, orchestrated around the table, ofers a prospect of substantive democracy, which could also be positioned in parallel with Butler’s (2018) notion of the assembly, the power of people to gather together. Such a mode of signifcation is ‘a concerted bodily enactment, a plural form of performativity’ (ibid., p. 8).

*** feminist corporeal-materialism Araszkiewicz’s text, entitled ‘Fangs’, opened the event (in Araszkiewicz 2019). She starts with ‘my body is against me’ and continues: ‘I would like to be visible, audible materially’. Her lyrical call nuances the embodied experience of presence. Intimate and beautifully written, it exposes the materiality of feeling and being present in the world, in a physical and material sense. She calls upon participants of Baumgart’s performative installation to ‘expose their fangs—break the silence’. Araszkiewicz also draws attention to the process of permeation and collective permeating; Baumgart references artistic practices of her own and of others. The installation itself is built on and from interventions penetrating, extending and expanding each other. For example, the text by Bojarska was written for Baumgart’s work Symfonia Syren (Mermaids’ Symphony, 2017, Museum of Sopot), in which the artist reconstructed a series of actions of Arseny Avraamov, an avant-garde Russian composer and theorists, addressing the movement’s violence and totalitarianism. She recounted that she wanted to transform it into an intimate situation, inviting participants to respond to her performance. Her strategy, employing Claire Bishop’s (2012) notion of ‘delegated performance’, is also used in the series of Round Table debates. When Baumgart was travelling to Sopot to perform her project, her lung punctured. This was a moment, she recalls, when she realised that the body needs to be reclaimed from the avant-garde and that this can only be done collectively. Her injury made her body vulnerable, which may be read alongside Butler’s (2018) notion of vulnerability, the core of resistance functioning as openness; opening the body onto the body of another. Vulnerability mediates confgurations of bodies and permeability of entities that render our capacity for action. This action involves the constitutive openness of interdependent and interconnected subjects having capacity to be afected and afect and being active. Activism in Baumgart’s case emerges and persists budding and evolving with/in each debate. The plates at the Round Table debates include her self-portrait representing her punctured body. She also calls upon El Lissitzky’s 1919 propaganda poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge and juxtaposes it with her own representation, appropriating its revolutionary aesthetic for the purpose of women’s avant-garde. ‘As women we need each other more than ever’, Araszkiewicz says (2019). The need for togetherness and solidarity allows for a fuid, dynamic and open becoming. This can be read alongside Luce Irigaray’s (1993) ‘female thinking subject’, which challenges phallic economies through the repositioning of vision and privileging touch. Irigaray (ibid., p. 173) says, ‘women are the adjectives or ornaments of a verb whose subject they can never be’. Irigaray argues that female subjectivity is enabling and generative. It shifts from an ontology of being towards becoming, activating the female body as a space for mediation and negotiation rather than for practices of othering. Acts of touching and being touched, ‘a call for communion’ (ibid.: 175), are constitutive of plurality over singularity. Irigaray’s discourse of touch, prioritising plurality, resonates with Baumgart’s act of dissent against female subjects prohibited from

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becoming. The artist’s gesture of resistance is based on politics of togetherness, solidarity and communality. Vulnerable bodies, dispossessed through our tactile, haptic, visual and motile capacities, become with/in collectivity, rendering embodied models of belonging. Araszkiewicz’s welcome speech ended with a call to raise a toast with white and black milk prepared by Wojtek Radtke, a Polish artist from Gdańsk. Baumgart told me that she envisaged the event as a proper feast to treat her guests. With empty plates referencing hunger strikes in Łódź, she wanted to ofer a drink. The white milk connotes ‘white stains’ or ‘white ink’, the invisible history of Polish women (Araszkiewicz 2019). Black milk references Elif Safak’s book Black Milk (2007), symbolising the subordination and invisibility of reproductive and afective female labour. As a feminist metaphor, milk also references Hélène Cixous’ (2008) feminine writing, with white ink connoting invisibility. Baumgart reminds us of the unwritten and/or unseen history of women, their afective and reproductive labour and unacknowledged (and usually unpaid or underpaid) contribution to society and culture. Baumgart’s embodied action could be read alongside Marsha Meskimmon’s (2019) notion of ‘vital feminist corporeal-materialism’, signalling ‘a deeply ethical and political entanglement with/in world’. Meskimmon argues that fgurative representation is replaced by diffracted fguration which materialises through dynamic and generous embodied self. She approaches new materialist thinking from an embodied, situated and corporeal perspective to rethink agency ‘beyond the limits of a human-centered system’ (ibid., p. 353). She observes (ibid.) that ‘in every sense of the term, a corporeal-materialist aesthetics demonstrates that art matters’. Baumgart carefully choreographs her performative installations, and it is noteworthy that the one in Łódź happened in the space of a theatre, on stage. Meskimmon’s ‘corporeal-materialist aesthetics’ becomes a strategy to materialise the embodied self with/in the world beyond representation. Baumgart challenges the notion of representation through a performative collective dynamic, unfxed and unfnished budding dialogue, which is generative to plural subjects emerging in mutuality. She choreographs activism, translating street politics into a para-artistic project that turns the social and political demands of a women’s movement into dissident ethics. Her curated debates embody and materialise a collective subject with/in an embodied revolution. Baumgart, and Araszkiewicz, and other women and men who assemble at the table ask the world to speak the feminine. Through the performative installation and, more importantly, through the debate, the stereotype of violence, physical (supported by forms of masculinism) and symbolic (with a political deployment of ‘woman’), is deconstructed through this as an exercise of freedom based on togetherness. Baumgart invites participants to explore what ‘we’ can do together and for what ‘we’ should struggle. I approach her project as an active solidarity campaign, building alliances in our democratic struggle to appear and be present as women, as citizens. Exclusions that have become non-representative and naturalised in Poland are confronted and opened not only to consider relations of power that have structured them but also to demonstrate that, as argued by Butler (2018: 68–79), it matters when bodies assemble as relationships connect: ‘a politics of alliance’ requires ‘an ethics of cohabitation’. Butler (ibid.: 8) emphasises the importance and urgency of ‘a plural form of performativity’, with its excess as a mode of signifcation that is ‘a concerted bodily enactment’. Baumgart creates such an opportunity for a coordinated action, reconstituting plural forms of agency and initiating a social action ‘in concert’—with/in I and we—of

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resistance. The event uses strategies of visual disruption embodied with/in gestures of dissatisfaction with the male-centred vision and version of his-story and continued disregard for women’s presences and rights. Kurz (2019) discusses the performative nature of the assembly, which, as she notes, needs to be realised also in spaces of representation. This would enable the symbolic sphere to be reclaimed. She suggests that before we take to the streets to protest alongside each other, ‘body to body’, for women’s rights and civil society, we become part of a collectively participating audience which reinforces solidarity and togetherness. *** With her ongoing project, Baumgart invites predominantly women to debate issues that were neglected or silenced in the original 1989 Round Table talks because women were largely uninvited. She recounted that the project was budding within her; frst her body literally signalled the need for an embodied revolution when her lung was punctured, and then the 2016 Black Protests unravelled yet again the issue of a problematic and dangerous Polish government’s relationship with the Church, diminishing women’s rights, including sexual and reproductive rights. She considers this project a para-artistic work that mutates and evolves in response to national and local debates concerning women’s rights. This budding and the interconnectedness of the project, or in fact her artistic practice, and its participatory character allow her to break hierarchies and learn how, as she explains, to organise people. Budding, as a feminist organising structure, forms new lives. As a strategy in Baumgart’s work, it builds an agential collective. Mirzoef (2011: 473) called for the right to look. . . . It begins at a personal level with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love. That look must be mutual, each inventing the other, or it fails. . . . The right to look claims autonomy, not individualism or voyeurism, but the claim to a political subjectivity and collectivity. Baumgart enables such space of appearance which does not reproduce hierarchical structures based on patriarchal discursive tactics and which is not exercised through a play of images and representations. It is a space of togetherness with/in which activism happens alongside or nearby art, as she told me. This emergent and budding activism, enacted in proximity alongside each other, evolves through repetition in each iteration of the project. It is a pernicious and persistent collaborative act grounded in solidarity. It demands visibility for women and human rights, for all people at all times to be treated as equally and irrevocably human. Butler (2018: 19) talks about ‘the people’ that are not just produced by their vocalized claims, but also by the conditions of possibility of their appearance, and so within the visual felds, and by their actions, and so part of embodied performance. Those conditions of appearance include infrastructural conditions of staging as well as technological means of capturing and conveying a gathering, a coming together, in the visual and acoustic felds. Baumgart’s project is a form of responsible and response-able counterpower founded upon an ethos of solidarity, afrming mutual dependency and collective action beyond

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central narratives, at margins and frayed edges. Constructing liminal collective spaces that challenge power modalities, it galvanises plural existence, which, according to Butler (2018: 16), is a triumph against all forms of precarity. The proximity generated by Baumgart allows space for ‘a bodily demand for a more liveable set of lives’ (ibid.: 25). It embodies our being in the world by opening up a debate that negotiates conditions of precarity and vulnerability and recognises the assault on women’s rights in post-1989 Poland. Butler (2018: 52) proclaims, the ‘I’ is thus at once a ‘we’. . . . The exercise of freedom is something that does not come from you or from me, but from what is in between us, from the bond we make at the moment in which we exercise freedom together, a bond without which there is no freedom at all. This my-her-our story is about space in which we emerge as a collective subject with an agency to act with support of one another and in solidarity. Let’s.

Notes 1. The next debate was entitled Rewolucja to nie kolacja. A może jednak kolacja (A revolution is not a dinner or maybe it is a dinner) and happened at the Galeria Miejska BWA (City Gallery BWA) in Bydgoszcz on 28 February 2019; the following, Wszyscy rozmawiają o pogodzie. My nie (Everybody talks about weather and we do not), was hosted by Arsenal Municipal Gallery in Poznań on 8 March 2019; and then Kolacja to nie rewolucja a może jednak (A dinner is not a revolution or perhaps it is) was at Jan Tarasin Art Gallery in Kalisz on 9 December 2019. 2. Tishani Doshi,  Girls are coming out of the woods  (Bloodaxe Books, 2018); Permission courtesy of www.bloodaxebooks.com. 3. Under current law, abortion is allowed in three circumstances: danger to a woman’s life, rape or incest and prenatal tests indicating serious and irreversible damage to the foetus. 4. I explored Black Monday and Black Protests in relation to concepts of net-communities and hospitality, and political subjectivity (see Sliwinska 2018). 5. Some were presented at an exhibition, Polki, Patriotki, Rebeliantki (Polish Women, Patriots, Rebels) at Galeria Miejska (City Gallery), in Poznań, Poland 8–10 August 2017. 6. Solidarność was founded in August–September 1980 and was the frst independent labour union in a country belonging to the Soviet Bloc. 7. Approximately 717 people, of whom only 50 were women, participated in the series of Round Table talks and working groups (Jankowska et al. 1989). 8. For example, abortion was legal in the Polish People’s Republic between 1947 and 1989. 9. KPKP aimed at training women in Poland to exercise their voting rights granted in 1918. 10. Araszkiewicz is the co-founder of Porozumienie Kobiet 8 Marca (8th March Women’s Coalition), established in 2000, organising the annual march ‘Manifa’ demanding equal rights for women; and a Board Member of Kongres Kobiet (The Congress of Women Association). She initiated and co-founded Elles sans Frontières, a feminist collective in Brussels. 11. Maria Janion, Katarzyna Kobro, Róża Luksemburg, Maria Skłodowska-Curie, Magdalena Abakanowicz,  Olga Boznańska,  Zofa Nałkowska,  Wanda Jakubowska,  Jolanta BrachCzaina, Krystyna Janda, Zosia Strasibotka and Maryna Kłak. 12. So far, Anna Baumgart together with her daughter Agata, as Baumgart Baumgart, have created ten such plates. 13. Visual evidence from the protests was shared online with the use of the hashtag #cuentalo (tell it). 14. Although the protests were conservative in their defence of the right to abortion rather than a demand for a wider access to abortion. 15. For discussion on Black Protests, see Sliwinska 2018.

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16. It would make abortion laws signifcantly more stringent, penalising abortions in case of foetal impairment.

References Araszkiewicz, Agata. 2019, ‘Okrągły Stół Kobiet. O interwencji Anny Baumgart “Sprawa kobieca w Polsce 2018”’, Nowa Orgia Myśli, available at: http://nowaorgiamysli.pl/index. php/2019/06/05/okragly-stol-kobiet/, accessed 20 March 2020. Araszkiewicz, Agata and Czarnacka, Agata. 2019, ‘Poland’s Rebel Women’, available at: www. eurozine.com/polands-rebel-women/, accessed 20 March 2020. Arruzza, Cinzia, Bhattacharya, Tithi and Fraser, Nancy. 2019. Feminism for the 99%. A Manifesto. London and New York: Verso. Bishop, Claire. 2012. ‘Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity’. CUNY Academic Works, available at: www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/PDF/ Art%20History/Claire%20Bishop/Delegated-Performance,Outsourcing-Authenticity.pdf, accessed 2 April 2020. Braidotti, Rosi. 1991. Patterns of Dissonance. A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Butler, Judith. 2018. Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Chehonadskih, Maria. 2012. ‘What Is Pussy Riot’s “Idea”?’ Available at: www.radicalphilosophy. com/commentary/what-is-pussy-riots-idea, accessed 8 April 2020. Cixous, Hélène. 2008. White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Deepwell, Katy. 2020. ‘Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms. Introduction’, in Deepwell, Katy (ed.) Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms. Amsterdam: Plural Valiz. Dorlin, Elsa. 2016. ‘Bare Subjectivity: Faces, Veils, and Masks in the Contemporary Allegories of Western Citizenship’, in Butler, Judith, Gambetti, Zeynep and Sabsay, Leticia (eds) Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 236–255. Douglas, Mary (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies. Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Guerrilla Girls. 2020. ‘Guerrilla Girls: Reinventing the “F” Word: Feminism’, available at: www.guerrillagirls.com, accessed 9 April 2020. Human Rights Watch. 2019. ‘Oddech Władzy na Plecach’, available at: www.hrw.org/pl/report/ 2019/02/06/327241#7266e1, accessed 18 March 2020. Irigaray, Luce. 1993. The Ethics of Sexual Diference. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jankowska, Janina, Łuczywo, Helena, Ludwika, Wujec, Staniszewska, Grażyna, Modzelewski, Karol, Maziarski, Wojciech and Dworak, Jan, 1989. ‘Women’s Role at the Round Table Talks’, Documentary, available at https://ninateka.pl/flm/rola-kobiet-przy-okraglym-stole, accessed 1 April 2020. Kurz, Iwona. 2019. ‘Performowanie genealogii—rewolucyjna wspólnota ciał’, in Bojarska, Katarzyna and Kurz, Iwona (eds) ‘Siła kobiet’, Widok. Teorie i Praktyki Kultury Wizualnej, issue 23, available at: www.pismowidok.org/pl/archiwum/2019/23-sila-kobiet/performowaniegenealogii, accessed 18 March 2020. Meskimmon, Marsha. 2019. ‘Art Matters: Feminist Corporeal-Materialist Aesthetics’, in Buszek, Maria Elena and Robinson, Hilary (eds) A Companion to Feminist Art. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Mirzoef, Nicholas. 2011. ‘The Right to Look’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 473–496.

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Mirzoef, Nicholas. 2017. The Appearance of Black Lives Matter, available at: https://name publications.org/item/2017/the-appearance-of-black-lives-matter/, accessed 18 March 2020. Mishtal, Joanna. 2015. The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Sliwinska, B. 2018. ‘Mobile Places and the “Cyborg Body”. Feminine Embodied Net-Community of #CzarnyProtest/ #blackprotest’, in Sliwinska, B. and Bohr, M. (eds) The Evolution of the Image: Political Action and the Digital Self. New York: Routledge. Solnit, Rebecca. 2016. Hope in the Dark. Untold Histories. Wild Possibilities. Edinburgh and London: Canongate. The Constitution of the Republic of Poland. 1997, available at: www.sejm.gov.pl/prawo/konst/ angielski/kon1.htm, accessed 18 March 2020.

4

The Absent Image Resisting the Erosion of Public Trust in Syrian Activists’ Evidential Visuality Mario Hamad

In March 2011, nationwide protests broke out across Syria against the decades-old rule of the Assad regime, inaugurating what activists of that movement call the Syrian revolution. Following the regime’s subsequent lethal crackdown on dissent and its attempted media blackout, Syrian video activists took it upon themselves to document, record and—via the platforms of international news outlets—disseminate footage of the crimes being committed, exposing the regime’s depraved acts of violence and murder to audiences around the globe. Faced with a PR crisis, the regime unleashed an extensive disinformation campaign, casting its opponents as ‘terrorists’ and itself as a victim of a foreign ‘conspiracy’ for ‘regime change’. This chapter maintains that part of the regime’s disinformation campaign has involved strategies intended to erode international public trust in the activists’ evidentiary images—those images evidencing the crimes being committed by the regime, as well as those evidencing the existence of a grassroots civil society opposition, long denied by the Assad dictatorship. In analysing these strategies, I demonstrate that the regime’s disinformation campaign has been primarily upheld by a policy that is absent of images—a policy reliant on a verbal and literary narration by sympathetic commentators, and an aggressive campaign of rumour-making and doubt intended to render absent the body of evidentiary images recorded and disseminated by Syria’s visual activists, all the while providing no images to back up the regime’s own assertions. In recognising that the regime’s campaign has managed to secure a place in both mainstream and fringe political opinion in the Anglophone world, this chapter also provides an analysis of Wujoud Collective’s short activist flm Testimony of a Former Detainee (2017), demonstrating how audio-visual manifestations of Syrian revolutionary activism has evolved in response to the regime’s absent image strategy. Contextualising the flm in this landscape of pro-regime attempts to erode public trust in evidentiary images, the analysis pays particular attention to the flm’s conceptual methodology of ‘plundering’ the regime’s absent image strategy and redirecting it back against the regime itself—a militancy achieved by the flm’s activist makers absenting their own visuality as a means of both making visible the regime’s absent image strategy; and reinforcing their own corporeal existence as Syrian democrats in the face of regime eforts to deny their existence and erase their visual legacy.

Conspiracy? Following the outbreak of mass demonstrations across Syria by March 2011, President Bashar al Assad addressed parliament on 30 March, alleging the protests to have

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been instigated by Syria’s ‘external enemies’ as part of a ‘conspiracy’ to ‘destroy’ the nation (Al Jazeera 2011). Adding that foreign and Arab news channels had launched a campaign to defame the Syrian state and that social media was being used to provoke and agitate unrest, he declared his resolve to ‘protect’ the country’s ‘security’ and ‘ensure its stability’. The subsequent months saw Assad’s narrative gain an international following among the radical fringes of political demographics around the globe. In the Anglophone world, conspiracy theory websites such as Infowars, Globalresearch and 21st Century Wire featured articles by Nimmo (2011), Chossudovsky (2011) and Henningsen (2011) respectively, that aligned with the regime’s narrative of events and warned of a ‘globalist’1 conspiracy to destroy Syria; while material authored by Nineham (2011), Habertson (2012) and Brar (2012) for the media outlets of smaller political organisations such as Britain’s Stop the War Coalition (2011), Revolutionary Communist Group, or the Communist Party of Great Britain Marxist–Leninist respectively, promoted the Assad government’s line through self-styled anti-imperialist rhetoric.2 Yet while the Assad regime’s narrative gained a following among the radical fringes of political opinion, October and November 2011 saw it introduced into a broader, more mainstream audience via two articles published in two of the UK’s most widely read newspapers: the Guardian and the Independent. The frst was by Alastair Crooke—a former British diplomat and European Union policy advisor who had served in MI6. Crooke’s 2011 article, ‘The ‘Great Game’ in Syria’ (published in Asia Times in October; then in the Guardian in November), alleged a Saudi Arabian-instigated conspiracy to overthrow the Assad regime through the backing of Islamist terrorists, claiming that Western nations were passively supporting the Saudi plan due to their intentions to weaken Iran. He furthermore maintained that Assad not only enjoyed the support of the majority of the Syrian people, but dismissed the Syrian opposition-in-exile as being unrepresentative of and out of touch with Syrian sentiments within the country. The elements of this story were repeated in Patrick Cockburn’s 2011 piece for the Independent, ‘Compared to Syria, the fall of Libya was a piece of cake’. Promoting a narrative of the uprising as being motivated by a Sunni Islamist hatred of the Shia,3 Cockburn alleged that the violence and chaos in the country was being pushed by a Saudi–American plot intended to overthrow the Alawite4-dominated government of Bashar al Assad in order to weaken its ally Iran. Echoing Assad’s statements on mass media, he furthermore alleged that Syrian opposition activists were involved in the ‘manipulation of the media’ in order to mislead foreign journalists banned from the country;5 and he asserted that the fall of the Assad government would lead to a ‘triumphant Sunni regime’. In narrating a story of the Syrian uprising as an international conspiracy that would yield only chaos and regional instability, Crooke and Cockburn made the case for the Assad regime’s continued survival—and by implication, therefore, for its use of force. Since the start of Syria’s civil uprising, audio-visual material disseminated online and to news channels around the globe by Syrian activists has evidenced the Assad regime’s lethal response. Videos revealing bloodied and injured protesters being shot at by the regime’s military; aftermath footage of massacres; and even torture footage of civilians and political prisoners being humiliated and murdered on camera—shot by regime personnel themselves and later leaked—contributed to the regime’s PR crisis. But Assad had already prepared for this. Using his parliamentary address to announce his ofcial narrative of events, the regime’s immediate response of war against civilians included the aggressive promotion of this narrative, which in a matter of months—via

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Crooke and Cockburn’s articles—was presented as the Syria story in two of Britain’s most reputable broadsheets. This pro-Assad narrative has since incorporated a range of conspiratorial claims, beginning with March  2011’s allegation of the presence of ‘armed gangs’ that, the regime claimed, were killing civilians and government security personnel.6 Since then, these claims have expanded to include stories alleging local opposition groups were repeatedly gassing their own communities and then blaming the regime for the attacks in order to provoke international military action against it7; to allegations that the ‘West’ was ‘funding ISIS’8; and continued all the way to the defamatory campaign waged against the Syrian Civil Defence (a network of search and rescue teams known as the White Helmets, who operate in rebel-held areas), accusing the organisation of being a ‘PR cover’ for ‘terrorists’.9 In analysing these numerous myths10 disseminated by the Assad regime and its cohort of international propagandists, a single commonality among them emerges: the absence of image. This can be understood as the aggregate absence of images that ought to have evidenced the claims being made for each of the regime’s myths. This absence of images therefore culminates in the absence of visual evidence of the regime’s overarching narrative claim: a global conspiracy for ‘regime change’. What remains therefore, is the imagined event. On a macro level, this is the imagined event of a global conspiracy for regime change. On a micro level, these are the many imagined events peddled via Assad-friendly media outlets that collectively construct an imaginary landscape within which each micro-narrative is formulated to sustain Bashar al Assad’s primary myth of the uprising against him being a conspiracy instigated by outsiders. This absence of images stands in stark contrast to the thousands of hours of raw audio-visual material that has been recorded and distributed online by Syrian civil activists11 since February 2011, alongside the self-incriminating torture footage shot by regime security personnel themselves.12 Yet despite the disseminators of the Assadist narrative having failed to produce the audio-visual material to back up their conspiratorial allegations, the absence of visual evidence has not prevented the regime’s narrative from gaining traction among segments of political societies around the world. What I describe as the absence of image in the regime’s narrative is not an assertion that photographs or videos have not been used by Assad’s propagandists—indeed, pro-regime disinformation has made frequent use of both appropriating Syrian activist visual content and documenting the regime’s own crimes, whilst re-narrating the story behind the images in order to recast victims of the regime as victims of anti-regime ‘terrorists’.13 Rather, the absence of image denotes the intention behind the Assadist propaganda campaign: a strategy of rumour-making and doubt, all sustained by the spoken, literary and crucially non-visual efort of a few key infuencers from both the obscure fringes of conspiratorial outlets, as well as those of supposedly more credible journalistic and intellectual statuses, such as Patrick Cockburn, Seymour Hersh,14 John Pilger15 or Noam Chomsky:16 a coterie of esteemed profles in the feld of political theory and confict analysis, each with considerable public followings. It is with the support, and beneft of doubt provided in particular by this latter group of high-status commentators that the potential value of Syrian activists’ visual evidence starts to erode. The evidentiary ‘image’, so to speak, seemed unnecessary when Crooke, and later Cockburn, made the case for the regime’s continued survival—and, therefore, implicitly, for its use of force. The visual evidence of this alleged international ‘plot’ of ‘armed gangs’ and local rebels gassing their own neighbourhoods wasn’t anywhere

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to be seen. Yet so long as infuential analysts were willing and able to defend the regime’s case in the most widely read publications in the Anglophone press, material visualisations remained unnecessary. The ‘truth’17 of the event was revealed in the written word and, crucially, in the absence of evidentiary images. Assad’s imagined event became ‘truth’ not by virtue of any material visuality, but by the formulation of images in the collective imagination of Crooke, Cockburn and Hersh’s readers. But it was not enough for Assad that high-profle commentators were upholding his narrative in widely read publications and international forums of debate. The formulation of an imagined event required a further policy of aggressively diminishing the value of those images exposing the regime’s crimes: a policy of defaming the reputation of Syria’s democratic opposition to the extent that any video or photographic images associated with them would be deemed untrustworthy and misleading—a conscious campaign to bring the activists’ evidentiary images into a state of social stigmatisation that would efectively render the visual material ‘absent’. The regime’s intention has therefore been to make absent those images evidencing its crimes. To achieve this, online message board trolls initiated operations of political and social undermining, working with the intention to diminish and eventually stamp out the evidentiary value of activist video and photographic images that sought to expose the regime’s atrocities. This electronic army of pro-Assad trolls has since fooded online message boards and comments sections of news media websites with endless streams of posts aimed at pushing the regime’s narrative into the political debate.18 As cited in an article by Gelblum (2017), investigative journalist Mike Hind describes these internet trolls as working to create ‘the impression of a false social consensus’: That’s why they food the online world . . . because anybody happening along to see that—and that includes politicians, and policy-makers, and other journalists— they want them to believe that this is the social consensus. That’s what they’re manufacturing. As many comments found underneath activist videos on YouTube and other visual media-sharing platforms streaming activist material demonstrate, the regime’s attempt to fabricate the impression of a grassroots social consensus in line with its politics has included the strategy of casting doubt over the authenticity of the activist video content—a strategy intended to ultimately eradicate the ‘image’ that these videos collectively communicate by way of devaluing and dismissing the content to the point that no activist video is able to escape the public associating them with fakery and propaganda for ‘regime change’ ‘imperialism’ or ‘Jihadi’ ‘terrorism’. Indeed, upon a cursory observation of the comments sections underneath numerous third-party outlets providing a platform to Syrian democrat footage, it becomes noticeable that an Assadist online rumour-mill is sustained by this electronic army of pro-regime internet trolls. The trolls’ overall claim is that all the activist video and photographic material are fabricated ‘propaganda’ designed to dupe and mislead online viewers into supporting a take-over by radical Islamists—a ‘regime change plot’ they claim is being orchestrated against the Assad government by the USA, Saudi Arabia and Israel.19 As cited in Gelblum (2017) once again, Hind notes that trolls pay particular attention to occupying the comments sections of platforms with large audiences. While the vast majority of videos uploaded to YouTube by Syrian pro-democracy activists have few to no comments underneath them (such as those published on the activist-run

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Shaam News Network or Aleppo Media Centre), a cursory survey of the discussion threads provided on internationally renowned media outlets such as the Guardian newspaper, or on the Twitter accounts of human rights organisations such as Amnesty International, reveals that propaganda trolls have prioritised these platforms for their commentary.20 It is specifcally the case when these various outlets use footage originating from Syrian activist-run sources that the content has regularly been dismissed by the trolls. The trolls’ preference for tarnishing the reputation of activists on the discussion threads of world-famous news outlets and international organisations, rather than on the original activist-run platforms where the content was initially uploaded, is likely motivated by the intention to defame the activists in front of an initially nonaligned audience constituting a larger percentage of US and British nationals. The targeting of this particular audience demographic may be understood as a calculated intention for a gradual nurturing of a widespread public sentiment that would ultimately infuence the policies of citizens’ respected governments with regards to Syria. The regime’s treatment of evidentiary visuality therefore reveals the essence of its policy: with no evidentiary images to back up its own conspiracy narrative, it resorts to fostering a social and consensual negation of activist-owned images to render those images, too, as efectively absent.

Testimony of a Former Detainee: The Absent Image as ‫وجود‬ (Wujoud) In this context of the Assad dictatorship’s strategy to absent evidentiary images, Syrian visual activism requires reconceptualisation if it is to continue to destabilise the regime’s pervasive narrative campaign. One possible reconceptualisation is proposed in the short flm Testimony of a Former Detainee (2017)—referred to hereafter as Testimony—by Wujoud Collective. The flm’s opening frame occupies most of its entire running time, revealing a screen of black. There is no image. Instead, the viewer is met with an audio recording of what we know from the flm’s accompanying literary description, to be a Syrian man recounting his past experience as a prisoner of conscience in the Assad regime’s prison system. The absence of an image on screen allows the flm’s experiencer to meditate into a state of auditory concentration, in which the audience’s focus defaults towards sonically absorbing the story being recounted by the Syrian man. Taking the idea of the absent image as a point of departure, Testimony alludes to the workings of Assadist narrative propaganda and the way such propaganda is received and accredited by internet users and the general public. While pro-regime propagandists work to undermine the credibility of activist-recorded images as a means of efectively eradicating, or rendering absent, the visibility of these images among online users, the flm turns the idea of eradicating images into a concept. The regime’s strategy of absenting an evidentiary image is applied in the most literal sense in this flm, but its purpose here is to subvert the regime’s intention and undermine the pro-Assad narrative. The blacked-out screen ironically implies that pro-Assad internet trolls are no longer needed to absent the visual evidence of Assad’s crimes, nor those images revealing the existence of anti-regime democrats—for in this flm, anti-regime activists are absenting the visual evidence all by themselves. In this specifc case, it is the image of the victim of regime crimes—the former detainee—that is withheld. The activists

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involved in the making of this flm are therefore absenting their own visuality. In doing so, what is made apparent is the regime’s own policy of erasing evidentiary images. The black screen that replaces what could have been an imaged video of the former detainee speaking to camera acts as a subtle reference to the regime’s workings of absenting the visual evidence of an existent Syrian democratic opposition. In Testimony, therefore, presence is created through the conscious decision to visually absent. A  parallel can be drawn here with Mirzoef’s (2017) idea of the ‘space of nonappearance’—what he describes as the ‘nonplaces’ or ‘killing zone[s]’ located in the deserted and unnoticed spaces ‘between private and corporate property’, in which a racialised US police force and a compromised legal apparatus work to sustain a ‘racial hierarchy’. This is where ‘Black’ Americans are murdered by US police ofcers who will be acquitted by virtue of a process that prevents the deceased victims from ‘appearing’ outside the pre-designated frames imposed and enforced by the ‘settler state’. As with the Assad regime’s policy of absenting images, the ‘space of nonappearance’ erodes public faith in witness testimony and evidentiary material that would otherwise have incriminated the accused police ofcers—a process that, Mirzoef argues, is implemented by the police force itself and often bolstered by sympathetic media outlets during the mediatised process of courtroom hearings. But, conversely, Mirzoef’s redacted photographs of these spaces of nonappearance—photographs of the locations where the victims are killed or incarcerated—have the efect of alluding to the guilty party’s strategy of keeping these killings and injustices low profle and away from the public gaze. When Mirzoef removes (or redacts) the victims’ bodies from the photographs, what is left is a demonstration of the loneliness and unpopulated emptiness of the spaces chosen for the killing. When shown through redacted photographs, the spaces of ‘nonappearance’ instead become images that create appearance. This is because they make apparent the workings of injustice that the perpetrators had intended to be unseen. This raises a crucial point in understanding what I identify to be the essence of Syrian resistance to the Assad regime—existence. In Testimony, the absent image does not absent the existence of the former detainee, but rather makes it manifest. The flm’s absent image thus does the opposite of the regime’s absent image strategy that had sought to erase evidence of the existence of a Syrian democratic opposition. If the logic of the regime is based on the idea of erasing the visible evidence of this civil opposition, then an inherent part of this strategy also involves the intent to destroy the physical existence of this very opposition. This becomes apparent when considering the regime’s policy of mass murder, of which its concerted disinformation campaign constitutes a crucial component, functioning to justify and legitimise the act of killing. The regime’s intent is thus exterminatory—it seeks the eradication of the physical existence of a home-grown democracy movement, as well as the erasure of this movement’s visual legacy. Therefore, since the Syrian democrat’s existence is antithetical to the regime’s intent to exterminate it, the democrat’s very existence defaults to a state of resistance. I call this state of resistance ‘wujoud’ (‫ )وجود‬after the Arabic word for existence/presence. In the context of intended extermination, ‘wujoud’ becomes a term of political signifcance, for it denotes an existence that is by defnition oppositional to the regime’s intent to end it. Syrian resistance to the Assad regime is therefore embodied in the very being of each and every Syrian revolutionary, and thus inextricably linked to the corporeal. Testimony alludes to this corporeality by demonstrating that

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the existence of the Syrian democrat does not need to be seen in order for it to be known, since this democrat’s ‘wujoud’ is manifested via the absented image on screen.

Comparative Absence The ‘absent image’ in Testimony furthermore intends to challenge the regime apologist to hold this flm up to scrutiny alongside any pro-regime propaganda video of a similar ‘talking head’ format. The pro-Assad video that went viral during the regime’s fnal onslaught against East Aleppo in December 2016—featuring propagandist Eva Bartlett sitting in front of UN wallpaper21—acts as a working example. When held alongside one another, both the Bartlett video and the opening frame of Testimony demonstrate an absence of any evidentiary images that ought to be presented to back up each speakers’ claims. While the Bartlett video does showcase the moving image of the pro-regime propagandist herself—a non-Syrian Canadian national seated at a press conference—it may as well be a black screen, for the image does not evidence the regime’s innocence, nor does it work as a visual argument in defence of Assad’s military campaign (the primary intention of the video and press conference itself). Taking the idea of the absent image to an extreme through a total abstention of material visuality, Testimony aims to provoke the mild regime sympathiser22—or the neutral undecided observer (often susceptible to regime propaganda)—to question the flm’s credibility for its use of no image. The intention is to lead this experiencer to question their own bias towards seeing Bartlett’s video as ‘trustworthy’. The flm therefore works to trap the mild regime sympathiser into dissecting their own analysis of the Syrian story. For the other ‘undecided’ audience members, Testimony compels them to compare its black-screened non-image to that of the full colour ‘imaged’ video of the regime propagandist. Since the pro-regime video of Bartlett contains no evidentiary images to support its thesis, her talking head holds the same visual value as that of the black screen in Testimony. What is left, therefore, are words of a Syrian man against those of a non-Syrian Canadian. Their politics are opposed to one another and their narratives difer. The Syrian man claims to be a democracy activist speaking from frst-hand experience, while the Canadian woman claims to be a journalist with access to witnesses in regime-held territory. A comparison of credibility between the two therefore requires a non-visual analysis. If Bartlett’s words are to be taken at face value without the inclusion of evidentiary material, what is it that makes a mild regime sympathiser view the former detainee’s story as supposedly less trustworthy? It is worth keeping in mind that while Testimony exposes the regime’s use of arbitrary arrest and lethal torture, comparing it to a pro-regime propaganda video about the fall of Aleppo may seem to be mixing up two diferent topics. Of what use is it to compare the two? The answer is found in the details of the accounts provided. The former detainee claims to have been imprisoned only for being a democracy activist. This fact alone is enough to evidence, non-visually, the regime’s policy of suppressing freedom of expression in Syria. That this man was imprisoned at a check point in regime territory casts doubt over Bartlett’s story of using witnesses from regime territory to support her case of Assad’s benevolent intentions. If this former detainee was imprisoned for voicing a pro-democracy opinion while in regime territory, this implies that self-censorship would have to be exercised by those Syrians resident in regime-held areas for the sake of self-survival. Zero criticism of the government, and upholding the state’s ofcial narrative to foreign journalists conducting interviews,

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would form part of every Syrian’s self-protective ritual when in regime territory. In this context, does ‘testimony’ given by Syrians currently resident in regime-held territory become trustworthy? This is the demographic that Bartlett and a series of other obscure journalists and minor celebrities24 have used in order to back up the proregime narrative of ‘liberating’ territory from the ‘terrorists’: an embedded journalism done under the ‘security’ provided by regime forces, and the monitoring ears of the ever-present mukhabarat (‫‘ مخابرات‬secret police’). Paraphrasing the thesis of an article by journalist Robert Fisk, Syrian-British writer Robin Yassin-Kassab (2019) states ‘that you can’t get the real story if you go and interview an Iraqi with a heavily armed American soldier standing next to you, because of course, the Iraqi is going to say, “yes, we like America, thank you”’. In contrast to the claimed ‘evidence’ of Bartlett et al.’s imbedded journalism, the power of Testimony lies in the presence of the Syrian civil activist himself, felt even in the absence of his own image. His presence evidences his own existence as someone— a Syrian democrat—who stands against the regime and the crimes the regime inficts upon the Syrian people. As such, this former detainee undermines the regime’s denialist narrative of a civil democratic Syrian movement being non-existent. The evidence of his very being sabotages the regime’s narrative. Furthermore, Speaking as a refugee in the safety of a liberal Western democracy, away from the reach of the regime and the Salaf Jihadists, if his story were intended to be a promotion on behalf of the Islamic State, or Al Qaeda, or the Salaf Jihadist ideology—accusations that are a staple of the Assadist social undermining strategy—he would not be promoting ideals of democracy, pluralism and human rights as he does in the audio recording. 23

Defaulting Into Militancy: Weaponising the Absent Image Testimony therefore conceptualises the regime’s propaganda strategy of absenting images, appropriating the policy in order to redirect it for an anti-regime purpose. The flm’s use of the ‘absent image’ draws attention to the regime’s own absent image strategy which had intended to establish the ‘truth’ of the imagined ‘event’ of a foreign ‘conspiracy’ for ‘regime change’. The flm also makes apparent the corporeal existence of a civil democratic opposition and thus destabilises the regime’s repeated smear of all its opponents being Al-Qaeda-like ‘terrorists’ (a destabilisation of the regime’s denialist rhetoric via ‘wujoud’). In light of these considerations, the flm plays a strategic role in an ongoing revolutionary efort to eliminate the regime in its entirety. To understand this, it is worth viewing the flm as an act of plunder and sabotage that destabilises the Assadist propaganda campaign. Those who made the flm are therefore saboteurs, a term that in the regime’s narrative is synonymous with the label ‘terrorist’. This is important because the regime designates the entirety of its opponents as ‘terrorists’, doing so as a means to justify its extermination of oppositional populations. In this respect, Testimony holds parallel to the militant aspect of the Syrian revolution. The flm’s tactic of appropriating and redirecting one of the regime’s weaponised media strategies is mirrored in the action of those who defected from Assad’s army, abandoning their posts and taking what were once regime-owned weapons with them in order to form the anti-regime Free Syrian Army (FSA). Just as the armed faction of the Syrian revolution eventually came to the conclusion that the survival of neighbourhoods and communities in opposition to the regime necessitated the elimination of the Assadist state’s military capabilities, Testimony acts as an initiative intended to contribute

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to the dismantling of the regime’s propaganda machine through appropriating and re-aiming the regime’s own media weapon—the absent image—back at the regime itself. The former detainee’s story of arbitrary imprisonment and torture, detailed verbally without the need for images, contributes to a growing body of frst-hand testimony that stands as evidence to indict the regime of crimes against humanity, and potentially genocide, in a court of law.25 The threat to the regime posed by testimonials such as these is enough to provoke Assad’s propagandists into smearing the former detainees and their activist supporters with the ‘terrorist’ label. In this sense, the evidentiary value of such testimony can be understood as constituting a threat to the regime as credible as military force, for the potential enforcement of international law would ultimately bring about the elimination of the Assad dictatorship.

Notes 1. Nimmo (2011) and Henningsen (2011), writing for Infowars and 21st Century Wire respectively, reduce the Syrian war to a conspiracy by an international elite—referred to as the ‘globalists’—intent on destroying all nation states. Meanwhile Global Research contributor Chossudovsky (2011) alleges that the Syrian uprising is a conspiracy for regime change instigated by Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the USA, maintaining that ‘terrorists’ from foreign nations had been crossing into Syria from neighbouring countries and had opened fre on police and army from the very start of the uprising. 2. Brar (2012) and Habertson (2012), writing for the Communist Party of Great Britain Marxist-Leninist and for the Revolutionary Communist Group respectively, describe the Syrian uprising as a ‘phoney’ ‘imperialist plot’ instigated to overthrow a ‘progressive’, ‘anti-imperialist’ government. Meanwhile, Nineham’s statement for Stop the War Coalition (2011) expresses opposition to what it describes as a UK–US campaign for ‘regime change’. 3. Shia Muslims belong to the second largest branch of Islam—known as Shiism—after the majority Sunni sect. Shiism evolved out of a schism between followers of the prophet Muhammed following his death in the mid-seventh century. Today Shiism forms the state religion of the Islamic Republic of Iran. See Momen (1985). 4. Alawites belong to a branch of Islam known as Alawitism, which is believed to have been founded by followers of the 11th Imam, Hasan al-Askari, and his student, Ibn Nusayr, during the ninth century. Alawites are believed to revere Ali ibn Abi Talib, from where they derive their Arabic name ‘Alawi’ (‘followers of Ali’). Their numbers are few and mostly to be found in Syria, where they have been thought to constitute around 11% of the population. Although the Alawite belief system remains secretive to most scholars, the Alawites consider themselves to be a sub-sect of the Shia branch of Islam. Bashar al Assad is from the Alawite sect. See Friedman (2010). 5. The regime implemented a ‘media blackout’ in March 2011 (see the report by the Committee to Protect Journalists 2011), which included the banning of all foreign journalists from entering Syria, subsequently leading to global news outlets establishing frequent communication with Syrian citizen journalists in order to obtain video footage and on-the-ground testimony of the unfolding situation. 6. See Al Bab (2011) for English transcription of Assad’s 30 March address to Syria’s parliament. 7. For conspiracy theory articles claiming the Ghouta chemical attack was a false fag operation, see Hersh (2013) and 21st Century Wire (2017). 8. A 2014 conspiracy theory promoted by Iran’s state-run Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) alleges ISIS to be an Anglo–American–Israeli creation codenamed ‘Hornet’s Nest’. See Baker (2014). 9. See Russia’s state-owned media outlet RT (2017) and the Russian Embassy UK (2017) Twitter account, both promoting the conspiracy theory of the Syrian Civil Defence (also known as the White Helmets) as being linked to terrorists. These demonstrate how a

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10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

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micro-narrative has been turned into a concerted disinformation campaign by the Russian state in order to justify its targeting of the civilian rescue workers as part of a wider military strategy in support of the Assad regime. I use the term ‘myths’ to indicate that despite these narratives amounting to a series of unsubstantiated claims, they have been continuously repeated by a myriad of international fringe and mainstream commentators and outlets to the degree that they have come to be accepted as ‘truths’ among some participating in the Syria-related discourse. These claims can therefore be considered to have taken on the status of a deeply politicised contemporary mythology surrounding the Syrian confict. See YouTube videos by Zaher (2011); freedom 4syria (2012); aljabri saad (2012); or ahmadahmad1945 (2011) for examples of mass protests against the regime. For video examples revealing regime troops fring at and beating protesters, see Freeknight2011 (2011) or sssammmiii (2011). Examples of footage revealing regime troops humiliating, torturing, murdering and desecrating corpses of civilians (allegedly flmed by regime military personnel) are found on the YouTube account Syrian Scenes (2012a). In a YouTube video uploaded by Syrian Scenes (2012b), regime-afliated TV broadcaster Addouniya recasts victims of the Daraya massacre (20–25 August 2012)— alleged by Syrian civil activists to have been perpetrated by the regime—as victims of anti-regime ‘armed gangs’. The reporter provides a walking tour of corpses before conducting interviews with injured survivors, including two children who are asked to speak on camera while next to their dead mother. Similarly the YouTube account GlobalResearchTV (2012) posts an extract from Iran’s state-owned media outlet Press TV, which recasts the Houla massacre (25 May 2012)—which survivors and civil activists say was perpetrated by regime forces— as an atrocity committed by anti-regime gangs. A debunking of Hersh’s journalism on two of the Syrian chemical weapons attacks has been published by Higgins (2017) on the investigative website Bellingcat. Documentarian John Pilger referred to the Syrian Civil Defence as a ‘propaganda construct’, as is seen in a YouTube video shared by pro-Assad propagandist vanessa beeley (2017). Beeley herself has tweeted that the Civil Defence are a ‘legit target’ for regime and Russian aerial bombings. See The Syria Campaign (2017). In a YouTube video by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics (2015), Chomsky warns against outside powers intervening militarily to stop Assad, maintaining it would empower ‘jihadists’, while also dismissing humanitarian claims for intervention as likely disingenuous. In implying preference for continued regime dominance, his argument plays into the regime’s narrative whereby the confict is presented as that of ‘Assad vs terrorists/ Islamists’. While his arguments favour international disengagement—a policy that Syrian democrats and human rights activists view as one that defaults to allowing Assad and his allies to commit genocide—his public profle provides credence to the regime’s oversimplifed binary narratives: ‘Assad vs terrorists/Assad vs imperialists’—which continue to fuel the arguments behind the regime’s international allies on the far Right and the authoritarian Left. On several occasions, Chomsky has also referred to Patrick Cockburn as the most reliable authority on Syria. ‘Truth’ here can be understood as being sustained by a ‘regime of truth’ in the Foucauldian sense—one that is created by an international cohort of thinkers and commentators of signifcant social standing. See Lorenzini (2015). Comments underneath the Guardian (2017) editorial ‘The Guardian’s View On Syria: Putin Tests the West’ demonstrate how a pro-Assad and pro-Putin troll army dominate the discussion. For example, the comments underneath the YouTube video of Syrian citizen journalist Waad Al-Kateab’s interview with Democracy Now! (2019) accuse her of being a propagandist for Al-Qaeda, a ‘warmonger’ and ‘imperialist’ agent. A number of comments make laudatory references to US Democratic Party politician Tulsi Gabbard for her promotion of pro-Assad conspiracy theories alleging the USA to have been funding Al-Qaeda. Similar accusations are seen on the IMDB User Reviews page for The White Helmets (2016) documentary; and a further troll campaign is found in the online comments section under the

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20.

21. 22.

23.

Mario Hamad Guardian review of the second White Helmets documentary Last Men in Aleppo (2017). See Phillips (2017). For example, in a tweet by Amnesty International (2018) following the Assad regime and Russia’s aerial attacks against civilians, pro-Assad trolls canvass the thread, accusing the NGO of propagating for Al-Qaeda and ISIS. The White Helmets are, as usual, referred to as being in league with terrorists. Many of these comments have since been deleted, but some remain. The video can be viewed on the ofcial Twitter account of Russia’s state-backed platform In the NOW (2016). I use the term ‘mild sympathiser’ to describe an individual who may be mildly infuenced by regime propaganda, while not entirely convinced by it or aligned to the regime’s politics. This person’s sympathies with the regime may have arisen due to either previous ideological or political sentiments, or via exposure to regime propaganda as the frst Syria-related ‘news’ they came across while ignorant of Syria’s twentieth-century political history. A Syrian activist makes this point where he addresses Bartlett in a YouTube video (falghrawi 2016) stating that every . . . Syrian knows that . . . if you disagree with the . . . regime, you will be killed. I would love you to have the same conversation with the Syrians in Germany, or in Turkey, or anywhere else where they know that if they say the truth, they will not be killed.

Wujoud Collective incorporates extracts of this video in the online flm The Propagandist (2018) methodically debunking Bartlett’s allegations. See wujoudcollective (2018). 24. In television appearances promoting her pro-Assad documentary, Bolivian actress Carla Ortiz claims to have spoken to former residents of East Aleppo as they entered regime territory, while also claiming that the Twitter accounts of East Aleppo’s civil activists and citizen journalists were ‘fake’. See the pro-regime YouTube account HANDS OFF SYRIA (2016). 25. Such a trial opened in Germany on 23 April 2020, where two former Syrian regime prison ofcers face charges for crimes against humanity. See Amnesty International (2020).

References 21st Century Wire. (2017). MIT Researcher: Syria WMD ‘Facts’ Were Manufactured to Fit U.S. Conclusion for Ghouta in 2013. Available at: www.globalresearch.ca/syria-wmd-facts-weremanufactured-to-ft-u-s-conclusion-for-chemical-weapons-ghouta-attack-in-2013/5583713 [accessed 17 October 2020]. Amnesty International. (2018). 12 January. Available at: https://twitter.com/amnesty/status/ 951841606046543872 [accessed 17 October 2020]. Amnesty International. (2020). Syria: Germany Torture Trial Provides ‘Renewed Hope’ for Assad Government’s Victims. Available at: www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/syria-germanytorture-trial-provides-renewed-hope-assad-governments-victims#:~:text=The%20frst%20 trial%20of%20former,government%20prisons%2C%20said%20Amnesty%20International [accessed 17 October 2020]. ahmadahmad1945. (2011). ‫ابراهيم القاشوش ويل ارحل يا بشار دقة عالية‬2011 6 27 [video]. Available at: www. youtube.com/watch?v=a-qDRkZ1354 [accessed 17 October 2020]. Al Bab. (2011). Syria: speech by Bashar al-Assad, 30 March. Available at: al-bab.com/ albab-orig/albab/arab/docs/syria/bashar_assad_speech_110330.htm [accessed 17 October  2020]. aljabri saad. (2012). ‫هااام رفع علم االستقالل‬- ‫ساحة الجامعة‬- ‫ حلب‬-17-5-2012 [video]. Available at: www. youtube.com/watch?v=8EU1jecnObw [accessed 17 October 2020]. Al Jazeera. (2011). Syria’s Assad Warns of ‘Conspiracy’. Available at: www.aljazeera.com/ news/2011/3/31/syrias-assad-warns-of-conspiracy [accessed 17 October 2020]. Baker, A. (2014). Why Iran Believes the Militant Group ISIS Is an American Plot. TIME. Available at: https://time.com/2992269/isis-is-an-american-plot-says-iran/ [accessed 17 October 2020].

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Brar, H. (2012). Defend Syria. The Communists. Available at: https://thecommunists.org/ 2012/10/23/tv/defend-syria-imperialist-proxy-war/ [accessed 17 October 2020]. Chengu, G. (2014). America Created Al-Qaeda and the ISIS Terror Group. Global Research. Available at: www.globalresearch.ca/america-created-al-qaeda-and-the-isis-terror-group/5402881 [accessed 17 October 2020]. Chossudovsky, M. (2011). The Destabilization of Syria and the Broader Middle East War. Global Research. Available at: www.globalresearch.ca/the-destabilization-of-syria-and-thebroader-middle-east-war/25312 [accessed 17 October 2020]. Cockburn, P. (2011). Compared to Syria, the Fall of Libya Was a Piece of Cake. The Independent. Available at: www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/patrick-cockburn-comparedto-syria-the-fall-of-libya-was-a-piece-of-cake-6264952.html [accessed 17 October 2020]. Committee to Protect Journalists. (2011). Syria. Available at: https://cpj.org/2012/02/attackson-the-press-in-2011-syria/ [accessed 17 October 2020]. Crooke, A. (2011). Syria and Iran: The Great Game. The Guardian. Available at: www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/nov/04/syria-iran-great-game [accessed 17 October  2020]. Democracy Now! (2019). ‘It Is Not Just War. It Is Life’: Acclaimed Doc ‘For Sama’ Ofers Rare Glimpse into War-Torn Syria [video online]. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0GfMuG4n0 [accessed 17 October 2020]. falghrawi. (2016). Reply to ‘In the Now’ Facebook Video Produced Video to Syrian Regime Reporter Eva Bartlett [video]. Available at: https://youtu.be/N6Fr3UVocH0 [accessed 17 October 2020]. freedom 4syria. (2012). ‫ مظاهرة راااائعة في كلية الكهرباء‬:: ‫ جامعة الثورة‬15-5-2012 [video]. Available at: https://youtu.be/3c8RpKcDNaI [accessed 17 October 2020]. freeknight2011. (2011). Hidden Camera Captures Syrian Security Violent Suppression of Protests [video]. Available at: https://youtu.be/6nx9SF0rx4c [accessed 17 October 2020]. Friedman, Y. (2010). The Nusayrī-‘Alawīs: An Introduction to the Religion, History and Identity of the Leading Minority in Syria. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill. Gelblum, B. (2017). WATCH: Is Russia Behind Right-Wing Anti-immigrant Twitter Accounts With Eight Numbers in? The London Economic. Available at: www.thelondone conomic.com/ news/watch-russia-behind-right-wing-anti-immigrant-twitter-accounts-eight-numbers/01/09/ [accessed 17 October 2020]. GlobalResearchTV. (2012). Chossudovsky: US-Sponsored Gangs Committed Houla Massacre [video]. Available at: https://youtu.be/wFTnNt42QKk [accessed 17 October 2020]. Habertson, T. (2012). Syria: UN Peace Plan Set Up to Fail. Revolutionary Communist Group. Available at: www.revolutionarycommunist.org/middle-east/syria/2536-syria-un [accessed 17 October 2020]. Hands of Syria. (2016). Filmmaker Carla Ortiz Talks to Fox 11 About Aleppo [video]. Available at: https://youtu.be/il7I1FTRSwY [accessed 17 October 2020]. Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. (2015). Identity, Power, and the Left: The Future of Progressive Politics in America [video]. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch? v=JFiCg67cDTs&feature=youtu.be&t=57m40s [accessed 17 October 2020]. Henningsen, P. (2011). Syria Preparing to Resist Globalist and NATO Regime Change Plans. 21st Century Wire. Available at: https://21stcenturywire.com/2011/08/23/syria-prepared-toplay-long-game-resisting-globalist-nato-regime-change/ [accessed 17 October 2020]. Hersh, S. (2013). Whose Sarin? London Review of Books. Available at: www.lrb.co.uk/thepaper/v35/n24/seymour-m.-hersh/whose-sarin [accessed 17 October 2020]. Higgins, E. (2017). Will Get Fooled Again–Seymour Hersh, Welt, and the Khan Sheikhoun Chemical Attack. Bellingcat. Available at: www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2017/06/25/will-getfooled-seymour-hersh-welt-khan-sheikhoun-chemical-attack/ [accessed 17 October 2020]. IMDB. (2016). The White Helmets: User Reviews. Available at: www.imdb.com/title/tt6073176/ reviews [accessed 17 October 2020].

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In the NOW. (2016). 13 December. Available at: https://twitter.com/inthenow/status/ 808748331019091969 [accessed 17 October 2020]. Lorenzini, D. (2015). What Is a ‘Regime of Truth’? Le foucaldien, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1–5. Available at: https://foucaldien.net/articles/abstract/10.16995/lefou.2/ [accessed 17 October 2020]. Mirzoef, N. (2017). The Appearance of Black Lives Matter. Miami, FL: [NAME] Publications. Momen, M. (1985). An Introduction to Shi’i Islam: The History and Doctrines of Twelver Shi’ism. 1st edn. London: Yale University Press. Nimmo, K. (2011). Libya and Syria: The Neocon Plan to Attack Seven Countries in Five Years. Infowars. Available at: https://veritastoday.wordpress.com/2011/09/03/libya-and-syria-theneocon-plan-to-attack-seven-countries-in-fve-years/ [accessed 19 November 2020]. Phillips, C. (2017). Last Men in Aleppo Review—Gruelling Portrait of a City Without Hope. The Guardian. Available at: www.theguardian.com/flm/2017/jan/24/last-men-in-alepporeview-sundance-flm-festival-white-helmets-syria [accessed 17 October 2020]. RT. (2017). Assad: Oscar-Feted White Helmets Are Part of Al-Qaeda. Available at: www.rt.com/ news/381542-white-helmets-al-qaeda-members/ [accessed 17 October 2020]. Russian Embassy UK. (2017). 28 February. Available at: https://tinyurl.com/y4qr9f8v [accessed 17 October 2020]. sssammmiii. (2011). Syria Syrian Government Forces TANKS Fire on Protesters [video online]. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUsIFwQENiw [accessed 17 October 2020]. Stop the War Coalition. (2011). No Foreign Intervention in Syria. Available at: www.stopwar. org.uk/article/no-foreign-intervention-in-syria/ [accessed 17 October 2020]. Syrian Peace Action Centre–SPACE. (2016). The Syria International–Robin Yassin-Kassab [video]. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfdU7LH2aso#t=16m09s [accessed 17 October 2020]. Syrian Scenes. (2012a). Syrian Army Executes Prisoners, Desecrates Their Corpses [Warning: Extremely Graphic] [video]. Available at: https://youtu.be/zg1ocFDno6k [accessed 17 October 2020]. Syrian Scenes. (2012b). Syrian TV ‘Interviews’ Orphan Beside Her Dead Mother [Warning: Graphic] [video]. Available at: https://youtu.be/uRBnM8tmMuw [accessed 17 October 2020]. The Guardian. (2017). The Guardian View on Syria: Putin Tests the West. Available at: www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/28/the-guardian-view-on-syria-putin-tests-thewest#comments [accessed 17 October 2020]. The Syria Campaign. (2017). Killing the Truth: How Russia Is Fuelling a Disinformation Campaign to Cover Up War Crimes in Syria. Available at: https://thesyriacampaign.org/wp-content/ uploads/2017/12/KillingtheTruth.pdf [accessed 17 October 2020]. vanessa beeley. (2017). John Pilger: ‘White Helmets Are a Complete Propaganda Construct in Syria’ [video]. Available at: https://youtu.be/X27B0yuazGo [accessed 17 October 2020]. wujoudcollective. (2018). The Propagandist [video]. Available at: https://youtu.be/KfY1Ga4 oHUc [accessed 17 October 2020]. Zaher. (2011). Amazing Demonstration Homs-Syria 12/27/2011 [video]. Available at: www. youtube.com/watch?v=UXfC3Ei575Q [accessed 17 October 2020].

5

Bodies, Sovereignties, Futurities On Adelita Husni-Bey’s Practice Anastasia Murney

This chapter will focus on Adelita Husni-Bey’s The Reading/La Seduta (2017), a pedagogical workshop and flm that explores new avenues for collective resistance against nationalist, neoliberal and settler–colonial regimes. The flm was exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale as part of the Italian Pavilion’s exhibition, Il Mondo Magico (translated into English as ‘The Magical World’). Curated by Cecilia Alemani, the name of this exhibition was taken from Italian anthropologist Ernesto de Martino’s trilogy on magic. His signifcant contribution to the subject was his serious and compassionate treatment of magical practices associated with subaltern communities. De Martino (2015) sought to understand how these communities turned to magic as a ‘demand for psychological protection’ when confronted with an existential crisis, or what he termed ‘the negative’, therefore indicating its therapeutic function (p. xii). In dialogue with de Martino’s ideas, Husni-Bey designed a deck of tarot cards to be used as a therapeutic–pedagogical device in The Reading. Often associated with esoterism and divination, the cards are printed with terms relating to extractive capitalism: the mining of raw materials, such as oil, gas and rare metals, to be transformed into commodities and sold on the global market. The intensifcation of extractive capitalism and the exhaustion of natural resources marks a signifcant contribution to what is known as the Anthropocene, a new geological era shaped through the detrimental impact of human activities. In renewing de Martino’s engagement with magical practices, this is the ‘existential crisis’ Husni-Bey chooses. I argue that The Reading engages tarot as a ‘magical’ method for unpicking the knotted geographies and temporalities of the Anthropocene. As Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jennifer Gonzales and Dominic Willsdon (2016) argue, visual activism problematises ‘how we defne both the regimes of the visible and the boundaries of activism’ (p. 8). In examining The Reading, I propose a form of visual activism that does not centre on dramatic images that expose cases of injustice, petitioning for newsworthiness. Rather, taking inspiration from Eve Tuck (2018), I want to question the assumption that lack of change stems from a lack of information. This is a relevant problem for dominant modes of visualising the Anthropocene: detached aerial perspectives of a ravaged Earth (Demos 2017) or infographs that compact and render complex datasets legible (Houser 2014). The Reading, however, thwarts the desire to see environmental crisis on a monumental scale and in high resolution. Husni-Bey’s work refects on the limits of ‘facts’ to galvanise; it is a pedagogical intervention that does not presuppose information leads to action. The use of tarot in The Reading is a dialogic and heuristic method for working with spatial and temporal complexities rather than attempting to compress or resolve them. Marginalised within

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the masculinist Left, tarot ofers opaque visualities that require interpretation and do not cohere into a neat scientifc whole. In The Reading, the conversation refects on the uneven distribution of bodily vulnerabilities in context to environmental crisis. This involves generative moments of pedagogical discomfort: the participants are made aware of their relative privileges and insulation from harm. And so, this reveals the racialised axes that cut and compose the Anthropocene into uneven temporalities and geographies. The Reading situates and implicates the participants, cultivating an embodied social infrastructure in dialogue with anti-extractivist struggles. While the work exemplifes an intimate form of activism, it also negotiates immediate and oblique activisms unfolding within the uneven Anthropocene, experimenting with resistance and survival. Consistent with Husni-Bey’s artistic practice to date, The Reading invests in the political consciousness of young people. Although her work spans a number of themes, it is her engagement with anarcho-communist pedagogies that materialises as a clear foundation. She draws on various thinkers and histories, such as Russian anarchists Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman; Catalan educator Francisco Ferrer i Guàrdia, whose intervention into education led to what is known as modern or rational schools; and also infuential pedagogical ideas from Paolo Freire and bell hooks, to name a select few. Husni-Bey’s works are often realised through a combination of participatory workshops and flms. For instance, Postcard From a Desert Island (2011) was an experiment that tasked elementary school students with building a desert island in their school hall without direction. Over the course of three weeks, the children grappled with the idea of self-management and how to organise roles and responsibilities without institutions. If this work manifested the undisciplined imagination of the child, a later work, After the Finish Line (2015), focused on teenage athletes overburdened with the demands of neoliberal capitalism and its entrepreneurial, self-maximising logic. Through an attention to bodies in breakdown mode, the work explores the pressure to compete and achieve, unravelling how the rhetoric of ‘success stories’ magnifes individual triumph and depoliticises experiences of shame and failure. In converging therapeutic and pedagogical registers, After the Finish Line alludes to vulnerability as a site for collective agency. This can be followed into The Reading, which also approaches questions of healing through a practice of critical togetherness, alert to thinking about how capitalist and patriarchal structures organise social expectations and visions of the future.

Extractive Capitalism and the Uneven Anthropocene To provide more context on The Reading and how it unfolds, this 16-minute flm features an unscripted tarot reading with a diverse group of North American teenagers. It was the culmination of a two-week workshop, held in 2016 on Indigenous Lenape land, Turtle Island (Manhattan, New York). The workshop included a range of theatrical and writing exercises, where the participants were encouraged to refect on their relationship to extractive capitalism. Prior to flming The Reading, Husni-Bey invited a range of artists, scholars and activists to contribute to the workshop, including Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Evan Calder Williams, Julian Brave Noisecat and Hannah Black, each of whom spoke to various aspects of extraction, such as competing defnitions of ‘value’; the division between life and nonlife; and long histories of colonial dispossession. The flm is shot in a darkened room with soft, coloured lighting that changes

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Figure 5.1 Adelita Husni-Bey, The Reading/La Seduta, 2017 video still. Zavitsanos and the participants sit in a circle around the tarot spread

each time a card is fipped. The participants sit in a circle as the camera rotates around them (Figure 5.1). In terms of the tarot reading itself, artist Tina Zavitsanos acts as the reader, while the participants were guided by their collectively chosen question, ‘what is our spiritual tie to the land?’ The cards themselves show cryptic illustrations and are emblazoned with terms: ‘Extraction’, ‘The Ongoing End’, ‘Simulation’, ‘Vulnerability’, ‘Value’, ‘The Colony’, ‘Abstract Threat’, ‘Real Threat’, ‘Soil’ and ‘Dirt’. The ten cards refect the Major Arcana in a standard tarot deck, which require interpretation in relation to the chosen question. Zavitsanos uses the Celtic Cross spread, which ascribes a temporal position to each card.1 The central pair of cards in the spread includes ‘Abstract Threat’ in the ‘situation’ position, referring to the querent’s state of mind. ‘Extraction’ is then laid across this card in the ‘crossing position’, representing the challenge or problem to be overcome. As Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson (2017) argue, extraction has surpassed its traditional association with plantations and mines, expanding into logistical and fnancial realms to become a dominant paradigm of capitalism. But Husni-Bey’s The Reading is focused on a more literal exploitation of the land and its social and environmental implications. In the current global context, extractive capitalism can be understood as a generic and a particular condition. For instance, Saskia  Sassen (2014) identifes the expanding space of global capitalism and the repositioning of vast swathes of land as sites for resource extraction. ‘From a conceptual distance’, she writes ‘all these diferent genealogies of destruction become visible as a sort of generic condition: a global multisited array of dead patches of land and water in the tissue of the biosphere’ (p. 150). This resembles what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2016) calls the ‘“patchy Anthropocene”, that is, the uneven and unequal terrain of Earth stalked by Man’ (p. 3). This ‘patchiness’ apprehends how the accumulation and concentration of wealth produces patches of liveability and patches of death. As Tsing writes, ‘none

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of us live in a global system; we live in places. This doesn’t mean we don’t travel, but we travel from place to place, not in abstract globality’ (ibid.). This is the muddle of the general and the particular that characterises extractive capitalism and its position within the Anthropocene, which is structural and vernacular; it is ‘everywhere and limited’ (Tsing 2016, p. 11). This is a conceptual challenge that informs The Reading, where the participants are faced with muddled proximities, temporalities and geographies. It also requires them to locate themselves in this material context, refecting on how the products of extractive capitalism come into their lives and how they are complicit in its exploitative logics. Before going further, it is important to acknowledge the contested nomenclature of the Anthropocene.2 As Tsing (2016) argues, one of the term’s biggest problems is its reference to the Eurocentric fgure of Man as a neutral foundation (p. 2). For an increasing number of scholars, the term ‘Anthropocene’ is inadequate, charged with perpetuating a false universalism that neglects power asymmetries and does not make the true architects of climate catastrophe culpable. In response, Jason Moore (2017) suggests the ‘Capitalocene’, which foregrounds the development of capitalism and its conceptualising of ‘Cheap Nature’ as integral to ecological exhaustion. To be more specifc, Françoise Verges (2017) coins the ‘racial capitalocene’, which critiques the historical conceptualising of black labour power as a cheap and renewable source of capital, like nature, dating back to the transatlantic slave trade. This has formed an ongoing, racialised environmental politics where minorities and communities of colour are made disposable, becoming the frst casualties of climate change. In a similar vein, Kathryn Yusof (2018) challenges the racial blindness of the Anthropocene: ‘becoming post-racial through Anthropocenic speculation is a foil of the humanist trickster’ (p.  3). In articulating a longer historical view, she names ‘Black Anthropocenes’ as ‘predicated on the presumed absorbent qualities of black and brown bodies to take up the burdens of exposure to toxicities and to bufer the violence of the earth’ (p. xii). While there is a vast proliferation of terms to revise and replace the Anthropocene, these interventions assist in counteracting the disingenuous ‘we’ that is inscribed into the Anthropocene as a uniform condition, omitting its (settler) colonial histories. The vexed politics of the Anthropocene and its racialised distribution of threat are refected in the 2016 protests at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline (also known as #NoDAPL), which was an important infuence on The Reading. Led by the Indigenous Dakota Sioux tribe, the Standing Rock struggle unfolded in a very specifc place and is at once part of a larger pattern. The pipeline, controlled by Energy Transfer Partners, was designed to move shale oil from North Dakota to refneries in Illinois (Estes 2019, p. 2). After the initial plan of crossing the Missouri River just north of Bismarck was rejected, it was rerouted downstream to cross near the Standing Rock reservation. In violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 and 1868, and snaking through ancestral burial grounds, the pipeline was faced with ferce resistance at the Sacred Stone protest camp. The protests became a locus for anti-colonial, anticapitalist struggle, foregrounding Indigenous sovereignty as integral to environmental justice. But, as Jaskiran Dhillon (2019) argues, ‘resistance eforts, like the one at Standing Rock, defy purely localized analysis’ (p. 239). This highlights the oscillation between the general and particular that characterises extractive capitalism, where the targeting of Standing Rock is part of a larger colonial logic of dispossession. As David Archambault II (2019), Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, explained, DAPL

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was the latest in a long line of encroachments onto the lands of Indigenous peoples: ‘whether it’s gold from the Black Hills or hydropower from the Missouri or oil pipelines that threaten our ancestral inheritance, the tribes have always paid the price for America’s prosperity’ (p.  39). This exposes the slow violence and the long colonial shadow of the so-called Anthropocene. In The Reading, the tarot card marked as ‘The Colony’ is uncovered in the position designated as ‘ourselves’, according to the Celtic Cross spread. There is an audible reaction when the card is revealed, indicating a degree of discomfort. It pictures a fst clenching a chain that is handcufed to the wrist. Little houses can be seen sprouting from the top of the hand. The participants use various idioms to decode the card; one says ‘it’s like . . . yanking your own chain or holding your own noose’. Perhaps the closed fst is an act of wringing resources, miming a short-sighted reliance on fossil fuels, with the chain representing the metallic criss-crossing of pipelines across the United States. And so, it might be more accurate to consider this card in terms of the settler-colony, which, as Patrick Wolfe (2006) argues, ‘is a structure not an event’ (p. 388), meaning it is not fxed in time; it is a continuous geographical phenomenon that uproots, renames and represses Indigenous existence. Therefore, the card does not rescue the participants—as settlers—from implication, nor does it safeguard their futures. As the conversation builds, there is a refection on seen and unseen violence— ‘unless people see it in their faces’, says a participant, ‘unless your water isn’t drinkable . . .’ This can be linked to what Haraway (2016) describes as the refusal to be present in a time ‘of unprecedented looking away’ (p. 35). And so, there is a moment of pedagogical discomfort, revealing how certain habits of attention, formed in privileged environments, can structure a feld of vision, demarcating the limits of what can be seen and felt (Boler & Zembylas 2002). The tarot card, in this instance, is a critical stimulus for broadening this feld of vision. I want to focus on two more cards, ‘Abstract Threat’ and ‘Real Threat’, considering how The Reading oscillates between the general and the particular. ‘Real Threat’ shows a winding stream carving down a hillside. In the background, on one side of the hill, there is a rocket preparing to launch; on the other stands a dead tree. Drinking from the stream is a coiled black snake with a skull for a head, like an oil pipeline cutting through clean water (Figure 5.2). Linking back to Standing Rock, this is a direct reference to the Lakota prophecy about Zuzeca Sapa, the monstrous black snake that would descend and reap destruction, frst contaminating the water (Estes & Dhillon, 2019). For the Dakota Sioux tribe, this prophetic vision was threatening to be made real. In September 2016, when #NoDAPL gained signifcant traction, it was met with a militarised escalation of force to ensure the pipeline’s construction. As Nick Estes (2019) writes, ‘when the Water Protectors saw the heavy machinery that morning turning soil, it was the human remains—their relatives—that were unearthed.  .  .  . The Water Protectors pushed down fences, throwing themselves in front of bulldozers’ (p. 49). As the protests stretched on, reports from media and activists exposed the violent tactics used against the Water Protectors, such as the use of rubber bullets, tear gas, attack dogs and water cannons in freezing temperatures. This resonates with Judith Butler’s (2015) description of ‘bodies acting in concert’, bodies that are ‘both vulnerable and demanding’ (p. 97), contesting and obstructing the brute force of the settler state. In refuting the narrow extractivist gaze of the state, these struggles advocate an irreducible ecological lens that is attentive to a more-than-human world encompassing human bodies, ancestral bodies and bodies of water.

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Figure 5.2 Adelita Husni-Bey, The Reading/La Seduta, 2017, video still. A close-up of the ‘Real Threat’ tarot card

On the ‘Abstract Threat’ card, there is a faceless channel of people moving from— or to—a stitched line. One participant suggests, ‘it’s like they’re trying to enter a place but it’s shut of’. Another comments, ‘I see something that looks like barbed wire’, and someone else describes the black space in the upper third of the card as like a fragment of dark sky: ‘they’re going to a place that has nothing’. As the participants strain to decode the details, the card appears to show an amorphous queue of people, abstracted into a threat and under threat. This resonates with Sassen’s earlier description of extractive capitalism as a generic condition seen from a conceptual distance. However, this perspective from afar can blur and eclipse the slow violence occurring on the ground. I want to suggest the two lines drawn on both cards—the barbed wire on ‘Abstract Threat’ and the black snake on ‘Real Threat’—can be read as biopolitical infrastructures that control the fow of resources and populations. DAPL attempts to slice through Indigenous sovereignties, devaluing the land as an inconsequential passage between oil refneries, where spills and other accidents are risked. Moreover, infrastructures are least visible to those who are best served by them. For instance, Anne Spice (2018) examines the Canadian state’s discourse of ‘critical infrastructure’, arguing these are, in fact, ‘invasive infrastructures’ that normalise environmental destruction and criminalise resistance. It is worth questioning what makes some infrastructure projects ‘critical’ and for whom. As Spice proposes, ‘infrastructure’ can be reconceptualised in its more fundamental form: as the material conditions needed for sustaining life, composed from an assemblage of land, water, air, plants and animals (p. 52). In relation to Standing Rock, DAPL is a petro-intensive infrastructure threatening to sabotage an existing infrastructure, the clean water from the Missouri River. As the two cards are revealed, the group refects on where threat is concentrated and dispersed. Speaking to the ‘Abstract Threat’ card, one participant hesitates, she feels she is being ‘problematic’, and then goes on to state: ‘It’s like . . . we can’t grow

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things on the soil here, but it doesn’t feel like something that afects me going to buy a soda at the bodega’. This reveals a disjuncture between two kinds of infrastructure, one based on capitalist exchange and one based on the ecological conditions needed for sustaining life. It also reveals the infrastructural cladding that protects her right to move through space and access resources. This resonates with an insight from Sara Ahmed (2017), who argues ‘privilege is a bufer zone’ (p. 237). Building on the work of Audre Lorde and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Ahmed goes on to argue: ‘racial capitalism is a health system: a drastically unequal distribution of bodily vulnerabilities’ (p. 238). For context, in Lorde’s A Burst of Light (2017), comprising journal entries from her frst three years living with liver cancer, she writes ‘cancer is political’ and questions what it would mean to pursue a life that is not ‘circumscribed and fractionalized by the economics of disease in America’ (p. 95). In Ahmed’s reading, she calls attention to ‘the way in which your own body experiences what is outside itself as inside itself; death from the outside in’ (p. 238). This is to consider the extent to which the world is made to ensure one’s survival—or not. In The Reading, the participants grapple with the material and infrastructural conditions that circumscribe and fractionalise a feld of vision. This corresponds to diferent proximities of bodily threat and harm. Through an emphasis on situatedness and discomfort, the work attempts to retrain visual attention in the uneven Anthropocene.

Magic and a Crisis of Presence I will now address the signifcance of tarot as a method in The Reading. Tarot’s history stretches back to the Italian Renaissance. In its earliest incarnations, tarot was common as a secular card game, ‘a simple source for the controlled production of randomness’ (Gregory 2016, p. 236). It was only in eighteenth-century France that tarot acquired occultist and esoteric qualities. As broader historical context, Helen Farley (2009) explains the waning power of Christianity in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which ushered in the rise of anti-clerical and anti-religious movements. Subsequently, as Farley writes, ‘the Church had to compete with the nation for liberal nationalism’ (p. 96). This shifting status quo unlocked space for other religions and esoteric beliefs, departing from a Christian doctrine. As a practice within more recent popular culture, however, tarot has become increasingly hybridised and adaptable as well as commodifed. There are multiple decks and endless interpretations. Classic varieties include the popular Rider–Waite–Smith Deck and Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Deck. There are also recent and emerging decks with feminist, queer and activist orientations, such as The Modern Witch Tarot and Next World Tarot, reimagining classic tarot archetypes. For these reasons, and as tarot becomes more agile in the digital age, it is difcult to ascribe with a fxed ideological character. It should be noted that, while there is a wealth of colloquial information available online, there has not been much serious academic attention given to the resurgence of tarot as a social practice. For Husni-Bey, tarot is a ‘new and not-new capacity to bring about a level of intimacy or magic’. She describes her use of tarot as a ‘queering practice’ in Judith Butler’s sense of the term, explaining: ‘it is a way of queering thought, or queering the problem, in order to escape the idea of what a normative solution can be, or how a solution can be arrived at’ (2019). In Bodies That Matter (1993), Butler studies the meanings of the term ‘queer’ and its resignifcation from degradation to afrmation. Earlier uses of the term, she writes, ‘include: of obscure origin, the state of feeling ill or bad, not straight,

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perverse, eccentric’ (p. 176). These pathological associations indicate how ‘queer’ has been constructed as a deviant realm of behaviour, separate from—and a threat to—a dominant, heteronormative realm. She goes on to argue, ‘the term “queer” has operated as one linguistic practice whose purpose has been the shaming of the subject it names or, rather, the producing of a subject through that shaming interpellation’ (p. 226). Its force has subsequently been linked to the irrational and the infantilised, primed for ridicule and marginalisation. Another generative inversion comes from Sara Ahmed (2019), who takes up ‘queer use’ to consider the wilful misuse of things deemed to have a proper use. ‘Queer use’, she writes, ‘can be about lingering over things . . . to linger on the material qualities of that which you are supposed to pass over; it is to recover a potential from materials that have been left behind’ (p. 208). To this end, Husni-Bey is working to invert a view that dismisses tarot as cheap mysticism, as non-scientifc and frivolous, in order to bring out an afrmative counter-use. In terms of tarot’s location within late capitalism, Karen Gregory (2012) has studied the experiences of professional tarot readers in relation to the global fnancial crisis and its precarious aftermath. This involves tracing how tarot has been adapted into the neoliberal marketplace and the growth of ‘spiritual entrepreneurialism’, aided through digital platforms. In this sense, there is a convergence between tarot as ‘manifesting’ future success and the individualist mantra of the market. Gregory (2019) also addresses the ‘reluctant entrepreneur’, who is unwilling or unable to monetise their practice, some of whom consider turning tarot into a fnancial transaction compromises its magic. The Reading, however, does not engage with tarot through the lens of a professional reader striving to create a sustainable business model. The work is oriented towards a diferent kind of potential that embraces tarot’s friction with capitalist imperatives and its patriarchal shaming interpellation. Unlike a traditional one-on-one format, it is reconceived in collective form, expanded into a pedagogical model in which there is a de-privileging of one participant’s exclusive knowledge. In the vein of Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), an important reference for Husni-Bey, there are no ‘teachers’ and ‘students’ but rather ‘teacher-students’ and ‘student-teachers’ (p. 61). What unfolds in The Reading is perhaps more akin to the esoteric turn in tarot, where alternative practices fourished in between the doctrines of church and state, experimenting with diferent ideas and knowledge systems. And so, this is to take a queer, non-linear route towards overcoming an obstacle. Husni-Bey claims the pedagogical is what always occurs in a tarot reading. In other words, one sits with a reader, presents a question to focus the reading, and the reader then assists in producing a narrative in order to deal with the problem. By its nature, tarot is based on dialogical and dialectical approaches. As the cards are fipped, there is a process of conversational decoding that takes places: observing the patterns and interactions between diferent cards, more elements that complicate the narrative, giving it more texture. As Freire writes, ‘historical themes are never isolated, independent, disconnected, or static; they are always interacting dialectically with their opposites’ (1970, p. 52). The tarot cards cannot stand as static pieces of knowledge with fxed interpretations. Their signifcance is suspended, unfolding, incomplete. To this, I want to recall Tsing’s (2016) ‘patchy Anthropocene’ and her reference to anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, who ‘guides us to things that do not ft together—and yet somehow are together’ (p. 4). In the uneven Anthropocene, where the local perforates the global, this urges an attention to complexities and conficting scales. As Tsing writes, Strathern teaches us to slow down and ‘sit in the muddle’ (p.  5). This is a messier

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alternative to Freire’s Marxist dialectics, stopping short of a synthesis. But in this fashion, tarot’s openness to multiple articulations undercuts the notion of a frm ‘solution’. It assists in visualising a problem without reducing its complexities. I want to return to the original exhibition context that informed The Reading in order to consider how tarot fts into the larger thematic framework of magic. Coming back to de Martino, his investigation into magic sought to critique the presumptions of magic’s falseness in ethnographic scholarship. This line of argument strengthened over the course of his career, countering the radical scepticism and ‘anti-magic polemic that runs through the entire course of Western civilization’ (De Martino 2015, p. xi). Philosopher Federico Campagna (2018) builds on some of De Martino’s insights, examining two reality systems or cosmogonies used to structure the world: magic and Technic. While not interchangeable, capitalism relies on Technic as a metaphysical framework, which functions in ‘the spirit of absolute instrumentality, according to which everything is merely a means to an end’ (p. 25). Technic operates through ‘cutting up’ the world, reducing and packaging things into units that can be replicated and made into infnite combinations (p. 34). As Campagna writes, this is to see the world as a ‘stock-pile of standing-reserve . . . a forest is no longer a forest, but a stockpile of timber ready to be sent to production’ (p. 24). This is compatible with the logic of extractive capitalism: cutting into the earth in order to mine and make commodities from nature, which is understood as a resource to be exploited and nothing else. Unlike Technic, magic embraces the irreducible and is not harnessed to productivism. Magic is against Technic’s measurable units and its belief in absolute language to encapsulate the world (Campagna 2018, p. 32). On this note, it is helpful to observe Silvia Federici’s (2004) important work on how magic was purged from the world in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, resulting in a genocidal wave of witch hunts across medieval Europe. While a vast range of activities and beliefs were understood as magic—animistic conceptions of nature, the use of herbs for healing, prophecies and divination (Federici 2004, pp. 142–143)—the punitive charge of ‘magic’ was often reserved for the knowledges and solidarities of women from the lower classes. In other words, these were practices that could not be accommodated with the new capitalist organisation of labour and were marginalised or extinguished as a consequence. In this sense, Husni-Bey aligns herself with a queer-feminist reclaiming of magical practices and subjectivities. As Federici writes, ‘in the eyes of this new capitalist class, this anarchic, molecular conception of the difusion of power in the world was anathema’ (p. 174). In a similar vein, Campagna (2018) argues that magic proceeds from the inefable: what cannot be possessed and pinned down (p. 118). Like Strathern’s invitation to ‘sit in the muddle’, the critique of neat scalar divisions is pertinent in the uneven Anthropocene, where the local perforates the global. In The Reading, the modular confguration of the tarot spread assists in thinking across scales. And while the cards ‘speak’, their meanings are often suggestive and do not exhaust what is signifed. Their ambiguous and indeterminate qualities are subject to an embodied and dialogic exchange between the reader and, in this case, the collective querent. In tracing the persistence of magic, as de Martino does, I  want to emphasise its therapeutic properties. In viewing magic as a demand for ‘psychological protection’, de Martino understood it as a valuable support system for the rural Italian peasantry, placing him at odds with orthodox Marxists and their disdain for the cultural ‘backwardness’ of the South (Dei, 2018 p. 55). A key concept that recurs throughout his work is the ‘crisis of presence’ (De Martino 2015). This describes a moment of

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slippage threatening one’s sense of self and ability to act in the world. It is where there is some kind of malaise in the world that induces feelings of fear and impotence in a person. Of course, in a current context, this is resonant with the looming crisis that is the uneven Anthropocene, threatening the extinction of life of Earth. Magic, de Martino explains, is a therapeutic response, comprising a set of cultural techniques that can help the suferer to regain presence in the world, shaking them from their paralysis. As an example, Marja-Liisa Honkasalo (2015) applies de Martino’s ‘crisis of presence’ to the religious rituals of North Kareliean women in eastern Finland. Marginalised for their religion and also due to their gender in the Orthodox Christian church, the women practice domestic rituals, such as prayers and intricate embroideries, to assert their presence. Honkasalo interprets these rituals as like ‘holding together a world that often seemed to be falling apart’ (p. 72). Husni-Bey also articulates her own attraction to tarot as ‘a thing to go to when everything else fell apart’ (2019). In this sense, these are embodied rituals oriented towards a collective assertion of presence to treat feelings of social alienation. Towards the end of The Reading, a card printed with the term ‘Vulnerability’ is fipped in the ‘outcome’ position. The illustration features two headless fgures, blind and deaf, clinging to one another and standing on top of the Earth (Figure 5.3). Again, the participants work to decode what is on the card. One suggests there is a confessional implication in the card’s literal rendering of ‘spilling their guts out’. Another questions whether there is a competitive dynamic between the fgures, wrestling over the pieces of a broken world. However, against this apocalyptic scenario, one of the participants says: ‘I like to think that they’re dancing . . . there’s magic in that’. This comment fnds a vital moment of joy and interdependence in devastation. Faced with a ‘crisis of presence’, the fgures, like the North Kareliean women, are holding together a world that is falling apart. This can be interpreted as magical, restorative labour that

Figure 5.3 Adelita Husni-Bey, The Reading/La Seduta, 2017, video still. A participant shows the ‘Vulnerability’ tarot card to the rest of the group

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unfolds from a place of vulnerability. As Judith Butler (2015) argues, ‘vulnerability and resistance can, and do, and even must happen at the same time’ (p.  142). Her reconceptualising of vulnerability as a form of activism involves an attention to bodies as dependent on ‘other bodies and networks of support’, and so this means: ‘it is not altogether right to conceive of individual bodies as completely distinct from one another’ (p. 130). This fnds a connection with de Martino on magic as a social infrastructure for the lower classes and Spice’s proposition for an alternative ecological defnition of infrastructure, both as vehicles for collective healing. In this vein, I suggest The Reading unfolds as a kind of intimate activism, one that unravels the unequal distribution of bodily vulnerabilities, to recall Ahmed (2017), and uses the tarot spread as a social infrastructure, where the participants can be vulnerable and therefore attentive to each other. I have sought to examine the pedagogical signifcance of Husni-Bey’s The Reading, which ofers a new approach to understanding the Anthropocene. While the work is somewhat ambitious in its oscillation between the general and particular manifestations of ecological crisis, I want to hold open a tension between Indigenous ontologies and Indigenous-led struggles unfolding on the frontiers of extractive capitalism and magic as a therapeutic form of resistance, expounded through the work of de Martino, Campagna and Federici. In spite of their shared opposition to the regime of Technic, this should not confate them. Nonetheless, it is valuable to see alternative social and cultural infrastructures—building from suppressed knowledges and solidarities—that are working to confront and undo colonial and extractive regimes. In The Reading, the counterintuitive use of tarot is instructive for recalibrating visual strategies in—and against—the Anthropocene with its universalising, de-historicising tendencies. Tarot is a functional device, undoing the knots between passive thinking and active doing. While a tarot reading traverses temporalities, it has frm anchors in the present. This is because tarot requires the querent to be situated and invested, providing a question to drive the reading. This might provoke discomfort where one is faced with being complicit in harm, reaping the fruits of extractive capitalism, for instance, or insulated from its deleterious efects. But if there is no investment, there is no reading. In its generation of knowledge, this is a version of visual activism that does not hinge on ‘facts’ as its central mode of operation. Rather, The Reading is about afective and embodied strategies that interrogate the infexible visualities of the Anthropocene, negotiating a range of proximities and complicities. This calls for shifting our attention from the facts of destruction to the narratives that produce it, including the narratives that prevail in spite of the facts and the counter-narratives that can help bring about healing.

Notes 1. The Celtic Cross is one of the most common tarot spreads. It consists of ten cards laid face down in a numbered sequence. Six of the cards are laid in a cross formation and four cards are spread in vertical row to the right of the cross. The ‘Celtic Cross’ is at the core of the spread and involves a ‘situation’ card and a ‘crossing’ card laid on top. This is representative of the querent’s state of mind and the problem that drives the reading. The rest of the cards are in set positions that refer to factors that infuence the problem and are interpreted by the reader in a methodical fashion.

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2. While acknowledging the problems attached to the term, I use the term ‘Anthropocene’ or ‘uneven Anthropocene’ to encompass a range of uses and contestations. See feminist geologist Jill Schneiderman’s (2017) ‘The Anthropocene Controversy’ in references for a more detailed discussion of the debates surrounding the term.

References Ahmed, S. 2017. Living a Feminist Life, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Ahmed, S. 2019. What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Archambault, D. 2019. ‘Taking a Stand at Standing Rock’, in N. Estes  & J. Dhillon (eds), Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, pp. 37–39. Boler, M. & Zembylas, M. 2002. ‘Discomforting Truths: The Emotional Terrain of Understanding Diference’, in P. Pericles Trifonas (ed.), Pedagogies of Diference: Rethinking Education for Social Change, Routledge, New York and Abingdon, pp. 107–129. Bryan-Wilson, J., Gonzales, J. & Willsdon, D. 2016. ‘Editor’s Introduction: Themed Issue on Visual Activism’, Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 5–23. Butler, J. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, Routledge, New York and Abingdon. Butler, J. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Campagna, F. 2018. Magic and Technic: The Reconstruction of Reality, Bloomsbury Academic, London. Dei, F. 2018. ‘The Magical Worlds of Ernesto de Martino’, in C. Alemani (ed.), Il Mondo Magico: 57th Venice Biennale. Italian Pavilion, Marsilo Editori, Venice, pp. 49–58. De Martino, E. 2015. Magic: A Theory from the South. Translated by Dorothy Louise Zinn, HAU Books, Chicago, IL. Demos, T. J. 2017. Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today, Sternberg Press, Berlin. Dhillon, J. 2019. ‘What Standing Rock Teaches Us About Environmental Justice’, in N. Estes & J. Dhillon (eds), Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, pp. 235–241. Estes, N. 2019. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance, Verso, New York and London. Estes, N. & Dhillon J. 2019. ‘Introduction: The Black Snake, #NoDAPL, and the Rise of the People’s Movement’, in N. Estes  & J. Dhillon (eds), Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, pp. 1–10. Farley, H. 2009. A Cultural History of Tarot: From Entertainment to Esotericism, I.B. Tauris, New York. Federici, S. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Autonomedia, Brooklyn, NY. Freire, P. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Continuum, New York. Gregory, K. 2012. ‘Negotiating Precarity: Tarot as Spiritual Entrepreneurialism’, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 3&4, pp. 264–280. Gregory, K. 2016. ‘In the Cards: From Hearing “Things” to Human Capital’, in K. Behar (ed.), Object Oriented Feminism, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, pp. 225–244. Gregory, K. 2019. ‘Pushed and Pulled to the Internet: Self Employment in the Spiritual Marketplace’, American Behavioural Scientist, vol. 62, no. 2, pp. 208–224. Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, Durham, NC.

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Honkasalo, M. L. 2015. ‘If the Mother of God Does Not Listen: Women’s Contested Agency and the Lived Meaning of the Orthodox Religion in North Karelia’, The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 128, no. 507, pp. 64–92. Houser, H. 2014. ‘The Aesthetics of Environmental Visualisations: More Than Information Ecstasy?’, Public Culture, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 319–337. Husni-Bey, A. & Murney, A. 2019. Interview on 16 February, Skype. Lorde, A. 2017. A Burst of Light and Other Essays, Ixia Press, Mineola, New York. Mezzandra, S. & Neilson, B. 2017. ‘On the Multiple Frontiers of Extraction: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism’, Cultural Studies, vol. 31, pp. 185–204. Moore, J. W. 2017. ‘The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 44, no. 3, pp. 594–630. Sassen, S. 2014. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Schneiderman, J. S. 2017. ‘The Anthropocene Controversy’, in R. Grusin (ed.), Anthropocene Feminism, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, pp. 169–195. Spice, A. 2018. ‘Fighting Invasive Infrastructures: Indigenous Relations Against Pipelines’, Environmental and Society: Advances in Research, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 40–56. Tsing, A. L. 2016. ‘Earth Stalked by Man’, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 2–16. Tuck, E. 2018. ‘I Do Not Want to Haunt You But I Will: Indigenous Feminist Theorizing on Reluctant Theories of Change’, lecture at Indigenous Feminisms Workshop, University of Alberta, 15–18 March. https://vimeo.com/259409100, 10 January 2020. Verges, F. 2017. ‘Racial Capitalocene: Is the Anthropocene Racial?’, Verso Blog, 30 August. www.versobooks.com/blogs/3376-racial-capitalocene, 10 January 2020. Wolfe, P. 2006. ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4. Yusof, K. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.

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Domestic Fronts Arrangements for Feminist Living, or Survival Is Not a Metaphor Alexandra Kokoli

Beginning with a refection on the protestors’ dwellings at the Greenham Common women’s peace camp, this chapter examines the multifarious ways in which the domestic sphere is evoked, restaged, critiqued and reclaimed across artistic practices and visual activism shaped and motivated by feminism. Dwelling matters as both symbol and material necessity for the survival of vulnerable bodies, sustained by continuous giving and taking of care, and including the feminist struggle for social housing. Rather than a straightforward denouncement of dwelling along with patriarchal domesticity, I argue that feminist art, activism and their multiple intersections in the work of Paula Chambers, Małgorzata Markiewicz and Sera Waters continue to revisit and sometimes recover homemaking, its materiality and its symbols, as well as explore the potential for nurturing feminist subjects. Proceeding through a mix of scholarship and personal meditation on intuitively collected research materials, the chapter carves a speculative path through apparently distinct instances of feminist politics across activism and creative practice to propose new perspectives on the complex interface between feminism, labour, bodies and the stuf of home.

(Im)Material Resistance a bit of symbolism, a bit of vandalism —Nicky Edwards (1986, 112)

In the rich visual archive that the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common (Berkshire, UK; 1981–2000) left behind, protesters’ dwellings are omnipresent even though they only sometimes constitute the main focus of photographs or drawings. Once spotted, they are certainly memorable. Greenham ‘campers’ and ‘stayers’ who, unlike visitors, stayed overnight or spent extended periods of time at the camp and were thus subject to its women-only policy, explored a range of dwelling arrangements, from sleeping in cars, camper vans and sometimes caravans to setting up tents and ‘benders’, makeshift structures from sticks bent and set into the ground with plastic sheeting stretched over, just about strong enough to ofer protection from the elements but also very easy to dismantle: violently in evictions by the authorities or for quick removal to safety, to avoid destruction by eviction (Figure 6.1). If tents have emerged as the signature ‘disobedient objects’ of more recent protest movements, including Occupy, at once practically essential and symbolically potent (Feigenbaum 2014),1 benders represent the true ‘spirit’ of Greenham, namely the combination of its ethical orientation,

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Figure 6.1 Decorated Bender, Greenham Common women’s peace camp, 1980s Source: Courtesy of Adam Blaug. Photograph by Astra Blaug, The Feminist Library Collections at Bishopsgate Institute Note: www.bishopsgate.org.uk/collections/blaug-astra

political commitments and material strategies. Their pliable resilience both explains and symbolises the surprising longevity of the peace camp. Surrounding the US airbase in rural Berkshire, the women’s peace camp protested against and resisted the nuclear mutation of the long-standing militarisation of this common land. Greenham Common was claimed by the Air Ministry as a military training airfeld in the early 1940s and was soon handed over to the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) (Greenham Common Control Tower 2020). Despite intervals of disuse after the end of World War II, the Ministry of Defence never returned it to the Council for free public use, as was its original designation—a common (Harford and Hopkins 1984, 7). By 1968, the base was formally and indefnitely leased to Britain’s American allies and became known as USAF (United States Air Force) Greenham Common (ibid.), although the acronym USRAF has also been informally used to highlight the collusion between the British (RAF) and US air forces in the de-commoning of the site, following the compulsory purchase of the land in 1951 by the Ministry of Defence. In 1979, NATO earmarked Greenham as a base for Cruise missiles, nuclear weapons with many times the annihilating power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. It was this decision by NATO that prompted a group of women, men and children to march in protest from Cardif to the site and to eventually set up the peace camp there, which would remain women-only and leaderless for 19 years (1981–2000). It is bitterly ironic that the most concerted eforts to put an end

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to the peace camp by legal means took the course of strengthening and policing the boundaries of the base and challenging the right of the women protesters to the land of Greenham, still designated in name if not in deed as a common (DEFE 24/2966 1983; PREM 19/1846 1983–1986). A  local far-right group, R.A.G.E. (Ratepayers Against the Greenham Encampment), unsuccessfully sought to have the peace camp’s water supply disconnected and to strike campers of the electoral register by questioning the validity of the protest site as a residential address (Moores 2014; GB62 IWM Documents 1982–1988). Land rights frame a fundamental opposition between the nuclear military base and the peace camp, separated by a wire fence. In an overview of a multi-disciplinary, archaeology-led research project on the site, the team describes Greenham Common as a heterogeneous object, using the phrase ‘bunkers and benders’ to refect on the radical disparities accommodated on the site across the two sides of the perimeter fence (Department of Archaeology, n.d.). The ‘bunkers and benders’ binary has both material and symbolic consistency, representing oppositional ethical and political orientations towards nuclear weapons, their accumulation, their purpose and their potential. In the section titled ‘Personal Responsibility’ in a collection of resources and documentation of actions of the Greenham Common peace camp, Sarah van Veen describes her motivations for anti-nuclear activism: ‘I felt I had to do something and not just build a bunker in my back garden!’ (Cook and Kirk 1983, 28). Benders instead of bunkers stand for a de-privatisation of daily life in defence of common survival, underlined by van Veen’s own negotiation of the personally painful contradiction that defending her young family should necessitate leaving them behind, as men do in wartime: ‘Now women are leaving home for peace’ (30). From an archaeological point of view, the durability of bunkers allows for archaeological ‘business as usual’, while the barely-there remnants of benders question to what degree material traces found on or in the ground can fully account for past events, particularly protest and activist community-building: the inclusion of protest movements into heritage interpretation does not so much expand as queers the work of archaeology (Schofeld and Anderton 2000), challenging its normative methodologies and expectations by demonstrating what their narrow application leaves out.

Darning the Fence: Domesticity as a Target and a Frame(Work) The cheap and easy construction, activist mobility and archaeological undetectability of benders shows them to be contiguous with the visual, material and performative poetics of Greenham women’s actions, many of which focused on the perimeter fence of the USAF airbase. As well as ‘decorating’ the fence with hand-made signs, banners, knitting and everyday objects, Greenham women also shook it to produce an uncanny rattling, suggestive of their determination, cohesion and strength in numbers.2 They also famously cut into the perimeter fence with bolt-cutters, to which they referred by the code name of ‘black cardigans’ in phone communications to avoid detection. Cutting actions were widely publicised as evidence against Greenham women, indicting their hypocrisy (they weren’t really peace women as they didn’t always use peaceful methods), recklessness (they put the base and themselves at risk) and criminality (from destruction of property to prosecutions under the Ofcial Secrets Act, which carried much more severe punishments). Such actions would often be followed with less sensational but equally evocative ones: darning the fence with wool, to repair and also

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transform it. Wool threads woven into the fence were common and can still be found on some of the gates, although it is not possible to determine whether and when they have been replaced (Figure 6.2). Their use to patch up its breaches, incongruously and imperfectly, emerged as an eloquent practice, repeatedly staging the contrast between a military operation with all-destroying potential and the soft protest of passionate amateurs undeterred by their lack of obvious power.3 Greenham women would regularly point out the shared vulnerability of human bodies on both sides of the fence in their campaign against nuclear weapons (cf. Butler 2010), and mobilised their own reparative ethics/aesthetics, comparative weakness and apparent amateurism as evidence of the strength and authenticity of their convictions (cf. Majewska and Szreder 2016; Majewska 2019).

Figure 6.2 Wool interventions on the perimeter fence, Blue Gate, Greenham Common, April 2019 Source: Photograph by Alexandra Kokoli

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There is more than a little humour, tacit and conscious cultural knowledge, and plenty of ambivalence, in the act of darning a breached military fence. Like many other Greenham actions, darning the fence knowingly references the ways in which feminist theory and artistic practice targeted, critiqued and ultimately troubled the domestic sphere, holding its idealisation widely if not solely responsible for divisions of labour that cemented gender hierarchies (cf. Schor 1997; Molesworth 2000). The action simultaneously demonstrates mastery of the secondary domestic skill of maintenance (rather than creative making); it relies on its associations with femininity and the domestic sphere as separate and merely ancillary to the world of— paid—work, while protesting their absurdity; it performs care and possibly caring with a mix of sincerity and parody. To me, it also resonates with the sanitised expletive ‘darn!’, a minced form of ‘damn’ originating in eighteenth-century New England where public swearing was a punishable ofence (Online Etymology Dictionary 2020). Darning the fence is the feminist post-punk pacifst equivalent to the punk safety pin, barely holding together fragments beyond repair and contaminating its tools (wool; pins) with associations that can’t be forgotten and appropriations that won’t be reversed. The alchemical and only superfcially contradictory framing of feminist protest against domesticity within the latter’s codes and practices brings to mind earlier feminist experimentations, including the collaborative Feministo, aka the Women’s Postal Art Event (1975–1977?).4 Artist and educator Kate Walker played a key role in growing the Feministo network out of her personal correspondence using small handmade objects with her friend Sally Gollop after she moved house to ‘keep the lines of communication open’. Soon the network included dozens of women of diferent backgrounds and generations from across the world and resulted in some historic sitespecifc exhibitions, notably Portrait of the Artist as a Housewife at the ICA in the hot summer of 1977, coinciding (or clashing) with celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee and its punk hijacking on the Thames.5 Ambivalence towards women’s role in social reproduction extended to a highly complex approach to art, craft and their respective spheres and institutions. In the words of Phil Goodall (1987, 213), ‘we have both celebrated . . . domestic creativity and exposed it for its paucity’. Although not all of Feministo’s participants thought of themselves as artists (while others had studied art and design at university and/or went on to forge careers in art practice and/or art education), their shared blatant disregard for aesthetic value frmly places the project on the side of its contemporary art practices, despite still being excluded by most of its institutions. Yet art was never its principle concern: as in the Greenham Common peace camp, life, its preservation, and improvement—defending a life worth living while fguring out together what that might be—motivated and shaped Feministo. Writing in the year of Feministo’s ICA exhibition, Rozsika Parker (1987 [1977], 207) examined how postal art broke down the distinction between producers and consumers of art and acknowledged Feministo’s implication with consciousness raising, where ‘art practice becomes a living process—more of a dialogue’. When Kate and her mother Agnes Walker (1987, 27–30) discussed ‘the aesthetics of survival’ ten years later, considerations of daily life, thrift, class, and exclusion from art’s institutions became further entangled, with Kate deploying a weaving metaphor to describe the contrast between the visual cultures of her childhood with the art worlds of her adulthood, both troubling and fruitful, making new text(ile): ‘the tangle in my head’ (30) still refuses to be untangled, a strange material document of discomfort and insight.

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Some of the works exchanged pushed Feministo’s ‘aesthetics of survival’ well beyond any principle of pleasure or at least redemption: the home, as setting of the drudgery and injustice of undervalued and unpaid maintenance labour, is also transformed into the site of sustained mental and physical sufering and sometimes deadly violence. Kathy Nicholson reverses the sublimating process by which (high) art, according to Kenneth Clark (1993 [1956]), turns naked bodies into nude forms, and then goes further.6 Her papier-mâché sculptures of skinned and chopped up little bodies, barely human but visibly female, devolve the nude back into fesh, and fesh into meat readypacked for consumption. Placed on paper salads and Styrofoam trays in the fridge, these body fragments trace a fne line between the banal cruelty of human meat diets and the horror of femicide. Nicholson’s nudes-turned-meat perform another unsettling gesture, typical of her contemporary feminist approach to the domestic: for women, homes become more than prisons to existentially defne and ultimately merge with their bodies, as in Louise Bourgeois’ series Femme Maison (1946–1947) and the collaborative Womanhouse (1972). Another of Nicholson’s works, exploring the dread of post-partum breakdown, which I have only ever seen in a grainy photograph (as if in an old newspaper), showed the form of a near life-size infant pierced by a safety pin and was the only work to be censored from some exhibitions of the Feministo project. The soft and cheap materials and taken-for-granted skillset used in Feministo, and evoked again in the post-punk aesthetics of breached and darned fences at Greenham Common, accommodate a dizzying range of ideas and afects, resulting in uncomfortable exchanges.

Domestic Warfare: Houses and Bodies as Battlegrounds We must arm ourselves—not with weapons but with rage. —Angela Carter (1983, 156)

Violence has been a key dimension of feminist artistic approaches to domesticity.7 In Domestic Warfare (1975), a slide projection of 120 colour slides by Alexis Hunter, domestic interiors are literally attacked and destroyed, dismantled in their materiality, as a potent visual metaphor of the feminist indictment of patriarchal domesticity. The home is revealed as a battleground and then almost a ruin, the materialised aftermath of a feminist war against domesticity. The battle begins between an idealised heterosexual couple modelled after the work’s contemporaneous visual codes of advertising. Represented only by their extremities (impeccably groomed and dressed forearms and lower legs) and placed in overly staged domestic settings, the couple’s fetish-limbs embody a short-lived marital bliss ritually undone in a residential demolition. In all their substantial materiality, domestic interiors gain currency as visual metaphors for life made unliveable in early art informed by feminism. Patriarchy’s symbiotic contiguity with commodity fetishism, capitalism and, as the next paragraph shows, militarism and imperialism remain an explicit if not as widely recognised part of the picture. In a review of a retrospective exhibition of Martha Rosler’s photomontage series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (1967–1972), Laura Cottingham (1991) refects on the artist’s sourcing of photographs of the Vietnam war in the pages of Life Magazine, where ‘half-blown bodies, dead babies, and anguished faces fow seamlessly into mattress ads and photo features of sophisticated kitchens, fastidiously fertilized

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lawns and art-hung living rooms’. Titled the ‘War is Always Home’, the review argues that ‘the consumer media avoids directly referring to political and economic connections between your cozy sofa and someone else’s dead body: Rosler reveals the artifciality of this severed causality’. Rosler’s photomontages therefore undertake the work of reconnection on both symbolic and literal terms. Interestingly, the images already co-habited in close proximity on the pages of Life Magazine; Rosler cuts, crops, and re-assembles them to denaturalise their suture and make it fnally visible. In 2018, Basia Sliwinska and I  curated a small exhibition at the London gallery l’étrangère, with the deliberately provocative title Home Strike, suggestive of warfare, disaster and labour refusal as protest. With works by CANAN (Turkey), Paula Chambers (UK), Małgorzata Markiewicz (Poland) and Su Richardson (UK), who also took part in Feministo and its follow-up Fenix (Parker and Pollock 1987, 216–219), Home Strike revisited the familiar feminist tropes of defamiliarising domesticity to argue that their uncanny forces can still be felt in contemporary art practices informed by and committed to feminism but perhaps no longer framed by it as decisively as, for example, Feministo was. The rest of this section focuses on the ways in which the work of Chambers and Markiewicz negotiates its feminist legacies and contributes to the casting of ‘home’ as a discursive and material space of continuing feminist interest. War is always already in the home, where war makes itself at home. That the fght against patriarchy takes place in both domestic and global politics is not a new idea. Yet, keeping them both simultaneously in view, as Rosler’s work achieves, without one overshadowing the other, proves a delicate operation. The work of Paula Chambers belongs to the traditions of art informed by and committed to feminism briefy outlined here, and adds to them by picturing armed resistance as emanating from within the domestic sphere rather than spilling into it. Chambers weaponises everyday household objects, transforming them into instruments of self-defence or violent revolt: for Kitchen Shanks (2017), common cooking utensils have their handles wrapped in upcycled worn tights secured by colourful hairbands, thereby turning the material supports of femininity into makeshift feminist armament. Exhibited on a security grill, the shanks allude to the display of confscated DIY weapons as an educational tool for prison wardens, depressingly implying that the outbreak may have already been suppressed, or else that the insurgents are gaining ground and engaging in skill-sharing. Kitchen Shanks subverts the stereotypically feminine—perhaps even girly—associations of the colourful tights and hairbands while also sabotaging their networks of consumer capitalist circulation. A rickety barricade cobbled together from fragments of found and sometimes stolen furniture is infested with small cut outs of women with guns, real and imaginary, grotesque and idealised, from images sourced from the internet: Domestic Front (2016–) (Figures 6.3 and 6.4) lurks in the gallery space, carrying with it an unsettling out-ofplace-ness, and poses the even more disturbing question: under what circumstances would you build a barricade at home? In her review of Chambers’ one-person exhibition Shoplifting at Woolworths, Civic Gallery, Barnsley, 2020, Dawn Woolley (2020) acknowledges the evocation of righteous defence against domestic violence, but also intriguingly considers whether the work suggests that ‘a particular type of domestic environment might produce violent women’. Albeit not quite interchangeable, subjects and objects share in their agency and, frustratingly, lack thereof. The not quite random nor obviously systematic placement of the fgures on the barricade appears to provide a model for Feminist Clutter (2018), another of Chambers’ disruptive

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Figure 6.3 Paula Chambers, Domestic Front, 2016, installation view Dye House Gallery, Bradford, April 2018 Source: Courtesy of the artist

occupations of space. Clutter speaks of objects out of place and out of order, crossing boundaries, not knowing their place. Disruptive agency is shared and, in being shared, becomes augmented between revolting subjects and disobedient objects. Here, as in Feministo, domestic things are enlisted in feminist struggle. Alongside Domestic Front, Home Strike included a short video, Resistance Kitchen (2017), by Małgorzata Markiewicz, made in response to and as protest against the withdrawal of funding for women’s shelters in Poland and released for International Women’s Day on 8 March 2017. Wearing a double-breasted trench coat and beret, the artist presents a selection of ingredients, mainly poisonous plants, to prepare deadly dishes which, as she announces to camera, ‘may be the only tool of resistance available to women’. She calls for women to defend themselves and ‘join the resistance kitchen’, in a radical subversion of care-giving. Referencing cinematic and televisual representations of the French resistance in her attire and witchy potion-making in her actions, Markiewicz splices repertories of resistance into new languages of visual activism, where the home gets reinstituted as the mandatory domain of feminine propriety with disastrous results. The cultural codes across which Chambers and Markiewicz operate come with their own risks. While the codes of witchcraft (standing for alternative knowledge and practice, ways of being that fout gender norms and expectations, and the violent suppression of both) have been joyfully deployed in the visual and material activist practices of Greenham women, photographic images of women with guns—and often specifcally mothers with guns, pushing buggies with rifes slung on their shoulders—have been weaponised by the American far right in a treacherous mobilisation of pseudo-feminism as a euphemism for white supremacy.8 Aggressive nostalgia for homelands of imaginary

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Figure 6.4 Paula Chambers, Domestic Front, 2016, installation view, detail, Dye House Gallery, Bradford, April 2018 Source: Courtesy of the artist

purity merges with fears of impending socio-environmental collapse. Chambers is aware of such problems, and yet her barricade is radically and dangerously inclusive. Reactionary survivalists appear alongside freedom-fghters and exploitative fantasies of gun-toting women in bikinis, begging for psychoanalytic readings. Their co-existence is as tenuous as the barricade on which they perch is unstable. What keeps them together is a recognition of the transhistorical global war against women and its aspirational refection in armed resistance. While seemingly addressing uncannily familiar concerns, art practices like those of Chambers and Markiewicz represent another turn of the screw in the nexus of feminist politics and visual activism. In crushing austerity, neo-feudalism and the creeping mainstreaming of the intrinsically anti-feminist far right, they no longer petition for equality, nor do they ofer utopian visions of a

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feminist futurity. They go of grid, in bitter recognition that self-reliance and makeshift but forceful resistance may well be the only option. Never mind resilience: this is war. [The last sentence of the paragraph above gives me pause. It was originally written for a short presentation at the symposium ‘Feminist Visual Activism’, organised by Basia Sliwinska, ICA, London, in July 2018, in which it made for a strong ending and was well-received.9 Yet in the sober process of revising this text for publication, its obvious contradiction confuses, and its ‘playing to the gallery’ populism grates. Why do I  then hesitate deleting it? I  am certainly not suggesting that the work of Chambers and Markiewicz represents a departure from the ethics and aesthetics of Greenham visual and material activisms; on the contrary, the two are in dialogue, or perhaps more accurately form part of a dialectic. While the struggle for peace against a grotesquely funded military system carefully sidesteps its methods and discourses, it is also haunted by spectres of unusual or perverse exceptions to patriarchal femininity: ‘Pallas Athina in shining armour, Joan of Arc, an Amazon, a Nicaraguan woman in battle fatigues’ (Jones, 1987, 180) or even serial killer Myra Hindley (183). Disorderly chains of association, at once revolutionary and shaped by the culture against which they revolt, like Chambers’ internet-sourced women with guns, snag and tear at the screen that separates survival from the spectral realm of its opposite. Breaching the peace to keep the peace.10 Pursuing a systemic rupture for life’s sake is a risky business, not for the faint-hearted or the purists. The ficker between the hostile ghosts of haunting and promising spectres of an afterlife, a continuous transformation for the sake of survival which is however iconographically tethered to the past,11 is amplifed and multiplied in the tangled threads of art informed by and committed to feminism. Brimming with potential and danger, the infestation of these uncomfortable images on Chambers’ rickety Domestic Front at once accentuates the structure’s fragility and holds it compositionally together. In this pause, the need to hazard a defnition of feminist visual activism presents itself with pressing urgency. Feminist visual activism labels a force feld too wild to safely accommodate specifc political causes, even though it regularly hosts and nurtures them. It is a space of perpetual unrest in which the labour of archival care for bricolaged collections of images, things and practices is activated by embodied subjects who fnd strength in their shared vulnerability and their determination to survive, or even live a better life.]

Slow and Urgent: Towards Feminist Survival(ism)12 In a troubling text on gender, the Cold War and responses to the nuclear threat across militarist and pacifst camps, Wendy Brown (1989) considers the persistence of the special role ascribed to women and domesticity in (nuclear) extremis. Planning for a future after a nuclear strike might seem cruelly pointless or cynically misleading, but both the Central Ofce of Information in Britain (which Brown does not discuss) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the US produced guidelines in which the outmoded ‘domestic manual’ gets resurrected (Brown 1989, 286). Even despite the occasional liberal nod to gender equality, both the state politics of survivalism and the activist politics of disarmament ‘reiterate a traditional domestic usage of the feminine [and afrm] the symbolic value of women to the reproduction of culture’ (287). Both operate within a horizon of individualism in which a time without—or possibly free from—biological and social reproduction remains unimaginable and

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unimagined. Brown is aware of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and acknowledges the specifcity of women’s contributions within it but does not discuss women’s activism or peace camps such as Greenham Common. I wonder what she would have made of Greenham’s queered living arrangements and its sometimes seemingly naive attachment to ‘sequence’, a futurity achieved through reproduction, which has since come under much criticism, including from feminist quarters. Although survivalism may be an already compromised political discourse bound in individualist self-reproduction, the real will to survive cannot be reduced or abandoned to such murky discursive ground. Having carefully explained the suspicion with which African women have dealt with the Euro-American canons of feminist theory and their taxonomies, Wendy Jacobs (2011) brands the ‘praxial feminism’ of women’s housing activism in post-apartheid South Africa as ‘survival feminism’: her case study of the Victoria Mxenge Housing and Development Association demonstrates the interconnectedness between feminist consciousness, a commitment to treating housing as a necessity rather than a commodity, quality of life, social justice and community building. Survival in this context is shown to be much more than the simple preservation of biological life, and rather a personal and political commitment to caring about and for each other. Focusing on survival ofers a view of the feminist preoccupation with domesticity that is neither merely symbolic nor privatised. Although Ann Pettitt (2006, 39) describes the original group that founded the Greenham Common’s women’s peace camp as ‘amateurs’ in activism, she also notes that some had experience of direct action, ‘both to solve our own need for housing and to help others’. Defending social care and the right to decent housing in particular is identifed as part-and-parcel of nuclear disarmament campaigns; conversely, in the age of nuclear proliferation, all activism for social welfare is cast, indirectly, as anti-nuclear activism, protesting ‘the sickening waste and mismanagement of money, skills and resources invested in the arms race’ (Cook and Kirk 1983, 33). Historically, taking care has not been taken seriously: it is feminised and therefore belittled, just as giving care is feminised in the diferent direction of self-sacrifcing mothering, literally priceless and thus never remunerated or rewarded. Sera Waters (2020) reclaims the taking and giving of care in a format traditionally used by young women, as a learning exercise and, if well made, a token of friendship to exchange with one’s peers: her Survivalist Sampler (2019–2020) attempts to recover survivalism from the far right while ‘remembering and relearning’ (23) ‘slower ways of existing’ (Waters 2020, 22). Waters’ proposal for an intersectional feminist survivalism deploys domestic craft to repair the damage to the land perpetrated by the collusion of settler colonialism, extractivism and capitalism, and to recover long-suppressed aboriginal knowledge and practices. The work is at once slow and urgent: caring takes time even or especially in emergencies.

Covid Coda: Feminist Survival Against the Odds At the time of writing (April 2020), I fnd myself in domestic lockdown following a decision of the British government. Diferent versions of similar emergency policies are in efect across much of the world. We are saving lives, we are told, by staying home, working from home if we can, being furloughed if we are entitled or enduring job losses, to slow down the spread of the 2019 version of a common virus which continues to elude efective management and whose morbidity had originally been

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underestimated. The impact of the virus and its (mis)management throws into sharp relief and further exacerbates persistent inequalities pivoting on ability, class and race, in intersection with gender and sexuality. Our imposed self-isolation proves once more how easily the simple struggle for the preservation of life becomes an instrument for the afrmation of normativity, not only ideologically reinforcing it but also threatening anyone who might deviate from it with sanctions of varying severity. The imperative to stay home rests on the assumption of an idealised family unit, untouched by intimate partner violence or child abuse, where one lives with their loved ones and loves the ones one lives with. Counterintuitively, surviving the pandemic of COVID19 by following the instructions we have been issued poses grave danger to the wellbeing and lives of many women and children. The virus and its (mis)management threaten to become a disaster for feminism by re-tabling implicitly gendered divisions of labour with an urgency that defes their long-standing feminist critiques and hard-won transformation (Lewis 2020; Flaherty 2020). Care workloads expand and explode as schools remain closed, friends and family fall ill and the immuno-vulnerable lose their independence. Life partners fnd themselves in awkward negotiations about housework and childcare or, worse, assumptions are made that negate feminist achievements of the past 50  years. Women are killed by the men with whom they share their lives and dwellings at shockingly accelerated rates (Townsend 2020), while feminist organisations around the world are compelled to share guidance on how to deal with violent partners in lockdown (Glen 2020). On 6 April 2020, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres tweeted: ‘Peace is not just the absence of war. Many women under lockdown for #COVID19 face violence where they should be safest: in their own homes’ (Newman 2020). Single parents, who are predominantly women, are also hit harder than two-parent families, facing greater stresses on their resources, fnancial, temporal and emotional. Women’s organisation Madre (2020) issued a strategy for ‘care and connection’ in the COVID-19 pandemic, in which the care work already performed by women, in principle and in actuality, is mobilised to seed an increasingly de-privatised future.13 Would a pandemic such as COVID-19—and its management by obeying the instruction to ‘stay home’—have meant the end of the Greenham Common peace camp if it happened in 1990 as opposed to 2020?14 I think not, since Greenham successfully unsettled both the site and situation of ‘home’. One of Greenham Common’s most radical interventions, as Sasha Roseneil (1995; esp. 2000) among others have persuasively argued, was to queer domesticity, frst by liberating it from its heteronormative bonds but by also going as far as questioning its familiar architectural repertories. Just as Greenham benders, super-mobile makeshift shelters that leave little trace behind, stood in semiotic, material and political opposition to bunkers, the peace camp hauled living outside of living rooms and chosen intimacies out of structures of kinship. It exploded the boundaries of the ‘household’ to encompass all women gathered on the common, bound together by their determination to survive and to secure the survival of others.

Notes 1. Disobedient Objects was the title of an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2014–2015), which examined ‘the powerful role of objects in movements for social change’ and ‘demonstrated how political activism drives a wealth of design ingenuity’ (Victoria and Albert Museum 2020).

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2. In early photographs of USAF Greenham Common, the perimeter fence appears to be made out of bare wire, although colour photographs from the mid-eighties onwards show it to be coated in green plastic. The piece of fence that I saw and handled in the Feminist Archive South (Special Collections, Bristol University Library) was plastic-coated. I have not been able to fnd out exactly when or why the original fence was replaced with a plastic-coated version, but it is relevant to note that the action of shaking the fence produced a much more powerful sound without the plastic coating. 3. There are many continuities as well as discontinuities between Greenham’s activist uses of craft and contemporary craftivisms. See Carpenter (2010) and Kokoli (2014). 4. Feministo is difcult to date: while the personal correspondence between Kate Walker and Sally Gollop in small handmade objects began in 1975, it was only later that the project expanded into a postal art network, with open calls for participation published in the feminist press in the following year. And whereas the 1977 exhibition Portrait of the Artist as Housewife is widely viewed as a culmination of Feministo, with four of its key participants (Su Richardson, Monica Ross, Suzy Varty, and Kate Walker) moving on to a new project, Fenix, in the same year, some of the Feministo artworks were exhibited internationally thereafter. It is revealing that Rozsika Parker (1987, 207), who famously also showcased Feministo in Studio International, chooses to leave the completion date of the project open, still wondering in 1977 whether it might become ‘a vast, subversive, international network’ with a blurred beginning and possibly no end. 5. On 7 June  1977, The Sex Pistols famously threw a party on a river boat on the river Thames to launch their single ‘God Save the Queen’ at the height of Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee celebrations (Savage 2012). 6. Art historian, museum director and broadcaster Kenneth Clark is perhaps best known for his BBC2 series Civilisation (1966–1969), which was criticised for its reinforcement of the Western European art historical canon, disregard of women artists and artists of colour, and lack of engagement with the socio-political conditions under which art is produced and consumed. John Berger responded to such biases through his series Ways of Seeing (BBC2, 1972), which profoundly infuenced both feminist art history as well as the development of the study of visual culture in Britain, while Lynda Nead (1992) critiqued Clark’s implicitly gendered and explicitly idealised approach to the nude in her book The Female Nude. 7. The complex approaches to domesticity in art informed by feminism cannot be fully analysed here. I discuss some of them, including Feministo, in my book The Feminist Uncanny (2016). See also Tobin (2017). 8. The signifcance to contemporary feminisms of witches and the history of their persecution is too wide-ranging to adequately chart here. On mobilisations of witchcraft at Greenham Common, see Roseneil (2000, 16–18). On women in far-right white supremacist movements, including the deployment of scantily clad women with guns, see Daniels (1997, 56–69). Over the past decade (2010–2020), women’s leadership in such movements has both expanded and gained wider recognition; for an international perspective, see e.g. Provost and Whyte (2018). I  am indebted to Aaron Winter for his expert assistance in navigating the intersections of gender and the far right. 9. I would like to thank Basia Sliwinska for the invitation to participate in the symposium and to rethink and expand my contribution for this book. I am also indebted to her insightful observations on the work of care in artistic practice informed by feminism (Sliwinska 2019). 10. ‘Breaching the peace’ was the ofence for which many Greenham women were arrested and prosecuted. The irony was not lost on them and the phrase was appropriated as a Greenham slogan, giving the title to numerous articles and pamphlets, including one that expressed criticisms of Greenham from a feminist perspective (London: Only Women Press, 1983). 11. My approach to the visual and material activisms of Greenham Common is informed by Griselda Pollock’s feminist mobilisation of Aby Warburg’s art historical methods that combine scholarship with intuition and chart iconographical continuities and discontinuities in art and visual culture (Pollock 2007, 2013). I am also mindful of Chari Larsson’s (2019) proposal to view Warburg’s notion of ‘afterlife’ as an alternative to melancholic models of haunting and hauntology in art history and more broadly in the humanities and the social sciences. However, I wonder whether the distinction between ‘afterlife’ and ‘haunting’ is not already implicit in the diference between hostile and friendly ghosts, with whom one might anachronistically collaborate.

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12. On the role of women and discursive deployments of femininity in millenarian movements and the apocalyptic imagination, see Palmer (1997). Palmer briefy discusses ecofeminism and Wicca, and although both are relevant to Greenham Common, I see the peace camp as principally defned by a pacifst opposition to the nuclear arms race. 13. For an in-progress compilation of sources and resources on the impact on gender equality of COVID-19, see EIGE (2020). 14. Speculative approaches to Greenham Common are not necessarily helpful, but I  am encouraged by Sasha Roseneil’s example, who wonders how the camp’s women-only character would have dealt with trans issues. Roseneil (2000, 184, n.6) makes the educated guess that inclusivity would have prevailed and that the gate system would have meant that some if not all gates would have been transinclusive. I assume that there were transwomen at Greenham, although I have not yet found any references to their experience.

References Brown, Wendy. (1989). ‘Nuclear Domesticity: Sequence and Survival’. In Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, edited by Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich and Susan Merrill Squier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 283–302. Butler, Judith. (2010). Frames of War, rev. edn. London: Verso. Carpenter, Ele. (2010). ‘Activist Tendencies in Craft’. In Concept Store #3: Art, Activism and Recuperation. Bristol: Arnolfni, pp. 86–91 Carter, Angela. (1983). ‘Anger in a Black Landscape’. In Over Our Dead Bodies: Women Against the Bomb, edited by Dorothy Thompson. London: Virago, pp. 146–156. Clark, Kenneth. (1993 [1956]). The Nude. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cook, Alice, and Gwyn Kirk. (1983). Greenham Women Everywhere. London: Pluto Press. Cottingham, Laura. (1991). The War Is Always Home: Martha Rosler (catalogue essay). http:// martharosler.net/reviews/cottingham.html Daniels, Jessie. (1997). White Lies: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse. London: Routledge. DEFE 24/2966. (1983). ‘Working Party on the Control of Anti-Nuclear Demonstrations: Public Access to Ministry of Defence Lands; Peace Camps’. National Archives, London. Department of Archaeology, University of York. (n.d.). Greenham Common. www.york.ac.uk/ archaeology/research/current-projects/greenham-common/. Edwards, Nicky. (1986). Mud. London: Women’s Press. EIGE (European Institute for Gender Equality). (2020). ‘Covid-19 and Gender Equality’. https:// eige.europa.eu/topics/health/covid-19-and-gender-equality?fbclid=IwAR3s6O4ak_WFhMY DhaKYp4wS4gDHEpUFKNl9gXfjeKgkvDJtrY6ZqfsSd68 Feigenbaum, Anna. (2014). ‘The Disobedient Objects of Protest Camps’. In Disobedient Objects, edited by C. Flood and G. Grindon. London: V&A Publishing, pp. 34–44. Flaherty, Coleen. (2020). ‘No Room of One’s Own: Early Journal Submission Data Suggest COVID-19 Is Tanking Women’s Research Productivity’. Inside Higher Ed, 21 April. https:// tinyurl.com/yyfkbh4k GB62 IWM Documents. (1982–1988). (G A Meyer), Imperial War Museum. Glen, Louise. (2020). ‘Women’s Aid Issues Advice for People Living With Domestic Abuse During Covid-19 Coronavirus Pandemic’. Ross-Shire Journal, 17 April. www.ross-shire journal.co.uk/news/womens-aid-issues-advice-for-people-living-with-domestic-abuse196995/ Goodall, Phil. (1987). ‘Growing Point/Pains in “Feministo”’. In Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement, 1970–1985, edited by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock. London: Pandora, pp. 213–214. Greenham Common Control Tower. (2020). ‘History’. www.greenhamtower.org.uk/history/

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Harford, Barbara, and Sarah Hopkins. (1984). ‘What Is Greenham Common?’ In Greenham Common: Women at the Wire, edited by Barbara Hapford and Sarah Hopkins. London: Women’s Press, pp. 7–8. Jacobs, Becky L. (2011). ‘Unbound by Theory and Naming: Survival Feminism and the Women of the South African Victoria Mxenge Housing and Development Association’, Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice, Vol. 26, No. 19. Jones, Lynne. (1987). ‘Perceptions of “Peace Women” at Greenham Common 1981–1985: A Participant’s View’. In Images of Women in Peace and War: Cross-Cultural and Historical Perspectives, edited by Sharon MacDonald, Pat Holden and Shirley Ardener. Oxford: Macmillan, pp. 179–204. Kokoli, Alexandra. (2014). ‘Not a Straight Line by a Spiral: Charting Continuity and Change in Textiles Informed by Feminism’, Image and Text, no. 23, pp. 110–129. Larsson, Chari. (2019). ‘Against a Melancholic Art History: The Afterlife of Images’. In The Persistence of Melancholia in Arts and Culture, edited by Andrea Bubenik. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 193–203. Lewis, Helen. (2020). ‘The Coronavirus Is a Disaster for Feminism’. The Atlantic, 19 March. www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/03/feminism-womens-rights-coronaviruscovid19/608302/ Madre. (2020). ‘Care and Connection in Crisis: Feminist Strategy to Confront Covid-19’. www. madre.org/sites/default/fles/PDFs/Care%20and%20Connection%20in%20Crisis.pdf Majewska, Ewa. (2019). ‘A Bitter Victory? Anti-fascist Cultures, Institutions of the Common, and Weak Resistance in Poland’, Third Text, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 397–413. Majewska, Ewa, and Kuba Szreder. (2016). ‘So Far, So Good: Contemporary Fascism, Weak Resistance, and Postartistic Practices in Today’s Poland’. e-fux, No. 76. www.e-fux.com/ journal/76/71467/so-far-so-good-contemporary-fascism-weak-resistance-and-postartisticpractices-in-today-s-poland/ Molesworth, Helen. (2000). ‘House Work and Art Work’, October, Vol. 92 (Spring), pp. 71–97. Moores, Christopher. (2014). ‘Opposition to the Greenham Women’s Peace Camps: RAGE Against the “Obscene”’, History Workshop Journal, No. 78, pp. 204–227. Nead, Lynda. (1992). The Female Nude. London: Routledge. Newman, Scott. (2020). ‘Global Lockdowns Resulting in “Horrifying Surge” in Domestic Violence, U.N. Warns’. NPR. www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/ 06/827908402/global-lockdowns-resulting-in-horrifying-surge-in-domestic-violence-u-nwarns?t=1588912766645 Online Etymology Dictionary. (2020), ‘Darn’. www.etymonline.com/word/darn Palmer, Susan. (1997). ‘Woman as World Savior: The Feminization of the Millennium in New Religious Movements’. In Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem, edited by Thomas Robbins and Susan Palmer. London: Routledge, 159–171. Parker, Rozsika (1987 [1977]). ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Housewife’. In Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movements, 1970–1985, edited by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock. London: Pandora, pp. 207–210. Parker, Rozsika, and Griselda Pollock (1987). Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movements, 1970–1985. London: Pandora. Pettitt, Ann. (2006). Walking to Greenham. Dinas Powys: Honno. Pollock, Griselda. (2007). Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum. Abingdon: Routledge. Pollock, Griselda. (2013). After-Afects, After-Images. Manchester: Manchester University Press. PREM 19/1846. (1983–1986). DEFENCE. Policing of Demonstrations at Military Bases: Activities of Anti-Nuclear Demonstrators; Part 1. London: National Archives. Provost, Claire, and Lara Whyte. (2018). ‘Why Are Women Joining Far-Right Movements, and Why Are We So Surprised?’. Open Democracy, 31 January.

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Roseneil, Sasha. (1995). Disarming Patriarchy: Feminism and Political Action at Greenham. Buckingham: Open University Press. Roseneil, Sasha. (2000). Common Women, Uncommon Practices. London: Cassell. Savage, Jon. (2012). ‘The Sex Pistols’ Jubilee Boat Trip—A Classic Account’. The Guardian, 29 May. www.theguardian.com/music/2012/may/29/sex-pistols-jubilee-boat-trip Schofeld, John, and Mike Anderton (2000). ‘The Queer Archaeology of Green Gate: Interpreting Contested Space at Greenham Common Airbase’, World Archaeology, Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 236–251. Schor, Mira. (1997). ‘You Can’t Leave Home Without It’. In Wet: On Painting, Feminism and Art Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 191–203. Sliwinska, Basia. (2019). ‘Cathy Wilkes’ Care-Full Matter-Scapes: Female Afects of Care, Feminist Materiality and Vibrant Things’, Journal of Visual Art Practice, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 285–304. Tobin, Amy. (2017). Breaking Down a Woman’s Place. www.ravenrow.org/texts/75/; www. ravenrow.org/texts/76/ Townsend, Mark. (2020). ‘Revealed: Surge in Domestic Violence During Covid-19 Crisis’, The Guardian, 12 April. www.theguardian.com/society/2020/apr/12/domestic-violencesurges-seven-hundred-per-cent-uk-coronavirus Victoria and Albert Museum. (2020). ‘Disobedient Objects: About the Exhibition’. www.vam. ac.uk/content/exhibitions/disobedient-objects/disobedient-objects-about-the-exhibition/ Walker, Kate, and Agnes Walker. (1987). ‘Starting with Rag Rugs: The Aesthetics of Survival’. In Women and Craft, edited by Gillian Elinor et al. London: Virago, pp. 27–30. Waters, Sera. (2020). ‘Crafty Prepping’. Artlink, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 20–27. Woolley, Dawn. (2020). ‘“Shoplifting from Woolworths and Other Acts of Material Disobedience”, an exhibition of work by Paula Chambers’, Third Text Online. http://thirdtext.org/ woolley-chambers

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A Care-Full Re-Membering of Australian Settler Colonial Homemaking Traditions Sera Waters

Australia is haunted: a vast colonial aftermath. For generations, layers of damage caused by settler colonisation1 have been buried under buildings, bitumen, untruths and nationalist agendas, but haunting traumas resurface sooner or later. This chapter reckons with ghosts from this fetid past and interrogates the ghost-making role of settler colonial homemaking. Such reckoning is personally motivated, for Australia’s ghosts arise, in part, from my English, Irish, Scottish and German family’s two centuries of making homes upon invaded and stolen land. I am their descendent, a homemaker, mother and artist, grappling with this exponentially damaging heritage in search for ways to halt its perpetuation. In unpicking ancestral settler colonising, I have interrogated many caring and comforting domestic traditions my family brought to Australian shores from 1838, in the early colonial era, and passed along for six generations. My art practice focuses in on textile traditions particularly, for this domestic materiality not only holds tangible evidence of matriarchal knowledge around colonising but also suggests possibilities for a feminist and activist strategy of what I call ‘care-full re-membering’. Re-membering, informed by an ethics of care, slowly labours within intergenerational traditions and re-makes them to manifest untold truths—the ghosts colonised cultures and families like mine have not been willing to see. It must be remembered that ghosts are not only historic phenomena; just as many are being generated in this current neoliberalist period marred by ecological and humanitarian atrocities.2 There is an urgency to collectively act, and this chapter shares activist artmaking methods based upon truth-telling and care which recognise and call out the systems and structures which continue the incessant formation of ghosts. It is my hope to summon a less haunted future. I call my settler colonising inheritances ‘genealogical ghostscapes’, to knot together the bodily, familial, homely and spatial hauntings left in the wake of my ancestors who made their homes upon Aboriginal Country.3 The term ‘ghostscape’ revises ‘landscape’ to more aptly describe the Australian condition of living in the aftermath of settler colonisation. According to historians Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds, ‘settler colonists went, and go, to new lands to appropriate them and to establish new and improved replicas of the societies they left’ (2010: 2). In reproducing their societies upon Aboriginal Country, settler colonists re-scaped the land, wiping out the physical matter of Aboriginal occupation and covering it over with farms, gardens, buildings, fences and homes. This continuing spatial destruction and transformation thrives on disavowal, and as a result landscapes are pockmarked by absences, which over generations have grown into a loss of knowing about absences: ghosts. Artist and cultural theorist Ross Gibson claims ghosts are regularly cited in

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aftermaths, and he interprets them as not only metaphorical but a way to ‘name a perturbance that lingers in the Australian consciousness’ (2002: 165). The ‘ghosts’ of ghostscapes, then, describe places haunted by traumas which have been made invisible by their routine familial and national disavowal. Despite not being able to see ghosts, as cultural theorist Jan Verwoert described, ghosts are like those captured within ‘proton packs’ in Ghost Busters; they might be hidden from sight but still emit stinking gasses which make their presence known (2012). In colonised lands, ghostscapes reek, and numerous contemporary Australian and international artists, notably Brook Andrew, Doris Salcedo and Julie Gough, use their art to wrestle with inherited pasts that can be sensed but are all the more disturbing for their unknowability. I do know my ancestors cleared Kaurna and Bunganditj Country4 and built homes at the colonising fringes throughout the nineteenth century. An extensive family history archive tended by my mother for 40 years records how many ancestors weathered discrimination but just as many who ‘ghostscaped’, removing Aboriginal and other nonEuropean ways of life to cover them with their own home comforts and ensuing piles of waste. Yet the specifcs of who they encountered, what they saw, their attitudes and daily lives, is largely lost to time. Time, however, does uncover long-term afterefects, and generations on we are haunted by expanding desertifcation, incessant drought, leeching garbage, unmanaged bushfres, species death, polluted waterways and much more. My ancestors caused this. The severe repercussions from accumulated colonising traumas, especially for Australia’s First Nations people and Country, is seeping ever more deeply into the collective Australian consciousness. Yet since colonising began in the late 1700s, a political attitude of denial and disavowal has never waned. Those propelling Australia’s history wars continue to dispute historical accuracies and downplay intergenerational trauma. Ghosts, and their spatial relative, ghostscapes, arise from this unwillingness to acknowledge hurt, making recognition a pressing concern in a nation where, as artist and scholar Ross Gibson says, a ‘habit of denial . . . [is] a national characteristic’ (2002: 150). Recognition is transformative; it does not alter the past, but does enable pathways into empathy, taking responsibility and ultimately change. Like the powerful 2017 document towards constitutional recognition, the Uluru Statement From the Heart,5 my art practice uses truth-telling as a driving force, making tangible the causal actualities of this harm, even when that is confrontationally close to home. Truthtelling is informed here by Foucault’s extensive explications of the implications, beliefs and applications of public avowal (2014), and the push from Australian Aboriginal activists leading the way towards Makarrata.6 This form of truth-telling difers from the ‘transitional justice’ movement, taken up by the Australian government in the last decade, that aims for endings, decolonisation and tying of loose threads. Instead, my telling of truths creates enduring threads and tangled knots which, through publicly exhibited works of art, brings out into the open the messy realities of multigenerational national, imperial and familial settler colonial histories. While I cannot know ‘truth’ as an Aboriginal person, I know how untruths, selective truths or silences are used to sustain colonising practices within families. Patrick Wolfe, activist and leading historian of colonialism, asserted that ‘invasion is a structure not an event’ (cited in Veracini 2015: 1), causing me to examine how that structure has operated and shapeshifted within settler families to be reproduced from one generation to the next. One answer lies in understanding that the brutality of a forceful and violent colonisation disturb settling, whereas ‘cleaned up’ versions or silences,

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at least for a time, assuage unsettledness and quell discomfort. Comforting untruths and gaps become repeated, in family narratives, habits and documented histories, taking on an aura of ‘truth’. This structure is reliant upon the systematic clearing away of contrary evidence and covering it over with rhythms and traditions brought with settlers from their homelands. Much covering over is maintained and sustained in household routines, of washing, dusting, countering stains; and anthropologist Mary Douglas writes that ‘in chasing dirt, in papering, decorating, tidying we . . . are positively re-ordering our environment, making it conform to an idea’ (1966: 2). In settler colonial Australia, dirt has been racialised, with cleanliness and soap symbolic of order and ‘whiteness’. Housekeeping routines based upon eradicating ‘dirt’ have continued to reinforce colonial operations. Due to the devaluing of housekeeping as mere ‘women’s work’ it was not until feminist scholars such as Dianne Lawrence, Victoria Haskins and Fiona Paisley turned their attention to the domestic sphere that the signifcance of Australian homemaking as a transmitter of colonising strategies has been scrutinised. Even today, however, the substantial colonising efects of cooking a Sunday roast lamb or decorating a mantelpiece with artefacts that reafrm family values remains underestimated. In truth, homemaking, re-examined through settler colonial and feminist lenses, is revealed as the wellspring for forceful attitudes, routines, events and structures which systematically dispossessed countless Aboriginal families and communities of their home and connections to Country which reach back over 60,000 years. This is the truth-telling my art practice dwells upon. To pursue and disclose these truths, revelling with ghosts is no longer enough. I seek pragmatic and activist ways to enact real world change. My practice-based activism follows a new material feminist line of thought articulated by Susan Hekman of turning away from the world as linguistic construction to instead focus on the ‘real’: the ‘bodies and matter and real consequences of this materiality’ (2008: 116). Truthtelling through art-making repurposes materiality and has the potential to impact bodies, social and political discourse, to agitate and make real-world change. My framework for this activist approach has been developed from philosopher Colin Koopman’s (2013) proposition of ‘genealogical pragmatism’. He amalgamates approaches from two eminent philosophers: Michel Foucault’s methods of genealogy, particularly ‘problematisation’, with John Dewey’s pragmatist reconstruction. Koopman makes the case that each cyclically re-informs the other, declaring ‘genealogy agitates and pragmatism meliorates’ (2013: 247). Genealogical problematisation dismantles colonising ‘truths’, which go under the guise of ‘traditions’ or the ‘natural’, to reveal, as memory scholar Paul Connerton states, how they ‘seek to legitimate a present order of political and social power’ (2011: 1). From archives I locate spectral traces, however vaporous, as evidence which exposes the colonising motivation underneath ‘truths’. My pragmatic response, re-membering, in line with Dewey’s method of reconstruction, is motivated by deconstructing then restructuring elements of these problematic inheritances towards amelioration (Koopman 2013). I re-member with textile techniques, coalescing found domestic materials and needlework traditions from diverse eras and cultural lineages to question historical legacies and forge more complex and truth-flled versions, especially drawing attention to the disavowed in my own ancestry. The challenge of activism enacted through re-membering is detecting the almost invisible or unseen within my family and self, to grasp what Australian scholar Alison Ravenscroft refers to as the ‘embodied blindspot’ of a white settler colonial legacy

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(2007: 16). What I have noticed in my ‘normal’ habits, gestures, behaviours and attitudes has uncovered how deeply embodied my colonising lies. Grappling with normalisations confronts the often invisible mechanisms inherent in ideologies, which, disturbingly, reside in the complex tissue of my muscle memory, neural pathways, genetic material and familial lines. To research inherited blindspots, I have turned to family archives. Yet, despite the extensiveness of this archive, the lives of some early colonial forebears are sparsely recorded. Not surprisingly, the interior lives of female ancestors are the most cavernous historical gaps. I have learned most about the earliest female ancestor to arrive in Australia, Mary McKay, from archaeological evidence unearthed from the site of her home in Port Misery, now Port Adelaide (Lampard 2011). Excavated bones, bottles, slates, textile fragments and crockery prove she laboured in care-based domestic traditions: making clothes and decorative textiles, childrearing, gardening, cooking high quality cuts of meat and cleaning. An artwork, Beloved I (2015), uses found textile fragments, not unlike those discovered in her 150-year-old household waste, to piece together a spectral imagining of Mary, who was never photographed, re-membering her through remnants of her labouring. The imported origin of her material evidence supports the intergenerational qualities to her caring labour; even upon another land entirely, she carried on traditions learned from her mother and grandmother back in England to recreate comfortable lives for her spouse, children and grandchildren in Australia. Re-understanding these acts of care through both feminist and settler colonial studies perspectives challenges the division of private and public spheres (Tronto 2001: 1468) to reveal that colonisation resides as much in homemaking carried out predominantly by women as it does in nationally enacted policies. I wonder if Mary, as well as other ancestors, felt some culpability or internal confict at their homemaking and how they negotiated any misgivings. I  seek out indicators of their emotive terrain, of pride or enjoyment, but also shame, guilt, tedium, indiference or fear, and consider how these feelings may have been translated into home matters and holes in family narratives. From archival gaps, my enquiry reaches for embodied knowledge, probing inheritances in bloodlines, bodily abilities, predilections and inclinations. In comparison to the impact of social institutions, ancestral inheritance is twice as powerful as community attitudes (Kenneally 2014: 151). Furthermore, it is accepted that nurture and culture shape lives, but relatively new research into genetics and epigenetics has found growing evidence that we inherit bodily responses from experiences that occurred generations prior (ibid.). I conjure repressed ancestral knowledge by investigating feelings, gestures, habits, skills that reside within, taking Verwoert’s theory around a ‘craft of manifestation’ (2010: 271) literally. This personal search occurs alongside the current national and international surge of genealogical investigation. When Foucault observed genealogy as ‘an analysis of descent . . . situated within the articulation of the body and history’ (1977: 148), he could not have predicted the growth of family history networks which have amalgamated single family and DNA searches into immense collective webs of information. Database technologies, Kenneally observes, mean that ‘as we fnd ways to read, organize, and connect all this data, we can map patterns, develop insights, apply analysis, and make predictions’ (2014: 128). This global data, to which my own DNA information contributes, posits the familial self in the immense tangled lineages of human history, opening up possibilities to see how

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biases and behaviours have not only spread but have also had consequences over hundreds, even thousands, of years. One inherited tangle I have been re-stitching, located deep within my familial self and Australia’s colonising structure, is being a benefciary to the privileges of ‘whiteness’. Basking (2017) (Figure 7.1) is a portrait of my great-great-grandmother Wilhelmina, but more so a portrait of the operations of whiteness. Wilhelmina was staid matriarch of her family and region in the southeast of South Australia in the frst half of the 1900s. I single her out regularly in my art because the ghostscape left in her wake is a notable case study of racist practices which peaked between the development of a White Australia Policy from 19017 to the end of World War II. In 1993, Ruth Frankenberg exposed whiteness as a ‘set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed’ (cited in Curthoys 2009: 5), which whiteness scholar Aileen MoretonRobinson counters, stating it ‘is not unmarked, unnamed, or invisible [for Aboriginal people]; it is hypervisible’ (2015: xiii). The operations of whiteness are made starkly visible in Basking; the heads are blackwork embroidered in pale shades of cotton and bathed in shimmering white sequins, linen and light, to expose its glaring blindness, which like the glare of the Australian sun dissolves vision (Bolt 2000). Many

Figure 7.1 Sera Waters, Basking, 2017, linen, cotton, sequins, tablecloth, handmade glow-inthe-dark beads, 92 x 60 cm Source: Photograph by Grant Hancock. Copyright: Sera Waters

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benefciaries to privileges have been unable or unwilling to see prejudice associated with whiteness, for generations. Even feminist histories, according to historian Fiona Paisley, have ‘tended to underestimate settler colonial Australia’s preoccupations with whiteness .  .  . and .  .  . have given primacy to gender in their analysis as though it were neutral in relation to “race”’ (2000: 145). Intersectional feminist analysis retrospectively critiques the agendas of ‘well-meaning’ maternal feminist groups like the Mother’s Union,8 engaged in by Wilhelmina, whose campaigns were ‘grounded in a mostly disguised racial discourse’ (Swain, Grimshaw & Warne 2009: xxii). Continuing dialogue around biases and blindspots recognises the ongoing operations of racial discrimination and shines light on shameful pasts which were intentionally hidden after the gradual dismantling of White Australia Policies. Unintentionally and quite ironically, the bleached white of Basking was created over time and with exposure to sunlight, which caused the sequins to yellow, fttingly rendering their façade of whiteness outdated and antiquated. It is crucial that Basking, as an act of re-membrance, portray Wilhelmina herself. This subverts current inclinations for memorials, or more accurately counter-memorials, to exemplify, as art historian Lisa Saltzman explains, ‘the incommensurability of a fgurative commemorative practice’ (2006: 7). Basking uses the fgurative intentionally, not to perpetuate binaries of ‘victors and vanquished’ (Tello 2016: 2) but to counter settler colonial tactics which have long made the bodies doing the work of colonising invisible and difuse. Bringing specifc fgures into my art accounts for these bodies, or at the very least recognises the embodiment of attitudes which privileged some over others, namely Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, nonEuropean migrants or the poverty stricken. Like the amassed sequins, Wilhelmina, as a white modern and wealthy woman, accumulated privilege and overcame hardships and transgressions. She also partook in the late 1930s ‘protective legislation’ directed at employing young Aboriginal women as servants. Considered an ‘apprenticeship in a white home . . . intended to provide Aboriginal girls with a model of domestic life as a part of their assimilation or mergence into the white community’ (Paisley 2000: 84), recent scholarship, particularly the documentary Servant or Slave (McGregor 2016), has publicly exposed the abhorrent conditions faced by thousands of Aboriginal girls and women when forced into domestic servitude by the Australian government. Wilhelmina no doubt beneftted from cheap, or free, domestic labour to the detriment of young women removed from their families. Inherited murmurings convey that Wilhelmina and her immediate family adhered to the nervous system Australian anthropologist Michael Taussig articulates, which racially and spatially separates bodies through ‘unspoken rules’ (cited in Byrne 2010: 103). I know little else, but that these pasts are no longer spoken about indicates shame, even if that is retrospective. Shame, however, is not helpful; it only makes more ghosts. Instead, acknowledging these dismal circumstances and family culpability to unpick the societal structures which caused these traumas is necessary. Whereas Wilhelmina looks up assuredly, as her descendent I look into the ‘dazzling glare of the Australian light [which] necessitates a downward look and an attention to the patterns and rhythms of the ground’ (Bolt 2000: 209). I re-stitch this ground so the injustices around whiteness are there for all to see. Basking is hand-embroidered using the meticulous counted-thread technique of blackwork embroidery. This is my most care-full means of working, for the fne and skilled blackwork I perform using machine thread consists of a multitude of miniscule

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stitches and subtle colour shifts, pattern counting, considerable time for repetition and focused interrogation. Repetitive stitched movement, according to academic Clare Pajaczkowska, of ‘piercing and binding . . . [is a] destructive and reparative dynamic process’, which allows ‘a space and time of refexive thought’ (2015: 85–86). I refer to this as ‘repetitive crafting’ (Waters 2012): action-based research where laborious time is spent tending to repeated details, crafting into a state where new thoughts emerge. Stitching alone, these are directed inwardly to work through inheritances; when exhibited, the work manifests truths about injustices, retells fractured pasts and displays a care-full handling of national shame. Handling historical threads care-fully is the ethical imperative. In her book The Ethics of Care (2011), Fiona Robinson outlines an ethical approach directed towards peacebuilding. She highlights three methods: frstly, through recognising damage and moral responsibilities; secondly, through relationality and seeing diference as opportunities to form new patterns; and, lastly, through the deliberate act of slowing down time. Robinson states ‘care ethics displays a commitment to a slow process of listening to needs, building trust, and rebuilding relations and institutions for the long term well-being of societies’ (2011: 103–104). Practice-led expressions of this ethical approach are committed to the long labour required for realising change: spending time with details, scouring archives for ghostly evidence, unpicking the past, then re-stitching truth-telling confgurations. This slow and care-full art gives shape and form to the mechanisms which cause social injustices, making tangible reminders of what not to repeat as family and cultural colonising traditions. Traditions are inherited unwillingly, and as Verwoert has explored, they can emotionally and unknowingly burden family members who are habitually driven to repeat their parents’ ‘mistakes’ (2010: 258). Traditions, though, when consciously conjured and scrutinised, can be shifted. My art labours to recognise ill-ftting traditions and refne them towards a diferent future. Difculties arise, however, when inheriting disinheritances: disruptions in homemaking knowledge, disappeared by the mass production of domestic textiles, working mothers and the wave of cultural forgetting that has ensued since the mid-nineteenth century and modernity (Connerton 2009: 1–5). For all the benefts of women’s rightful equality, education and freedom beyond the domestic sphere, an intimate knowledge of numerous traditions has slipped beyond grasp—notably textile traditions such as mending, quilting, embroidery, making clothes and so on. As we remember through the body, a loss of certain habits, rhythms and skills equates to losing memories. The danger of collective cultural forgetting to the point of losing the ability to perform traditions is also the loss of the link to matriarchal knowledge, the passed-along knowledge female forebears accumulate through encounters between materials, patterns and skilled movement, and the ghosts residing within. I counter these palpable losses by experimenting with colonial textile traditions spread by women, and likely by my forebears: embroidery, as well as quilting, applique, rag-rug making and more. Dwelling within their haptic knowledge recuperates the past, like that undertaken by Elizabeth Wayland Barber when she recreated ancient textile practices. She concluded that ‘the process of recreating ancient artifacts step-by-step can shed light on the lives and habits of the original craftworkers that no amount of armchair theorizing can do’ (1994: 23). Making with techniques my ancestors have honed for centuries creates conditions which remind my body of ancestral gestures that have complex and otherwise inaccessible meanings.

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Touch, ‘the oldest and most basic sense’ (Goett 2015: 130), is critical to this endeavour. In matriarchal lines especially, our multigenerational knowledge coalesces around domestic textiles as materials we know intimately: their weight, texture, how they cover, comfort, fall, rest upon our bodies and in our hands. For this reason, I stitch into and make with inherited towels, sheets, linens or bedspreads, shabby with pulled threads, tears, stains and even residue of genetic material. Leaky Sleep of the Sullied (2017) (Figure 7.2) repurposes my grandmother’s cotton bedsheets upon a mustard bedspread, to explore what leaches out of the porous limits of the body in the privacy of the dark. Her sheets, dyed into colours of fesh, bruises and bodily fuids, have been quilted in the English pieced quilt style. Hexagonal cells are arranged into a life-size human imprint, an oozing or seeping that can no longer be contained. Underneath the tightly composed surface, the quilted section indicates the bodily toll from supressing painful truths over a lifetime and, perhaps more so, its intergenerational shadow. I made Leaky Sleep of the Sullied in the way generations of women make quilts, to externalise my internal state, my turmoil at inheriting palpable aftershocks, sore spots, secrets and silences. The sheets, which my grandmother and I have both touched, are a conduit to a deeper understanding of behaviours I had difculty understanding in

Figure 7.2 Sera Waters, Leaky Sleep of the Sullied,  2017, found bedspread, hand-dyed bed sheets, cotton, stufng, rope, found handles, 250 x 190 cm Source: Photograph by Grant Hancock. Copyright: Sera Waters

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her lifetime. From making Leaky Sleep of the Sullied I now appreciate that containment can be a self-sacrifcial act of protective care to stop the intergenerational spread of unwanted legacies. For this I am grateful, and in return I have quilted this family ghostscape, airing our dirty laundry and setting it into new patterns. All textile patterns abound with information and rich provenance, but since modern times the signifcance of this language has been diminished as ‘decorative’. Wayland Barber reminds us that ‘ethnographic parallels worldwide show that enormous time is often put into “simply” decorating people and things with efcacious symbols believed to promote life, prosperity, and safety’ (1994: 94). For generations, decorative patterns have functioned as repositories of knowledge: a vocabulary for individuals, families and communities to communicate cultural values, particularities of place, such as food sources and plant species, events and wisdom for survival. Over centuries, many of these patterns have been passed along in valuable sampler books, and in my practice I revert to this root idea of ‘sampling’ as a gathering, undoing the seventeenth-century transformation of a sampler into ‘education exercises in stitchery . . . [and] individual tests of skill’ (Parker 1986: 85). Stitching patterns continues to preserve them but also enables an interrogation of their insights and possibilities for application in current times. I began the conjoined square blackwork pattern of White (bread) Winner (Figure  7.3) in an orderly linear way expected of post-seventeenth-century sampler

Figure 7.3 Sera Waters, White (bread) Winner, 2017, cotton, linen, trim, 48 x 37 cm Source: Photograph by Grant Hancock. Copyright: Sera Waters

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traditions but soon broke out of these expectations to make discoveries. For within patterns of behaviour, be it cleaning or stitching, feminist writer Aritha van Herk says, can be found creative moments for ‘spectacle, disobedience, disclosure, and subversion’ (2012: 196). White (bread) Winner (2017) strays into unknown territory by stitching areas of unseeable pattern using pale cotton on pale linen, feeling for invisible places and alternative understanding. The dissolving squares and shifts in tone of this pattern came to not only signify the aerated surface of a slice of bread but allude to caverns, tunnels and gaps. Yet, however free I might think my stitching, only retrospectively have I comprehended how embroidering is restricted by grid-like structures. Counted thread embroidery techniques like blackwork, as well as Berlin needlework, long-stitch and many more, are performed atop the gridded warp and weft of fabric and follow linear boundaries. Both colonising homemaking and textiles are linked by these traditions of constraining and containing, underpinned by a ‘spectral structure’ (Saltzman 2006: 51) which operates underneath layers of labour, limits potential imaginings and the physical arrangement of surface matter. Textile practice especially is a discipline that has historically shaped women’s lives; samplers were used in early colonial Australia to educate girls in domestic duties, as well as morally, religiously and into obedience, aiming to contain them within societal bounds and structures. From the outset of settler colonisation, lines, like those of the cadastral grid, were drawn across maps to demarcate spatial, racial and gendered divides, enforced on the ground as borders or boundaries not easily crossed (Byrne & Nugent 2004: 32). Colonial historians Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds declare Aboriginal dispossession occurred ‘line by line . . . as meeting places, traditional food sources, water holes, and sacred sites were overwritten with European property claims’ (2010: 10). It struck me that samplers too unfold ‘line by line’ and in response, Sampler for a colonised land (2019) (Figure 7.4) consciously re-members an array of cross-stitched boundaries from barbed wire, brick walls, to a repeated utterance of the word ‘no’, all of which arise from fear-based and possessive political agendas. This ‘geometric discipline’ (Byrne 2010: 109) forces inhabitants to adhere to and fortify rigid and controlled ways of being, externally and within. These modes of settler colonisation continue today with the Australian government’s unhumanitarian approach to border control.9 Boundary Wreath (2017) (Figure  7.5) also studies boundaries, its focus familial fence lines. Like many house fences, Boundary Wreath is decorated with fowers which soften, beautify and normalise the forceful nature of this possessive line upon the land. In working the fowers repurposed from needlework kits, I observed my tendency to diligently re-enact geometrically patterned behaviours. As I bound edges with tightly wound wool, I realised my complicity with the controlling traditions of boundarykeeping. I am conditioned to close gates, tidy loose threads and tendrils, select and neaten. The normalisation of such settler colonial behavioural patterns falls into what Moreton-Robinson calls ‘possessive logics’; modes of rationalisation around white possession and Aboriginal dispossession rely upon circulated meanings ‘about ownership of the nation’ (2015: xii). These are rampant in settler colonial gardens nationwide, teeming with imported plant and fower species, fences and trimmed lawns. Not only do they signify a type of sedentary dwelling and land ownership incommensurable with Aboriginal custodianship, but when compared to the intergenerational care and sustainable farming managed across Australia by First Nations people (Gammage 2012, Pascoe 2018), they are re-understood as ecologically destructive, possessive and uncaring. All evidence from my ancestor’s loved gardens reveals they cleared land

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Figure 7.4 Sera Waters, Sampler for a Colonised Land, 2019, cotton on linen, 141 x 52 cm Source: Photograph by Grant Hancock. Copyright: Sera Waters

to plant imported species. Boundary Wreath is decorated with non-native, needleworked carnations, roses, orchids, poppies which surround a cleared white centre, to mourn these actions. In my exhibitions, gardening-related works, Boundary Wreath as well as long-stitch wallpapers such as Colonial Beacons (2017), loom at the entrance or exit, exacerbating, enlarging and highlighting the damaging truth of settler colonial gardening. Land damage is spread nationwide and is immortalised in Australian art history in the most celebrated visual expression since colonisation: the landscape. W. J. T.

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Figure 7.5 Sera Waters, Boundary Wreath, 2017, found woollen needlework, wool, velveteen, beanfll, hooks, 210 x 130 cm Source: Photograph by Grant Hancock. Copyright: Sera Waters

Mitchell’s pivotal book Landscape and Power (2002) charts the proliferating force of imperial landscapes which construct, refect and spread visions of ‘tamed’ nature based upon European landscape conventions. Pastoral, picturesque and pre-landrights landscapes survey land in a totalising view, constructing safe and inviting visions construed to suit political cultural drives: the blue and gold landscapes of the wool industry but one example.10 While painted landscapes have prevailed in Australian art, landscapes have also been transformed into domesticated homecraft versions, such as the Semco Long Stitch Originals series of the 1980s, mass-produced woollen longstitch kits depicting Australian nostalgic pastoral landscapes. Semco, who in decades prior had predominantly supplied textile patterns of European fora and fauna to their Australian market, achieved popular success with this Australian landscape series,

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aimed at hobbyists and amateurs, including my grandmother, at a time coinciding with the Aboriginal land rights movement11 and bicentennial celebrating the arrival of the First Fleet to Sydney Harbour in 1788 (Waters 2015). Though these kits are now relegated to the realm of kitsch, they are worthy of scholarly attention as they reek of ghostscapes for their desire to overwrite Aboriginal Country, deep spiritual connection and knowledge, yet again. I repurpose, redesign and re-stitch these kits and their backward-looking Australian landscapes to counter patriarchal and possessive tenets with feminist, domestic and activist intent. It feels rebellious to use the kit techniques and sentimental shades of wool to traverse the pattern guidelines in ways my grandmother never would. Subverting further, I enlarge them as photographic wallpapers reminiscent of lavish interior decoration; Colonial Beacons looms four metres high and Falling: Line by Line (2018) (Figure  7.6) extends seven metres. Whereas wall coverings were ‘essential’ to colonial homemakers to decoratively orchestrate selective sets of meaning within living spaces, my fat wallpapers with their tactile illusions orchestrate a revelation of the costs of homemaking: the cutting down of Eucalypts, introduction of palms and pines and the propagation of biased untruths reinforced in pleasant views, landscapes and interior decoration. Genealogical ghostscapes arise from multigenerational misuse of Country: the mass clearing of trees and vegetation, taking over and spoiling regions, and the disavowal of damage caused by surveying, claiming, pastoralism, mining and care-based homemaking. My family’s contribution to each of these in Australia and their repercussions motivate my activist art practice. I  conclude this chapter against the backdrop of

Figure 7.6 Sera Waters, Falling: Line by Line, 2018, vinyl wallpaper, woollen long-stitches, 200 x 700 cm Source: Photograph by Rob–Acorn Photo (WA). Copyright: Sera Waters

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Figure 7.7 Sera Waters, Banner of Mine: Cultivation, 2017, towels, woollen blanket, trim, glow-in-the-dark thread, metallic thread, cotton, brass poles, 320 x 260 cm Source: Photograph by Grant Hancock. Copyright: Sera Waters

Banner of Mine: Cultivation (2017) (Figure 7.7), for banners have a history of being carefully made by women for political purposes, from the sufrage movement to feminist and climate change protests of the twenty-frst century. This banner is no diferent. Installed slack and retired, embroidered with recurring declarations of ‘mine’, it poses questions of regret over dogmatic and possessive forms of settler colonial homemaking. It also, with its nod to textile traditions, suggests alternative ways of moving forward. This banner is made of preloved white and of-white towels in a haphazard style developed from the wagga, an Australian style quilt cobbled together from scraps that arose in the 1890s depression and post-world war periods into the 1950s

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(Gero & Somerville 2016: 115–16). For generations, women labouring domestically have repurposed scraps to give recognition to their untold truths. It is from inherited colonial and familial scraps that I will continue to re-stitch unearthed evidence into traditions to recognise the ghosts resulting from ongoing settler colonisation and reset their course to pass them along truthfully and care-fully to future generations.

Notes 1. This chapter is aligned with research from settler colonial studies, which difers from colonial or post-colonial scholarship. The settler colonial focus, informed here largely by academic Lorenzo Veracini, recognises that colonising settlers difer from explorers, colonists and even migrants, for their drive to remake settlements and societies with the purpose of staying (2010: 3). In South Australia, this began in earnest from the proclamation of the state in 1836. Notably, Veracini and myself understand settler colonialism to be an ongoing phenomenon. 2. In Australia ghost-forming atrocities, by which I mean events that will haunt this Nation retrospectively, include inaction on climate change mitigation, the failure to recognise Aboriginal claims to Country and the locking up of asylum seekers in refugee camps ofshore. 3. The use of ‘Country’ throughout this chapter recognises Aboriginal sovereignty and its usage in Aboriginal English to describe a person’s spiritual and ancestral connection to land, water bodies, skies, plants and animals. 4. Kaurna Country encompasses the Adelaide region, and Bunganditj Country the Mount Gambier region, in the southeast of South Australia. 5. The Uluru Statement From the Heart was developed from community consultation with 13 regional dialogues across Australia and was released in May 2017. The statement focused upon two reforms: for a First Nations voice to be enshrined in the Australian Constitution, and a Makarrata Commission (see footnote 6). 6. Makarrata is a Yolngu (north-eastern Arnhem Land, Australia) concept which, in the words of Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson, ‘captures the idea of two parties coming together after a struggle, healing the divisions of the past. It is about acknowledging that something has been done wrong, and it seeks to make things right’ (Laugesen n.d). 7. The White Australia Policy refers to a number of policies enacted in Australia from 1901 which aimed to maintain the Australian population as British and white. It was gradually dismantled, and notably disrupted by the Migration Act in 1958. Despite its dismantling, a White Australia mindset problematically still plagues some aspects of Australian culture and politics today. 8. Wilhelmina was a member of the Robe Mother’s Union, 1912, a conservative Anglican women’s group which undertook charitable work, social and cultural reform aimed towards women and children through ‘training’, prayer, and ‘lead[ing] their families in purity and holiness in life’ (Carey 2004). 9. Australia’s ofshore processing regime for asylum seekers attempting to enter Australia illegally by boat, colloquially referred to as ‘boat people’, has seen over four thousand men, women and children locked up, often for years, in detention centres, on Christmas Island, Manus Island, Nauru and in Papua New Guinea. 10. Arthur Streeton’s blue and gold pastoral landscapes have been highly celebrated in Australian art history. Gammage’s (2012) research into Streeton’s painting Golden Summer, Eaglemont of 1889, reveals, however, that a golden landscape occurs as a result of the land being signifcantly damaged and drought ridden. 11. The Aboriginal Land Rights movement has been an ongoing struggle to gain legal recognition of ownership over lands and waters, ownership which extends back thousands of years prior to colonisation.

References Banivanua Mar, T. and P. Edmonds (eds). 2010. Making settler colonial space: perspectives on race, place and identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Barber, E. W. 1994. Women’s work: the frst 20,000  years. New York: W. W. Norton  & Company. Bolt, B. 2000. Shedding light for the matter. Hypatia 15, no. 2 (Spring): 202–216. Byrne, D. 2010. Nervous landscapes: race and space in Australia. In Making settler colonial space: perspectives on race, place and identity, eds T. Banivanua Mar and P. Edmonds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 103–128. Byrne, D. and M. Nugent. 2004. Mapping attachment: a spatial approach to Aboriginal postcontact heritage. Hurstville, NSW: Department of Environment and Conservation. Carey, J. 2004. M U Australia (1892–). The Australian Women’s Register. The National Foundation for Australian Women (NFAW) in conjunction with The University of Melbourne. www.womenaustralia.info/biogs/AWE0737b.htm Connerton, P. 2009. How modernity forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connerton, P. 2011. The spirit of mourning: history, memory and the body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curthoys, A. 2009. White, British, and European: historicising identity in settler societies. In Creating White Australia, eds J. Carey and C. McLisky. Sydney: Sydney University Press. Douglas, M. 1966. Purity and danger: an analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge. Foucault, M. 1977. Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In Language, counter-memory, practice: selected essays and interviews, ed D. F. Bouchard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 139–164. Foucault, M. 2014. Wrong-doing, truth-telling: the function of avowal in justice, trans. Stephen W. Sawyer. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Gammage, B. 2012. The biggest estate on Earth: how Aboriginies made Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Gero, A. and K. Somerville. 2016. Making the Australian quilt 1800–1950. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria. Gibson, R. 2002. Seven versions of an Australian badland. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Goett, S. 2015. Materials, memories and metaphors: the textile self recollected. In The handbook of textile culture, eds J. Jefries, D. W. Conroy and H. Clark. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, pp. 121–136. Hekman, S. 2008. Constructing the ballast: an ontology for feminism. In Material feminisms, eds S. Alaimo and S. Hekman. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 85–119. Kenneally, C. 2014. The invisible history of the human race. New York: Penguin Books. Koopman, C. 2013. Genealogy as critique: Foucault and the problems of modernity. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Lampard, S. 2011. The respectable of Port Adelaide: working-class attitudes to respectability through material culture. Saarbrucken: LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing. Laugesen, A. (ed.). n.d. ‘Word watch: Makarrata’, One More Word, Vol. 48, No. 4. Australian National University. https://reporter.anu.edu.au/word-watch-makarrata McGregor, S. 2016. Servant or slave. Brisbane, QLD: No Coincidence Media Pty. Ltd.: SBS. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2002. Landscape and power. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Moreton–Robinson, A. 2015. The white possessive: property, power and Indigenous sovereignty. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Paisley, F. 2000. Loving protection? Australian feminism and Aboriginal women’s rights 1919–1939. Carlton South: Melbourne University Press. Pajaczkowska, C. 2015. Making known: the textiles toolbox—psychoanalysis of nine types of textile thinking. In The handbook of textile culture, eds J. Jefries, D. Wood Conroy and H. Clark. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Parker, R. 1986. The subversive stitch: embroidery and the making of the feminine. London: The Women’s Press. Pascoe, B. 2018. Dark emu: Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture. London: Scribe Publications.

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Ravenscroft, A. 2007. Coming to matter: the grounds of our embodied diference. Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 10, no. 3: 287–300. Robinson, F. 2011. The ethics of care: a feminist approach to human security. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Saltzman, L. 2006. Making memory matter: strategies of remembrance in contemporary art. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Swain, S., P. Grimshaw and E. Warne. 2009. Whiteness, maternal feminism and the working mother, 1900–1960. In Creating white Australia, eds J. Carey and C. McLisky. Sydney: Sydney University Press, pp. 214–229. Tello, V. 2016. Counter-memorial aesthetics: refugee histories and the politics of contemporary art. London: Bloomsbury. Tronto, J. 2001. Care and gender. In International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences. London: Elsevier Science Ltd, pp. 1466–1471. van Herk, A. 2012. Cleansing dislocation: to make life, do laundry (2008). In The domestic space reader, eds C. Briganti and K. Mezei. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 194–197. Veracini, L. 2010. Settler colonialism: A  theoretical overview. Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Veracini, L. 2015. The settler colonial present. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Verwoert, J. 2012. Anti-materialist materialisms. Paper presented at Artist’s week: into cosmos the presentness of utopias, Adelaide: Adelaide Festival Centre. Verwoert, J. 2010. You make me feel mighty real: on the risk of bearing witness and the art of afective labour. In Tell me what you want, what you really, really want, ed. V. Ohlraun. Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute and New York: Sternberg Press, pp. 255–305. Waters, S. 2012. Repetitive crafting: the shared aesthetic of time in Australian contemporary art. craft + design enquiry, 4. https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/journals/craft-design-enquiry/ craft-design-enquiry-issue-4-2012 Waters, S. 2015. Inside the outback: an exploration of domesticated landscapes in Semco’s Long Stitch Originals Series of the 1980s. craft + design enquiry, 7. https://press.anu.edu.au/ publications/journals/craft-design-enquiry/craft-design-enquiry-issue-7-2015

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Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance Activating Feral Materiality Paula Chambers

Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance (2018) (The Narration) Folding chairs, like women, are mindful of the space they take up. Packed away, fat and hidden, unseen and forgotten until next needed, then, ah ha, that useful folding chair makes a reappearance. In the garden, in the park, for camping, picnics and outdoor parties and festivals. For protests, demonstrations and sit-ins, for squatters and street life, for recreational fshing and other antiquated sporting events, the folding chair has upheld its worth. Light, portable, functional and convenient, tidy, discreet and user friendly, the folding chair surpasses the more cumbersome traditional deckchair, whose renowned complication of construction and heavy wooden frame and canvas seating has a whif of awkward masculinity, the stif upper lip of the Edwardian middle-class. Sitting, too, is ungainly in a deckchair: the hammock-like canvas invites sprawling indignity; the folding chair, however, requires the sitter to maintain posture: slender armrests, a sprung seat and upright back provides a contained and proscriptive seated experience. Like feminism, the folding chair has proved durable and enduring. Fashions and attitudes change, the invention of the ubiquitous moulded plastic chair, most often seen in white, would seem to have usurped the classic folding chair. But wait: a revival, antique shops and vintage stores stock originals in 1960s foral prints. Tescos, Asda, Argos and other low-end shopping emporiums have also rediscovered the folding chair, in deckchair stripes and plain bold colours: the utilitarian folding chair has made a come back. Yet in certain circumstances the folding chair is also unstable; lean too far in one direction or another and it is liable to tip over and dislodge the sitter in what is often a comedy moment. So folding chairs have humour, too. Witness the hilarity of Uncle Albert, one moment sitting comfortably, bottle of cheap lager in hand, the next, upon leaning too far to receive a half cooked hot dog or plate of wilting salad, deposited upon the ground in an unseemly and undignifed manner. Nylon shirt and slacks awry, mismatching sports socks and sandals formally unnoticed but now pointing skyward, much to the amusement of previously bored family members. The potential instability of the folding chair is disruptive and unsuspecting; it takes you unawares. The twenty-frst century folding chair now has small metal catches at each side as a safety measure against sudden closure. The chairs from the 1960s and

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‘For protests, demonstrations and sit-ins, for squatters and street life’ In an essay titled ‘Witness It: Activism, Art and the Feminist Performative Subject’, Hilary Robinson (2019) identifes what she terms the intentional feminist activist performative gesture to camera (Robinson, 2019, p. 245). And while Robinson’s feminist activist is discussed in terms of her subjectivity, it is my intention here to propose that the intentional activist gesture may also be performed by objects, for material things are political too. Political activism has a material culture of its own, from the objects woven into the chain link fence at Greenham Common women’s peace camp (1981–2000) and the white headscarves worn by the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina (1977–2006), to the pink knitted Pussy Hats worn by thousands at the mass protests against the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017 and the brightly coloured, handmade balaclavas of Russian performance group Pussy Riot (Chambers, 2020), among other such examples. These objects exist as material things, yet also as the documentation of their performative role in the political actions which they have come to re-present. In fact, it could be seen that the distribution of this documentation of the performative actions of these material objects have come to be the intentional gesture to camera that defnes them as activist. ‘Is the circulation of documentation what transforms an otherwise mundane object into an activist one? Is the documentation (the creation and circulation of photos, videos, websites) an activist practice itself?’ (Harvey, 2014, n.p.). Images (static or moving) have political force; they formulate evidence and establish strategies; they are material things in and of themselves. The activation of feral materiality, as proposed by Meskimmon’s (2019) work of art, what art work does, in Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance (2017) performs as an intentional gesture of resistance and dissent. Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance is a short flm originally made in a PowerPoint slide show format which features a black folding chair with the word FEMINIST stencilled on the back in white. The chair seemingly inhabits a range of seating arrangements, from the formal to the feral. The chair itself was rescued from a roadside collection point in Halifax, West Yorkshire. I sprayed the frame black to match

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the fabric seat and added the stencilled text. The chair was photographed from many angles in a makeshift setup in my living room and photoshopped into images of various seating situations I sourced from Google images. The flm has an ironic overlaid narration that aligns the ubiquity of the folding chair to the resilience of women as feminist subjects. The folding chair acts as a stand-in for the female (feminist) body, yet is also a material embodiment of feminism; to be a feminist in every situation one fnds oneself in requires commitment and stamina. As a flm, Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance manifests Robinson’s (2019) intentional feminist activist performative gesture to camera, as material evidence of a folding chair enacting strategies of resistance. The chair, in its myriad of seating scenarios, becomes the feminist performative object. This chapter investigates the potential for feral materiality, the found object as it performs as artwork, to be analysed within the context of new materialist thinking around the agency of objects, as feminist, as activist, as political, as resistant and as disruptive. I analyse Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance as politically vibrant, evidenced through the form and materiality of its manifestations: as feral materiality, as performative gesture, as flm (the document) and as evidence of material activism. If objects and materials can be seen to have agency, as new materialist thinking argues (Ahmed, 2006; Bennett, 2010; Boscagli, 2014; Coole and Frost, 2010; Miller, 2010), then I am asking: what kind of agency is enacted by objects and materials that occupy the boundary spaces of culture and society? Developing Maurizia Boscagli’s (2014) proposition that garbage is the outlaw underside of consumer culture and as such is both wild and dangerous, this analysis of Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance investigates the liminality, threshold spaces and activist social relations materialised in this short flm. An understanding of materiality as vibrant and agentic underpins the analysis of this chapter, in particular feral materiality as it performs as artwork. The specifc materials and objects understood as feral (wild, undomesticated and dangerous) are of importance in relation to my proposition that the activation of feral materiality as artwork enacts the intentional performative gesture. And that the activation of feral materiality as a feminist activist gesture is one in which the interrelational encounter between (feminist) subject and (domestic) object is disruptive of domesticity itself. Artwork made from domestic objects sourced from the street or from the economies of second-hand exchange, the feral materiality of this chapter, perform as a materialisation of feminist social relations. In the still images from Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance analysed here, it is the specifc nature of materiality that perform the threshold spaces of uncertainty and danger as a protest against domestication. Meskimmon (2011), conceptualises threshold spaces as transitional states both physically and metaphorically, states that can be applied to artworks that fracture an understanding of ‘being at home’ through their disruption of domestic materiality (Meskimmon, 2011, p. 32). Domestication implies a process whereby a subject is tamed, and trained to undertake the tasks associated with home life. The domestic object as feral materiality can be seen to have escaped the confnes of home and as such perform now as a subversive material embodiment of ‘not-being-at-home’. Agency as attributed to both (feminist) subjects and (domestic) objects is a key proposition of this chapter, and as materialised in my sculptural practice. Developing new materialist thinking on the intersubjective relationship between subjects and objects, how a shared sense of agency forms and informs the material encounter of both, I argue that the unruly agency of the found object as feral materiality performing

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as artwork, is an embodiment of the disruptive agency of women as a feminist strategy of resistance and dissent. Following Pil and Galia Kollectiv’s (2010) proposition that sculpture and installation (and other artworks made from found objects) are performative in and of themselves, I apply this notion of performativity to the folding chair featured in the flm Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance as an intentional activist gesture. The feral materialities that I am analysing here are the liminal objects that occupy the threshold spaces of urban and rural environments, objects that unsettle and fracture an understanding of ‘being at home’ through their disruption of domestic materiality. If feral can be defned as that which was once domesticated but has now returned to the wild, that which operates on the margins or thresholds of society and culture, then going feral is a process of liminality, a boundary practice that disrupts our understanding of the stability of domestication as a one-way process. Feral materiality is the abandoned, cast out and undomesticated object, the liminal and unsettling stuf that haunts the marginal spaces of consumer culture. The materiality of found objects exposes vulnerabilities. It is stuf at its most uncertain, vulnerable and wild; the found object is the outlaw underside of consumer culture, a threat to order; it has a confrontational quality (Boscagli, 2014). The transgressive and unstable material culture of domesticity as the marginal and afective found object is, in Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance, presented back to us as a reclamation of domestic detritus, as a protest against domestication. Importantly, Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance was created as an intentionally political artwork. As such, I argue that new materialist thinking, grounded in the physical (the matter or materiality of both subjects and objects), can be analysed as vibrant or agentic of feminist activism. Feral materiality made manifest as feminist activism performs the social relations of political activism; it is the stuf through which things are made to happen. A material transformation takes places via an event and makes possible a radically diferent re-articulation of the object, ‘a transformation that changes altogether not only the usage of the object but also it alters the set of relations that produce its meaning in this context’ (Kallianos, 2014). The making of artwork from found domestic objects as a feminist strategy of disruption and resistance materialises activism through the work of art I propose. Feminist agency, that of both the maker and the objects transformed through making, is collaborative and inter-relational. The flm Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance activates feral materiality whereby the found domestic object in its performative role as artwork becomes the material embodiment of domestic disruption as a feminist strategy of resistance; feminist agency is materialised through the dynamic transformation of the material culture of domesticity with activist intent. ‘The potential instability of the folding chair is disruptive and unsuspecting; it takes you unawares’ An analysis of two still images from the short flm Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance guides the following discussion on feral materiality as a protest against domestication. In relation to the arguments of this chapter, the analysis of these two images visually embodies the found object as feral materiality, including the folding chair in context, the specifc qualities of its materiality and its staging and presentation of the flm as document, evidence of a feminist activist performative gesture.

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Figure 8.1 Paula Chambers, Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance, 2017, still, ‘For Squatters and Street Life’. The folding chair hangs out with discarded others Source: Image author’s own

In the ‘still’ from the flm Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance, ‘For Squatters and Street Life’ (see Figure 8.1), the folding chair is seen loitering on the street in the company of two ofce chairs and a metal folding chair that appear to have been improperly discarded. The folding chair faces its discarded colleagues as if engaging them in conversation; the chairs take on a personality specifc to their materiality. They appear animated and autonomous, dangerous and wild, as if they have escaped from the confnes of domestication. The scenario in which the four chairs fnd themselves appears to be outside a garage; there is a locker containing gas bottles with a sign that reads ‘Danger, Keep Out’. All four chairs are black; they appear like housebreakers or street artists, dressed incognito for acts of night-time vandalism. The illegal act of grafti spray painting as a material intervention into public space is one that Schacter (2014) terms ‘insurgent ornamentation’, a term that could perhaps also be applied to the documentation of feral materiality as it inhabits the public space of the street. In Figure 8.1, the metal chair and the two ofce chairs are scrufy. The feminist folding chair in comparison appears smartly dressed; perhaps she is in the process of organising a strike or agitating her redundant colleagues for disruptive action. Yet the informal, even casual attitude of these chairs, abandoned and no longer of practical use, might suggest a more benevolent act on behalf of the feminist folding chair. Perhaps the other chairs have found themselves homeless due to a life of domesticity that has somehow evaded them. The folding chair ofers squatting as a strategy of reclamation and redemption.

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Figure 8.2 Paula Chambers, Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance, 2017, still, ‘For Protests, Demonstrations and Sit-ins’. The folding chair occupies the street Source: Image author’s own

In the ‘still’ from the flm Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance, ‘For Protests, Demonstrations and Sit-ins’ (see Figure 8.2), the folding chair is seen in the company of two white plastic moulded chairs (the Monobloc) of the kind that have become ubiquitous. The street is deserted of people; the chairs are seemingly its only occupants. The street itself is ambiguous in both location and time. ‘The Monobloc is one of the few objects I can think of that is free of any specifc context. Seeing a white plastic chair in a photograph ofers you no clues about where or when you are’ (Zuckerman, 2011, n.p.). The material qualities of the situation in which the chair fnds itself would seem to ofer the possibility of past, present and future activisms; alongside its Monobloc companions, the folding chair stages a material sit-in. Like the sit-in protests frst instigated by the US civil rights movement in 1960, such as that undertaken by African American students in Greensboro, North Carolina (Hohenstein, 2020), the folding chair claims the liminal space of the street, as if bringing to attention the need for a feminist reappraisal of domestic working conditions; the chair is unafraid to voice her opinions. The sit-in is a form of non-violent direct action that can involve one or more people who occupy an area for protest to call for political, social or economic change. Protestors gather conspicuously in a space, refusing to move until their demands are met. The folding chair and her Monobloc companions are conspicuous in their occupation of the otherwise deserted street, and like old women gossiping in the street, they exchange information, tactics and strategies. Like the ubiquitous and seemingly timeless Monobloc, the folding chair is light

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and portable; it can be taken with her to other situations where there is a need for feminist intervention. Found objects bear the scars of their use and misuse; the folding chair featured in my flm was very dusty when I found it but otherwise in a remarkably good condition for an object that had been discarded. It was still useable and bore only light scratches on the arms and folding legs, which were easily covered by the black paint I applied. The previous owner of the chair had chosen not to skip this object, but had rather left it by the side of the road for possible collection by someone who might fnd a use for it; that someone was me. Found objects such as my folding chair have ambiguous domestic biographies, I do not know who or how many have used them, where or why they were used, yet they resonate a domesticity that is at once past, present and future. The folding chair has been activated through its reclamation and re-presentation as the lead in the flm Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance. It has taken on the role of the feminist performative subject. Through its activation via the medium of flm as document, the chair enacts the dynamic cycle of use, reuse and misuse of feral materiality. Driving and walking around the back streets of any town, city or countryside area in the UK, one encounters a great many abandoned or discarded items of furniture. These domestic objects take on personality. They slump or stand proud, defeated or defant in their out-of-placeness; they appear to have gone feral. My usage of the term feral is one that doesn’t have to operate solely outdoors; a feral animal may live on the boundaries of domestic space, choosing to be indoors or out while still retaining the undomesticated state that defnes it as feral. So too with furniture and domestic objects that have been abandoned, cast out or discarded. The material culture of domesticity, most often encountered indoors, in the private spaces of home, becomes transgressive when encountered on the street, in alleyways or by roadsides, out in the public realm. Domestic objects encountered in these threshold spaces are always on the verge of becoming valueless; they are objects at the borders of commodifed matter (Boscagli, 2014), stuf that has been withdrawn from the cycles of consumption and has undergone the structural shift in value implicit in the process of casting out (Crewe and Gregson, 2003, p. 167). This devaluation of materiality encountered in the public realm can be seen as in direct opposition to the binary of public/private, in which the public is given precedence and value over and above that of the private. ‘The added element of potential danger made the experience of using a folding chair one that could not be taken for granted’ The Oxford English Dictionary (OED, 2018) defnes ‘feral’ as ‘in a wild state, especially after escape from captivity or domestication’, including in brackets ‘(especially of an animal)’ (OED, 2018). It goes on to add ‘behaving in a wildly undisciplined and antisocial way’ (OED, 2018). This alignment of wildness, escape and undomesticated, antisocial behaviour with animals is a theme that positions those whose behaviour and lifestyle are perceived as threatening and potentially dangerous. The labelling of disenfranchised and disafected people as a feral underclass pathologises the representation and spaces of poverty so that ‘council estates were abject border zones within the state which were not only liminal with regard to wider societal norms and values but were actively antisocial spaces’ (Tyler, 2013, p. 160 italics original). And although this notion of a feral underclass has been applied to people, it might equally

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be applied to the liminal materiality of the (perceived) antisocial spaces of council estates and other border zones, spaces inhabited by those that do not matter and, by implication, by matter that does not matter. The sofa on the street and the discarded fridge or mattress are as much feral objects as the subjects who abandon them. The folding chair in the street scenes of the flm stills analysed above occupies just such liminal and antisocial spaces as those identifed by Tyler (2013). In Figure  8.1, the folding chair is seen in the company of discarded and broken ofce chairs that appear to loiter as an unruly and disorganised group in a manner that could be perceived as threatening if the chairs were subjects rather than objects. In Figure 8.2, the folding chair occupies the liminal space of the street with more confdence; the chairs might even be seen to be in the process of planning, or plotting, an act of resistance. The low economic, social and cultural value of the folding chair, its Monobloc companions and the discarded ofce chairs in Figure 8.1 contribute to their status as feral materiality. An antique upholstered chair abandoned in a similar manner would not have the same resonance of law-breaking as the folding chair and its feral comrades, for the objects of material culture are equally complicit in the actions and events arising out of the social and historical injustices of the British class system. My analysis of the feral object and processes of going feral are a development of Attfeld’s (2000) concept of ‘feral design’. Attfeld uses the term to defne a sub-genre of objects that were produced in response to the needs and desires of a classed and gendered consumer, the mass production of domestic objects that have been relegated by design history to the arena of low taste and kitsch. It is very often this genre of objects that fnd their way onto the street, or into a skip, deemed to have low value by those who discard them. Yet these abandoned and discarded feral objects are a rich material source for artists such as myself who make sculpture from found domestic objects. Whiteley (2011) identifes the process of sourcing the discarded objects of consumer culture for re-use as art through the use of the term ‘feral scavenging’ to describe the skip raiding, dumpster diving and tip dwelling strategies of artists who work with a ‘bric-a-brac sensibility’ (Whiteley, 2011, p. 56). Crewe and Gregson (2003) analyse another range of spaces within which these cast-out objects come to be reclaimed: charity shops, car boot sales and sites of retro retailing. These liminal spaces of consumer culture, they propose, are an in-between space and time that ofer that possibility of object rehabilitation or redemption. As artwork, these feral objects, scavenged or salvaged from the liminal spaces of consumer culture, whether from skip, roadside, car boot sale or charity shop, have an agency above and beyond their origins at point of manufacture. These objects have multiple spatialities and temporalities, all of which they perform when encountered as artwork. Boscagli’s (2014) analysis of the specifc agentic qualities of the found object as feral is one whereby the conceptual position that garbage occupies as unruly and potentially dangerous stuf disrupts the cycle of commodity culture due to its liminal status as neither desirable consumer object nor as waste at the end of its useful life. This proposition that feral materiality is potentially dangerous due to its liminal status, applied to an analysis of the flm stills from Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance, identifes the specifc material qualities of the folding chair that I originally found by the roadside, and that of the other chairs in the stills, as agentic of the multiple spatialities and temporalities that defne them as feral (see Figure 8.3). Boscagli (2014, pp. 227–268), identifes the resonance of trash as liminal objects that upset the narratives of consumer culture through cycles of use, reuse and

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Figure 8.3 Paula Chambers, Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance, 2017, still, ‘Low End Shopping Emporiums’. The folding chair, an undervalued object Source: Image author’s own

abandonment, as such becoming abject and marginal but with the potential for a radical rereading as feral materiality. Abject materiality here, as that which is cast out, corresponds to Douglas’ (1966) identifcation of dirt as matter out of place, as a threat to order. Developing Douglas’ analysis, Boscagli proposes that garbage is ‘a full afront to ordered materiality, is stuf at its most uncertain, vulnerable and wild’ (Boscagli, 2014, p.  227). Domestic materiality, already culturally denigrated as homely, ordinary and boring, is exposed as potentially valueless when encountered outside the home. As junk, the discarded or abandoned object illuminates the uncertainty and liminality of the cycles of commodity exchange. ‘Each home’s stuf, . . . becomes junk outside its domestic shelter: outside, each object appears disposable and vulnerable, its presence, permanence, and meaning suddenly uncertain’ (ibid.: p. 227). The propensity of stuf to become junk, to become garbage outside the home, troubles the historical object–subject split and ofers instead the potential for subject–object entanglements. The liminal status of junk Boscagli proposes, neither one thing nor another, yet still afective and embodied, is trash as a threat to order, ‘the outlaw underside of consumer culture’ (ibid.: p. 227). Junk as the discarded materiality of domestic life is stuf as objects at the borders of commodifed matter. Stuf refers to those objects that have enjoyed their moment of consumer allure, but have now shed their commodity glamour—without yet being quite cast aside. They exist brazenly as neither one thing nor the other: not quite saleable. And

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Figure 8.4 Paula Chambers, Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance, 2017, still, ‘Circumstances of Instability’. The folding chair as liminal materiality Source: Image author’s own

certainly not garbage, not monumental or important objects, but still bearing traces of a past, of desire, of life, and of the interactions between subject and object that formed them and wore them out. (Boscagli, 2014, p. 6) The found domestic objects, the feral materiality of my short flm Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance, are those identifed by Boscagli as not monumental or important, yet certainly not garbage; they are objects we are not ready to let go of, or are not ready to let go of us. They have been reclaimed, or reactivated as artwork, and it is this activation that gives these objects political agency (see Figure 8.4). In Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Douglas (1966) identifed dirt as being matter out of place, the transgressive spatial materiality that functions as the necessary stuf of social structure. The abjection or casting out of dirt defnes boundaries both physical (bodily and spatially) and social (moral and religious). Transgression of these boundaries as imposed by taboo or law-making brings with it the threat of social abjection, and as such, dirt becomes the stuf through which societies self-regulate. However, for Douglas, the disruptive nature of dirt as a threat to order also has the potential for power, as it is in the liminal or threshold spaces that

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boundaries inevitably produce that the transgressive agency of subjects may manifest (Douglas, 1966, p.  114). Douglas’ identifcation of dirt as matter out of place, the transgressive materiality of threshold states and spaces with transformative potential, in Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance materialises the disruptive potential of feminist activism through the performative agency of feral materiality itself. ‘There is an autonomy to the adaptability of the folding chair, one that cannot be forced to be what it is not’ Meskimmon (2011) proposes that artwork made from found domestic objects embodies the notion of the threshold through their transformation of materiality; the processes that enable a change of state (art-making) reconfgure sensory perception and as such does not depict memory or afect, but perform them (Meskimmon, 2011, p. 37). This notion of the performativity of domestic materiality engenders a phenomenological understanding of the liminality of junk and of its transformative potential when presented as artwork. We recognise the found objects and recall domestic interiors, we circumnavigate the installation through out habitual knowledge of the scale and mass of the doorways and the furnishings. Our attention is drawn to the extreme juxtaposition between found and fracture, temporarily our bodies are stopped, remembering is fragmented, the threshold is violated. (Meskimmon, 2011, p. 37) If, as Meskimmon proposes, the materiality of artwork made from found objects has the potential to locate us as subjects, and in the process to disrupt an embodied understanding of being at home, how might feral materiality, the stuf of ‘not-beingat-home’, spatially, physically and conceptually liminal, disrupt and disturb notions of home as a site of comfort, security and relational subjective encounter? And how might the domestic associations of this specifc form of materiality, re-presented as activist feminist art practice, perform the protest against domestication proposed in this chapter? In ‘Art Matters: Feminist Corporeal-Materialist Aesthetics’, Meskimmon (2019) adopts Barad’s (2007) use of the word entanglements as a way of making visual the dynamic, intersubjective encounter between matter and meaning: an embodied encounter where agency can be ascribed to both subject and object and where neither is less imperative than the other. As art work, agency, Meskimmon proposes, is the doing, the work of art, and as such can be experienced as a mode of experimental and material thought. In the flm Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance, the work of art is presented in the form of flm, the document as evidence of activist practice proposed by Harvey (2014). The flm materialises Meskimmon’s dynamic intersubjective encounter through the recontextualisation of feral materiality as politicised objects. In its form as the work of art, feral materiality ofers the potential to be transformative of the ways in which we understand the material culture of domesticity as vibrant and agentic of feminist activism. The understanding of materiality as agentic breaks down the hierarchy of subject–object relations through the inter-relational and intersubjective encounter between (feminist) artist and feral materiality as the work of art. Dimitrakaki (2013) asks how art-making as labour might constitute practices

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Figure 8.5 Paula Chambers, Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance, 2017, still, ‘Autonomy and Adaptability’. The folding chair inhabits the spaces of transient domesticity Source: Image author’s own

of refusal, the fight from domestic space and reproductive work (Dimitrakaki, 2013, p. 59). I propose that Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance materialises the disruptive and resistant encounter with feral materiality as performative of just such practices of refusal, of not-being-at-home as the work of art as a protest against domestication (see Figure 8.5). Materialisation implies a coming-into-being that is both material and agentic: an active process of making and of making things happen. The material encounter is also proposed by Coole and Frost (2010), in which living matter structures natural and social worlds before, during and after they are encountered by rational actors (Coole and Frost, 2010, p. 19). This material encounter is vital to an understanding of feminist activism performed through feral materiality, especially so for a feminist politics that sets out to challenge normative assumptions and established structures of power. I propose that it is through the work of art that just such a feminist political challenge can be materialised. Conceiving matter as possessing its own modes of self-transformation, self-organisation, and directedness, and thus no longer as simply passive or inert, disturbs the conventional sense that agents are exclusively humans who possess the cognitive abilities, intentionality, and freedom to make autonomous decisions. (Coole and Frost, 2010, p. 10) Additionally, the flm Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance materialises Elizabeth Grosz’s (2010) proposition for a feminist strategy of embodied freedom where the

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indetermination of matter liberates life from the constraints of the present, whereby ‘the ability to make (or refuse to make) activities (including language and systems of representation and value) one’s own, that is, to integrate the activities one undertakes into one’s history, one’s becoming’ (Grosz, 2010, p. 152). Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance is an artwork that materialises the agency of both subject and object as a transformative activity that has the ‘capacity or potentiality to act both in accordance with one’s past as well as “out of character,” in a manner that surprises’ (Grosz, 2010, p.  152). As a feminist act of autonomy and freedom, the making of artwork from feral materiality is just such a transformative action where memory and history materialise as the inter-relationality of (feminist) subject and (domestic) object in a manner that surprises and ofers the possibilities of exceeding the past while still acknowledging its presence in the present. The flm Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance, as evidence of the performativity of feral materiality analysed here as the feminist activist gesture to camera, has the potential to be world-making, whereby ‘the world is not a thing out there, but one in which “we” are formed and of which we are formative; the strength of feminist corporeal-materialism is its ability to imagine, think and make diferently from within’ (Meskimmon, 2019, p.  366). It is this ability to imagine, think and make diferently from within that my flm Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance materialises through the activation of feral materiality. Homeplace, as bell hooks (1990) so famously reminds us, can be a site of resistance. Resistance can be against all kinds of things that are like war: opposition to being invaded, occupied, assaulted and

Figure 8.6 Paula Chambers, Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance, 2017, still, ‘Heading up the Feminist Resistance’. The folding chair as activist Source: Image author’s own

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destroyed by the system (hooks, 1990, p. 80). A feminist resistance as the activist work of art made from feral materiality is, I propose, imperative, urgent and dynamic. As a shared agency between (feminist) subject and (domestic) object, the protest against domestication performed in Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance materialises Robinson’s (2019) intentional feminist activist performative gesture to camera (see Figure 8.6). The flm as document is the evidence of the political force of images and material things, whereby the feminist performative subject–object is made manifest through the activation of feral materiality.

References Ahmed, Sara (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientation, Objects, Others. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Attfeld, Judy (2000) Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg. Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Bennett, Jane (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Boscagli, Maurizia (2014) Stuf Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism. London: Bloomsbury. Chambers, Paula (2020) Materialising Dissent: Pussy Riot’s Balaclavas, Material Culture and Feminist Agency. In Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms. Deepwell, Katy (ed.). Amsterdam: Valiz. Coole, Diana and Frost, Samantha (2010) New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Crewe, Louise and Gregson, Nicky (2003) Second-Hand Cultures. Oxford: Berg. Dimitrakaki, Angela (2013) Gender, Art Work and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Douglas, Mary (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Hove: Psychology Press. Grosz, Elizabeth (2010) Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom. In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Coole, Diana and Frost, Samantha (eds). Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Harvey, Penny (2014) Curating the Activist Object. www.activistobject.wordpress.com (accessed 23 December 2019). Hohenstein, Kurt (2020) Sit-in Movement. www.btitannica.com/event/sit-in-movement (accessed 2 April 2020). hooks, bell (1990) Homeplace (A Site of Resistance) in Yearning, Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston, MA: South End Press. Kallianos, Yannis (2014) Political Materiality of Everyday Objects. www.activistobject.word press.com (accessed 23 December 2019). Meskimmon, Marsha (2011) Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination. Abingdon: Routledge. Meskimmon, Marsha (2019) Art Matters: Feminist Corporeal-Materialist Aesthetics. In A Companion to Feminist Art. Buszek, Maria Elena and Robinson, Hilary (eds). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. Miller, Daniel (2010) Stuf. Cambridge: Polity Press. Oxford English Dictionary (2018). Feral. www.en.oxforddictionaries.com (accessed 13 September 2018). Pil and Galia Kollectiv (2010) Can Objects Perform?: Agency and Thingliness in Contemporary Sculpture and Installation. www.kollectiv.co.uk/Object%20Orientations.html (accessed 15 July 2018).

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Robinson, Hilary (2019) Witness It: Activism, Art and the Feminist Performative Subject. In A Companion to Feminist Art. Buszek, Maria Elena and Robinson, Hilary (eds). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. Schacter, Rafael (2014) Refections on Activist Objects: The Material Culture of Social Movements. www.activistobject.wordpress.com (accessed 23 December 2019). Tyler, Imogen (2013) Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. London: Zed Books. Whiteley, Gillian (2011) Junk: Art and the Politics of Trash. London: I.B. Tauris. Zuckerman, Ethan (2011). Those White Plastic Chairs: The Monobloc and the Context Free Object. www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2011/04/06/those-white-plastic-chairs-the-monobloc-and-the-context-free-object/ (accessed 27 December 2019).

9

When Theodorah Met Dolly Gender and Visual Activism in Works by Senzeni Marasela Brenda Schmahmann1

In 2016, the Johannesburg artist Senzeni Marasela (b. 1977) produced 32 works representing well-known American singer and performer Dolly Parton. Comprised of photocopies of iconic images of Parton—mostly in concert—that have been overlaid with images of Marasela herself, these works ostensibly depict the visual artist responding with enthusiasm to the country-and-western star who is literally larger-than-life (Figures 9.1–9.2). But if the works are about Parton as a performer, they also include a second layer of performance. In the series, Marasela is represented wearing a dress constituted from red isishweshwe fabric2 in a style that is standard among many conservative married women in rural areas of South Africa—among them Matatiele in the Eastern Cape, where her parents were born.3 Marasela, while progressive, single and based in Johannesburg, dressed without variation in a red isishweshwe dress as part of a performance she conducted between 1 October 2013 and 30 September 2019. In depicting herself in this garment in the works, and sometimes even appearing to be on stage along with Parton and her band (see, for example, Figure 9.1), Marasela is in fact representing her own performance as well. Entitled Theodorah and Gebane: Dolly Parton, the series has iconographic links to—and could be considered a sub-category within—her ongoing Theodorah in Johannesburg project, which she began in 2004. Like other works within the ambit of the Theodorah in Johannesburg initiative and indeed prior works by the artist, Marasela’s works are intricately bound up with her own autobiography but also extend beyond her personal history to refect on social experiences that are shared with others. Crucially, also, her works are feminist. By representing herself in a red isishweshwe dress meeting up with Parton, I argue in this chapter that Marasela exposes the fact that her own costume, like that of the country-and-western star, is a form of camp artifce and that she too is self-consciously adopting a construct of appropriate womanliness in such a way as to transgress and question it. Furthermore, while Marasela’s works are feminist, they are also—more specifcally—examples of feminist visual activism in the sense that her commentaries about gender are manifest not only through images she exhibits in galleries but also her own personal and daily lived experiences. In other words, through her everyday life being constituted as a performance via her wearing of a red isishweshwe dress, the artist and her art become one and the same, with commentary on gender articulated by both. Feminism had a late and uneasy reception in South Africa, largely because it was construed as focusing only on white women and thus being of limited value to those battling race prejudice in the context of apartheid.4 But an increased emphasis on intersectional identities within feminist discourse enabled it to achieve credibility by the frst democratic election in 1994. This feminist emphasis within government

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Figure 9.1 Senzeni Marasela, Untitled work from the ‘Theodorah and Gebane: Dolly Parton’ series, 2016, photocollage and ink on paper, 29.7 x 42 cm, private collection Source: Courtesy Senzeni Marasela and the Tofee Gallery

Figure 9.2 Senzeni Marasela, four untitled works from the ‘Theodorah and Gebane: Dolly Parton’ series on display in the Tofee Gallery, 2018, photocollage and ink on paper, each 29.7 x 42 cm, private collection Source: Courtesy Senzeni Marasela and the Tofee Gallery

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would not prove enduring, however. Although South Africa developed progressive structures and legislation for enforcing gender equity during the early post-apartheid years, focus on feminist concerns began to dissipate during Thabo Mbeki’s term in ofce (June 1999–September 2008). There was further regression during Jacob Zuma’s presidency (May  2009–February  2018) when, as Amanda Gouws (2019) observes, structures and institutions introduced previously were dismantled, feminists departed government bodies and the perspective on females that ended up predominating in government became that of the ANC Women’s League, which ‘saw its job as mobilizing women for nationalist projects’ and reminded women ‘of their duty to care for men and children’. The iconography of Theodorah in Johannesburg, which took shape against the background of a waning commitment by government to ensuring gender equality, could be understood as a prompt about the importance of feminist issues. But by the time that Marasela began dressing every day in a red isishweshwe dress and made the Theodorah and Gebane: Dolly Parton series, her ironical rendition of herself as a conservative rural woman might be understood to have raised questions about the version of virtuous womanhood that was increasingly being promoted within state structures. Purchased as a group by one private collector, the Theodorah and Gebane: Dolly Parton works were exhibited at the Tofee Gallery in the small town of Darling in the Western Cape Province in 2018. However, apart from the few paragraphs I wrote for the show’s online catalogue (Schmahmann 2018), they remain unexamined. In revealing in this chapter how the Theodorah and Gebane: Dolly Parton works articulate feminist concerns, I provide a more expansive account of their transgressive meanings. I begin the chapter with an overview of her Theodorah in Johannesburg iconography, indicating how it served as a forum for Marasela to question constructs about appropriate womanliness as well as drawing on some ideas at play in earlier works. I then explore how feminist ideas are developed in her Theodorah and Gebane: Dolly Parton series.

Theodorah in Johannesburg In 2004, Senzeni Marasela began making works depicting a woman—Theodorah— from a remote rural home who fnds herself in Johannesburg, a city alien and overwhelming to her, seeking the whereabouts of an absent partner. Her choice of media varies. As well as linocuts, the project also involves works made via pencil drawings, watercolours, embroideries, collage and digital prints of photographs. The title Theodorah in Johannesburg may bring to mind the 1949 flm, Jim Comes to Jo’burg, directed by Donald Swanson and featuring a protagonist who leaves a rural settlement to seek his fortune in Johannesburg. But the more immediate source was Njabulo Ndebele’s novel, The Cry of Winnie Mandela, frst published in 2003, which speaks of women’s experiences during apartheid of waiting for years for departed men to return to them.5 As Ndebele expresses it: So what does a woman do in the absence of her husband, who is in jail, in the mines, in exile, or is dead, or away studying, or spends most of the time on the road as a salesman, or who, while not having gone anywhere in particular, is never at home because he’s busy fooling around? (Ndebele 2013: 3)

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These women, he suggests, are ‘Penelope’s descendants’—that is, modern incarnations of the woman in Homer’s Odyssey who waits patiently for years for Odysseus to return from his travels, fnding strategies for putting of the many suitors seeking to woo her in his absence. Ndebele’s book explores the experiences and thoughts of four fctional ‘descendants’ of Penelope as well as the imagined feelings of a famous ‘descendant’, Winnie Mandela, whose position of waiting for the release and return of her imprisoned husband, Nelson Mandela, was played out in the public eye, even during the years in which she was banished to the tiny town of Brandfort.6 One of the fctional descendants’ experiences is similar to that of ‘Theodorah’ in the Theodorah in Johannesburg works. Mannette Mofolo is left behind at their home in Lesotho when her husband, Lejone, departs to take up employment in the mines in the vicinity of Johannesburg. Initially returning home regularly and sending money to support Mannette and their children, Lejone’s visits gradually become rarer and rarer. Establishing a new relationship and family in nearby Benoni, his contact with his Lesotho family ultimately ceases altogether. After a couple of years of receiving no word from him, Mannette travels to the recruitment ofces in Maseru, then to the mining town of Welkom and then to Johannesburg itself, seeking his whereabouts. But she does not fnd him. While related to Lejone Mofolo in The Cry of Winnie Mandela, the man whom Theodorah is seeking was also modelled on the husband of Marasela’s mother’s cousin, a man named Gebane. Like countless other men seeking work in cities who eventually made alternative lives and sometimes established new families there, Gebane disappeared to Johannesburg, leaving his wife and four children without any fnancial support or means of contacting him. Like Mannette Mofolo, Marasela’s mother’s cousin attempted to fnd her missing husband, without success. Having deduced that he had departed permanently, she established a relationship with somebody else and the pair had children. But then, 15 years after leaving, Gebane showed up. An alcoholic without any work and unconcerned that he had neither sent any money home nor made any attempt to contact his wife, he was nevertheless outraged that the woman for whom he had paid lebola (bride price) had not, like Penelope, simply continued to wait for him despite there being no evidence that he ever intended to return or was even alive.7 In devising the project, however, Marasela did not name the abandoned woman after her mother’s cousin. ‘Theodorah’ is in fact the name of Marasela’s own mother. Theodorah Marasela had left Matatiele in the Eastern Cape in 1966 to join Senzeni Marasela’s father, whom she had recently married, in Soweto.8 But although Theodorah Marasela never experienced abandonment in the way her cousin did, her experience of the city would likely have been as an alienating and oppressive environment. That Senzeni imagined that it evoked such feelings for Theodorah becomes clear in a short article in which Sharlene Kahn (2017) refers to digital photographic renditions of the artist wearing a yellow dress belonging to her mother and visiting sites such as the Hector Pieterson memorial in Soweto, the Apartheid Museum and the Turbine Hall in Johannesburg—in other words, places that speak of experiences and histories prior to the frst democratic election in 1994 (Figure 9.3). Asking Marasela ‘why she takes these trips as her mum/for her mum’, Kahn quotes a response in which the artist says it gives immediacy and credence to Theodorah’s experiences: Because I  guess apartheid for most people who might not have experienced harshness, might not have seen it, it’s part myth, part horror. It’s very difcult to

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Figure 9.3 Senzeni Marasela, four untitled works from the ‘Theodorah in Johannesburg’ project, 2004–ongoing, digital prints Source: Copyright Senzeni Marasela and Courtesy AFRONOVA GALLERY

conceive of it as something real, that could possibly [have] happen[ed], you know, on the scale it did. (Kahn 2017) But if Marasela’s rendition of her mother speaks of the alienation of black South Africans within an apartheid city, Theodorah is also associated with absence in an autobiographical sense. Theodorah Marasela sufers from a form of bipolar schizophrenia, a condition that renders her emotionally and mentally fragile. Consequently, she was in a substantive sense absent for much of Senzeni Marasela’s childhood. In a commentary the artist made to me in 2003, she observed how this resulted in her mother being evacuated from conversation when she was a child: I recall that there was a deep shame and angst when it came to speaking about my mother . . . her illness was never properly explained to us, her children. We have had to struggle over the years to piece together what made her a constant absence in our childhood memories. As a child I would not easily tell friends of this illness as I feared being mocked by others. As a result I stopped speaking about her.9 This void in the maternal relationship had for some time informed Senzeni Marasela’s use of dresses worn by her mother as a motif in her own art. Notable in this regard is Our Mother, a work from 1998 that Marasela made when in her fnal year of

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Bachelor of Fine Art studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (Figure 9.4). While devoid of an actual wearer, it was nevertheless reworked with pins to acquire built-in breasts with quasi-nipples. Pointing to a nurturing that Theodorah’s six children did not expect from their mother due to her mental disorder, the breasted but vacated garment—one which simultaneously has the potential to cause deep and painful wounds—ofers an afecting statement about an absence of maternal care within their childhood years. (Schmahmann 2012: 15) Theodorah Marasela’s engagement with her dresses was unusual. In the habit of wearing one single dress over an extended period, she would suddenly tire of the garment and then burn it. The dress in blue isishweshwe fabric in Our Mother was

Figure 9.4 Senzeni Marasela, Our Mother, 1998, dress, pins, police baton in wooden container, photocopies, 150 x 100 x 11.5 cm (59 x 39¼ x 4½ inches), BHP Billiton Collection, Johannesburg Source: Photograph by Paul Mills

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in fact one that the artist retrieved before it was burned. Theodorah Marasela’s act of burning her dresses, although on an immediate level the outcome of illness, can also in fact be interpreted as a form of resistance to the role expected of her as the mother of six children. Indeed, while sufering from mental disease, Theodorah seems also to have manifested dis-ease with constraints she experienced within the realms of the domestic. Viewed in light of feminist reinterpretations of hysteria, her illness could perhaps be reinterpreted not as the manifestation of a condition symptomatic of incapacity but rather as the assertion of female subjectivity and the refusal of patriarchal norms. In other words, her ‘irrational’ absences and burning of garments, looked at from a feminist point of view, could be interpreted as a statement of resistance.10 The images of Senzeni Marasela in her mother’s dress in the Theodorah in Johannesburg project might be understood to carry related connotations. When in 2013 Marasela began wearing a style of dress in isishweshwe—this time in red—on a sustained day-to-day basis, she ordered these garments new rather than their being taken over from her mother.11 But, given prior iconographic associations of the dress, they were intricately connected to Theodorah Marasela and her complicated relationship to Senzeni and her other children. The choice of red for the dress would seem signifcant. In the Theodorah in Johannesburg project, the colour red is often predominant: watercolours are in red pigment on a white ground, for example, and Marasela has also made a number of embroideries in red thread on white cotton. As is noted by her in a discussion of embroideries at the Axis Gallery in New York in 2010: ‘As a child, Marasela watched her mother fnd refuge in needlework, always using red thread, as if to suture the secret wounds that psychologically inhibited her from mothering’.12 Interpreted in this light, the choice of a red isishweshwe dress may likewise invoke a sense of psychological wounding. The wearing of a style of dress associated with rural married women has in some respects accorded Marasela a certain conservative respect: ‘I’m essentially presenting a much older, respectable type. So cat-calling doesn’t happen. Men treat you in a particular way, and sometimes people try to help you: when you’re in a bus they give up a seat for you’.13 Yet she tends also to be treated as someone alien to the urban environment, and who does not belong in the middle-class world of business or the arts. She describes, for example, how she had an appointment with the CEO of a bank who had told her to proceed directly to his ofces, only to fnd that the security personnel were in total disbelief that she had any business being in the building. Or, she observes, staf will follow her suspiciously if she enters an upmarket shop.14 What is at stake here is the fact that, while representing a construction of female identity, Marasela is revealing how femininity is performed. By donning such a specifcally coded garment, Marasela’s performance highlights how her Theodorah in Johannesburg series is about more than women’s stories of loss and the political forces that resulted in situations in which they were abandoned or divested of agency: it is additionally and equally importantly about the enactment of social constructions of womanliness. The implications of ‘performing’ a female identity are especially pertinent in the Theodorah and Gebane: Dolly Parton works where, as I discuss below, she is represented in a red isishweshwe dress.

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Theodorah Meets Dolly During a stay in Matatiele in 2013, Marasela visited a friend of her mother who had a collection of Parton memorabilia. She was reminded of the extensive airtime given to Parton’s music on South African radio stations in the 1960s and 1970s—how the singer’s fans were not only in urban locales but also rural ones, and how they included not only many white but also numerous black South Africans. Appearing often on television in the 1980s and 1990s, Parton had in turn became part of Marasela’s own experience of growing up. She recalls hearing her music on radio at her maternal grandmother’s home in Matatiele, and how Parton’s popularity in black communities meant that she began to infuence what was understood as appropriate conduct for young black women. ‘A lot of the memories that I have you know, of music, of Dolly Parton, of ideas about what a proper black women looks like, does, behaves, is from my grandmother’, Marasela comments, adding that, while these ideas were those of her grandmother, they were, ‘of course, from Dolly as well’.15 But if Parton was associated with an appropriate version of womanliness, she was also associated with the capacity for personal reinvention and the defying of social limitations. Looking through the photographs of the friend of her mother, Marasela remembered how, as a child, her parents took her and her fve siblings to a nearby photo-studio where they had photographs taken of themselves against fantastical backgrounds such as Buckingham Palace and the Eifel Tower. Associated by Marasela with the family’s role-playing during visits to the local photo-studio, she remembered how Dolly Parton was constructed as an inspirational icon for her parents’ generation especially.16 A woman who had reached heights of success despite her lowly birth as one of twelve children in rural Tennessee and who highlighted rather than disowned her hillbilly origins, she suggested that South Africans from even the most marginalised, impoverished and disenfranchised of circumstances could, likewise, fnd happiness and success. As in the USA and elsewhere, the flms in which she starred sometimes had experiences that likely resonated with a broad range of people in South Africa. Noting that the reception of the movie 9 to 5 (1980) was positive across gender and class, and among teens as well as adults, Leigh Edwards (2018: 131) observes that its cowriter, Patricia Resnick, ‘attributed its success to broader frustrations with power hierarchies’. Black South Africans in the 1980s would likely have responded similarly, perhaps gleaning from the movie hope that they too could overcome injustice and discrimination. For many women, especially, Parton’s lyrics had commonality with their own experiences of gender prejudice. This would have been true of ‘Just Because I’m a Woman’ (1968), where Parton takes issue with gendered double standards in regard to experiences of sexuality—that is, an expectation that females remain virgins until marriage while males are free to seek out multiple partners. Equally, her account of gender discrimination in the workplace in the number ‘9 to 5’, which she composed for the flm but which was also a hit in its own right, focuses on a woman who receives little pay and no recognition for grindingly hard work—an experience that would relate to those of females in South Africa from various backgrounds. The Theodorah and Gebane: Dolly Parton works, while drawing on the Theodorah and Gebane characters, have a new narrative focus. As Marasela explains, ‘a lot of this journey stops being about this man and is about her [i.e. Theodorah herself],

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and then the fantasies and memories of Dolly’.17 Parton becomes in fact the signifer of fulflment and the overcoming of loss. Depicted on a considerably larger scale than Marasela herself and consistently in black-and-white, she is an iconic presence. A glowing apparition rather than a living being (see the top right image in Figure 9.2), her representation is otherworldly and even at times angelic. While Theodorah no longer seeks Gebane, he nevertheless features in many of the works in the series. Whether envisaged as an actual human being or simply a product of her imagination, Gebane appears alongside the fgure of Senzeni/Theodorah as a companion, fan or performer (see Figure 9.1 and the top left image in Figure 9.2). But rendered in broad outline, he is divested of features and becomes, in fact, ghost-like. Gebane’s spectral outline, coupled with the angelic, otherworldly Dolly, invokes the idea of what Derrida (1994), in his Spectres of Marx, conceptualised as a past that haunts the present and must be reckoned with in the interests of justice. In using the image of the spectre rather than depicting people as apparently palpable beings, Marasela’s images may suggest that the aspiration to achieve fulflment (signifed by the fgure of Parton) still has resonance in a post-apartheid South Africa haunted by apartheid inequities that are yet to be addressed. Most crucially, Dolly Parton performs not only songs but also, as I indicate below, constructs of womanliness. In her well-known and widely read study, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler (1999: 173) argued that acts, gestures and enunciations made by an individual in his or her everyday capacity are performative of gender in the sense that ‘the essence of identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means’. While creating ‘the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core’ which constitutes identity, the gendered body actually ‘has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality’. Thus, rather than expressing a pre-existent inner identity, an individual’s performances and gestures enacted on the surface of his or her body constitute the full sum of the identity they are assumed to signify (Butler 1999: 180). For Butler (1999: 174), retaining the illusion of an interior core which determines gender identity works to regulate sexuality not only in the sense it constructs heterosexuality as normative but also in the sense that it ‘precludes an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject’. But to reveal that the concept of an ‘interior and organizing gender core’ is nothing but a fction would be to expose and challenge the unequal relations of power that such a construction would seek to obscure. Butler proposes that cross-dressing enables a productive form of defance of such norms, fnding the play on the distinctions between the anatomical sex and gendered enactments of the performer to be potentially transgressive (Butler 1999: 175). But there are other strategies that might be considered equally productive. A performance in which there is an apparently knowing exaggeration of gestures and actions that would normally code the identity of the subject as authentically ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’, for example, may well be as potentially disruptive as one which creates a disjuncture between the markers of gender signifed by physiognomy and those inscribed through gesture or dress. Through overstatement, markers of gender become denaturalised and, as in drag, this strategy exposes the fact that the enactments being imitated are themselves already performative. Such exaggeration is clearly at play in Parton’s construction of her own femininity. Edwards (2018) suggests that she encapsulates an image that combines the town tramp and the pure mountain girl:

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using camp exaggeration in such a way as to articulate the feminist message that gender roles are simply assumed by women rather than intrinsic to their being, she also defuses the efcacy of these two stereotypes through their ironic conjunction. Roles that are assumed rather than intrinsic can of course be shifted, and a woman can consequently resist the constructs into which she is acculturated. One might argue that, by imaging herself in a red isishweshwe dress meeting up with Parton, Marasela is not simply illustrating a Parton fan engaging with her icon: more importantly, she is exposing the fact that her own costume is likewise a form of camp artifce and that she too is self-consciously adopting a construct of appropriate womanliness in such a way as to transgress and question it. This transgressive quality of the works is also to some extent the outcome of the way in which Marasela has modifed her source images. Marasela uses publicity photographs of Parton that capture and freeze stylised gestures and poses—ones that might in fact be deemed fetishistic in the sense that they frame Parton’s body as a spectacle through fragmentation and limitations of the spatial feld. But by using collage, and by cutting out photographic images of herself and attaching them to these images of Parton in such a way that the traces of her intervention are conspicuous, or by ‘crudely’ outlining the image of Gebane in such a way that he ‘defaces’ the original, these images of the country-and-western star work very diferently to how they might do without such interventions. The implications of this disruption may be interpreted in light of a point made by Laura Mulvey (1989) in her well-known essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, frst published in 1975, in which she used psychoanalytic theory to suggest how the conventions of mainstream cinema are structured to facilitate the workings of the gaze. According to Mulvey, a woman in patriarchal society connotes ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’, and she invokes pleasure for the spectator of the flm by becoming an object of both voyeuristic and fetishistic scrutiny. She notes how the attainment of pleasure through the deployment of the gaze relies on an obfuscation of the medium itself, on an elimination of signs of the production process that would interrupt the illusion. But what Marasela has in fact done in these images, which include stills from Parton’s flmed performances, is to use collage in such a way that it interferes with and interrupts their potential pleasurableness. The Theodorah and Gebane: Dolly Parton works have some qualities in keeping with Ndebele’s Cry of Winnie Mandela, from which the images (as an outgrowth of the Theodorah in Johannesburg project) drew their original inspiration. Literary critics have noted how the symbolism of Ndebele’s novel speaks not only about the relationship of women to men but also, symbolically, of the relationship between Africa and the West. For Dorothy Driver (2013: 207–208), ‘Europe is present in the novel in the form of an historically complex and insidiously pervasive white domination, manifested as colonialism and apartheid’, while also entering the novel through ‘the classical European myth of Penelope and Odysseus’. But, she suggests, it does so in such a way as to place as provisional and fuid rather than fxed and oppositional the very concepts [of] ‘Europe’ and ‘Africa’ themselves. Penelope’s welcome on African soil by a group of black South African women helps dispel the old distinctions of black and white, and signals a new relation between Europe and Africa, in which each is altered by the other’s transformation. (Driver 2013: 208)

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The fgure of Dolly Parton in Senzeni Marasela’s Theodorah and Gebane: Dolly Parton works might be seen to operate in similar terms. Rather than signifying an imposition on South Africa of music and values that are foreign, Dolly Parton’s music and self-presentation are revealed to resonate with those in many black communities The novel and the works by Marasela also both represent fantastical scenarios. In the second part of Ndebele’s novel, the four invented ‘descendants of Penelope’ who meet regularly (despite their geographical distance from one another) decide to ‘enter into a conversation with Winnie’ about their own ‘thoughts and desires’ as well as about her life, and Winnie Mandela consequently becomes the ffth member of their group (Ndebele 2013: 59–60). This departure from realism extends still further in the fnal chapter, which narrates how, when the fve women go on a trip to Durban, they pick up a hitchhiker who turns out to be the ancient fgure of Penelope and who indicates she has ‘been on the road for more than two thousand years’ (Ndebele 2013: 190). Likewise, although Senzeni/Theodorah appears to interact directly with Parton, as if they were in the same space, the overwhelming size of the country star in contrast with the visual artist, as well as the contrast between black-and-white imagery (for Parton) and colour (for Senzeni/Theodorah), makes it evident that this is an imaginary scenario. Besides having a non-naturalistic plot or story line, Ndebele’s novel is deliberately non-realistic, David Medalie (2013: 277) observes, because of its ‘ostentatiously declamatory and self-conscious rhetoric’. He interprets the signifcance of this departure from realism by making reference to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ writings about shamanism (which are invoked in the novel through references made to the fgure of Quesalid).18 Medalie (2013: 283–284) observes that ‘Lévi-Strauss identifes the shaman as instrumental in the psychoanalytic process of abreaction, “when the patient intensively relives the initial situation from which his disturbance stems, before he ultimately overcomes it”’. This process is associated with what Lévi-Strauss called ‘pathological thinking’: whereas ‘normal thought continually seeks the meaning of things which refuse to reveal their signifcance’, pathological thought ‘overfows with emotional interpretations and overtones, in order to supplement an otherwise defcient reality’.19 The Cry of Winnie Mandela is, for Medalie (2013: 284), an expression of the pathology and of the concomitant ‘overfowing’ which points not only to the ‘defciencies’ of post-apartheid South Africa, but also to the process of its healing. . . . [T]he dual role of the shaman in relation to ‘pathological thought’ in the community . . . is to heighten and exaggerate it in order to bring the community to the position of balance and, in so doing, to cure it. Within the recollection and re-experiencing of trauma, in other words, lies the possibility of recovery. These insights are relevant to Marasela’s Theodorah and Gebane: Dolly Parton works as well. Stemming from memories of the impact of Parton’s music on black communities during the 1970s and 1980s, these images speak poetically about fantasy and the imagination as a potential respite from oppression. While mostly showing images of Parton from recent years, they nonetheless have a ‘plethora’ of meanings pertaining to both the past and present. In other words, they have that surfeit of ‘emotional interpretations and overtones, in order to supplement an otherwise defcient reality’ that Lévi-Strauss associated with ‘pathological thinking’. Furthermore, the ‘excess’ of

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Dolly Parton as a fgure might be understood as ‘pathological’ in the sense that she represents a series of hyperbolic constructs of ideal womanliness. In enabling female viewers to reckon with these constructs in terms of their own lives, Marasela’s works become in a sense a tool for healing.

Conclusion The fve ‘descendants’ of Penelope in Ndebele’s novel ultimately resist in various ways constraints on their agency. As Driver (2013: 228) notes, ‘although their communities expect chastity and patience from them, and although they internalize these expectations, the women in many ways do not in fact wait passively’. Even Penelope resists being an exemplar of passivity: appearing as a hitchhiker, she explains that she is on a journey that follows the path of the unfolding spirit of the world as its consciousness increases, as the world learns to become more aware of me not as Odysseus’s moral ornament on the mantelpiece, but as an essential ingredient in the defnition of human freedom. (Ndebele 2013: 193) In parallel to Ndebele’s image of the travelling Penelope, Dolly Parton can be understood to resist constructions of ideal femininity as passive. Parton’s agency is emphasised by Samantha Christensen (2013: 165), who observes that the countryand-western star ‘uses her satirically feminine appearance to mock and exaggerate the superfuous expectations of women in country music’. Noting also that Parton ‘is resolute on issues of women’s empowerment and equality’, Christensen (2013: 173) adds that numbers such as ‘9 to 5’ and ‘Just Because I’m a Woman’ ‘ground her in a feminist identity and inspire her female listeners to transcend the social constraints of patriarchal Western culture’. Senzeni Marasela’s Theodorah and Gebane: Dolly Parton works, inspired by Ndebele’s novel, harness an association of Parton with agency and feminist resistance. As I have indicated, Marasela’s works reveal how conventional understandings of femininity are but constructs rather than absolutes. And through the hyperbole or excess of Dolly Parton’s enactments of femininity, these works encourage viewers to engage critically with those constructs and their impact on their own lives.

Notes 1. I am grateful to Senzeni Marasela for her insight about her works and to the Afronova Gallery, the Tofee Gallery and Paul Mills for images. I am also indebted to the National Research Foundation for funding for my research. Please note, however, that any opinions, fndings, conclusions or recommendations expressed here are my own, and the NRF accepts no liability in this regard. 2. Produced through a block and discharge method of printing, isishweshwe was developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe. While known as blueprint, variants in brown or red are also common. Originally imported, it began to be produced locally in the 1950s by Da Gama Textiles in the Eastern Cape. 3. Juliette Leeb-du Toit (2017: 225) remarks that women in Matatiele frequently wear ‘elaborate, well-made isishweshwe dresses and skirts’ and that most local people ‘recognise isishweshwe as designating respect, married status and decorum’.

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4. There are only very occasional instances of women artists producing works in the 1970s which are underpinned by consciousness of gender. In the 1980s, feminist ideas became increasingly infuential at universities, emerging in the work of artists such as Penny Siopis (who taught at the Natal Technikon in Durban in the early 1980s prior to lecturing at the University of the Witwatersrand) and Sue Williamson (who enrolled for an Advanced Diploma in Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 1982). For further details about early feminist art practices, see Schmahmann (2015). 5. I ascertained this during an interview with Marasela on 17 April 2018, in Johannesburg. 6. As a banned person whom the apartheid government sought to isolate and prevent from having political infuence, she was obliged to stay in Brandfort between 1977 and 1985. 7. Marasela told me about Gebane (she refers to him by his frst name only) in my interview with her on 17 Aril 2018. 8. Marasela provided me with the date of her mother’s arrival in Johannesburg during my interview with her on 17 April 2018. 9. Email correspondence with the author, 22 December 2003. Quoted in Schmahmann (2004: 46). 10. See Schmahmann (2004: 86–88), where I explore Penny Siopis’ depiction of a hysteric in An Incident at the Opera (1986–87) and Dora and the Other Woman (1988), the latter of which refers to the Dora whom Freud had diagnosed as hysterical. In unpublished notes from 1988 that Siopis made available to me, she indicated: ‘I am particularly interested in those re-readings which see Dora (in particular) and hysteria (in general) in terms of women’s resistance to patriarchal domination, or her protest against the colonisation of her body’. Siopis was in the Fine Art Department at the University of the Witwatersrand when Marasela made Our Mother and was a likely infuence on the work. 11. Eventually acquiring more than 30 such garments, all similar, her intention was to dress exclusively in this way for a period of fve years. This initiative has, however, continued into 2019, when this chapter was written. 12. www.nyartbeat.com/event/2010/B82B 13. Interview with the author, 17 April 2018, in Johannesburg. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. As Medalie (2013: 281) notes, Quesalid ‘was a Kwakiutl Indian who studied with shamans in order to expose them as frauds, for he had no faith in the power of sorcerers. But, to his surprise, he found that he was an efective shaman. . . . He becomes a powerful exponent of the practice which he disavowed and set out to expose.’ 19. Medalie is quoting Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, p. 181.

References Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York and London: Routledge. First published in 1990. Christensen, Samantha. 2013. ‘“Where It Counts I’m Real”: The Complexities of Dolly Parton’s Feminist Voice’. In Walking the Line: Country Music Lyricists and American Culture, edited by Thomas Alan Holmes and Roxanne Harde. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 163–174. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International. New York: Routledge. Driver, Dorothy. 2013. ‘Najbulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela and the Reconstruction of Gender and Nation’. In The Cry of Winnie Mandela (section ‘Articles for Discussion’), edited by Njabulo Ndebele. Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 206–259. First published in 2009 in Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English, vol. 105. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 1–38.

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Edwards, Leigh. H. 2018. Dolly Parton: Gender and Country Music. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Gouws, Amanda. 2019. ‘Little Is Left of the Feminist Agenda That Swept South Africa 25 Years Ago’. The Conversation, 5 August. https://tinyurl.com/yxqs385z Kahn, Sharlene. 2017. ‘Under the Infuence of “Covering Sarah”: Exorcising the Trauma of Colonialism and Racism’. The Conversation, 9 March. https://theconversation.com/underthe-infuence-of-covering-sarah-exorcising-the-trauma-of-colonialism-and-racism-71284 Leeb-du Toit, Juliette. 2017. Isishweshwe: A  History of the Indigenisation of Blueprint in Southern Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Medalie, David. 2013. ‘The Cry of Winnie Mandela: Njabulo Ndebele’s Post-Apartheid Novel’. In The Cry of Winnie Mandela (section ‘Articles for Discussion’), edited by Njabulo Ndebele. Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 268–289. First published in 2006, English Studies in Africa 49 (2): 51–65. Mulvey, Laura. 1989. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. In Visual and Other Pleasures, edited by Laura Mulvey. London: Macmillan, 14–26. First published in 1975, Screen 16 (3): 6–18. Ndebele, Njabulo. 2013. The Cry of Winnie Mandela: A Novel. Johannesburg: Picador Africa. First published in 2003 by David Philip, Cape Town. Schmahmann, Brenda. 2004. Through the Looking Glass: Representations of Self by South African Women Artists. Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing. Schmahmann, Brenda. 2012. ‘Developing Images of Self: Childhood, Youth and Family Photographs in Works by Three South African Women Artists’. African Arts 45 (4): 8–21. Schmahmann, Brenda. 2015. ‘Shades of Discrimination: The Emergence of Feminist Art in Apartheid South Africa’. Woman’s Art Journal 36 (1): 27–36. Schmahmann, Brenda. 2018. ‘When Senzeni Met Dolly’. In Senzeni Marasela: Theodorah and Gebane: Dolly Parton. Darling: Tofee Gallery, 4–5. https://issuu.com/thetofeegallery/docs/ catalogue_senzenimarasela2

10 Be-Longing Filipina Women Artists in Israel Negotiating Self, Body and Place Tal Dekel

Visual activism alters our understanding of society and contributes to social change. In the context of feminist art, visual activism involves particular visual attention to the lives of women of various backgrounds, especially minorities and marginalised groups. As Katy Deepwell (2020: 10) explains, visual activism aims to transform our understanding of how political issues are experienced, felt and understood, but it is not just about producing sympathy or empathy for ‘good causes’ . . . but by bringing together unexpected elements and new confgurations, it encourages us to see the world and how it operates. Chantal Moufe (2007) argues that ‘there is an aesthetic dimension in the political and there is a political dimension in art’, which reveals what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate. Camille Waring (2020: 206–207) notes that visual activism involves the use of visual imagery ‘by oppressed others’ to ‘re-imagine and redefne visual landscapes’. In this context, this chapter focuses on photographs created by Filipina migrant workers in Israel, interpreting their artistic production as feminist visual activism that strives to articulate their marginalised position as women in the host country where they currently live and work and to promote awareness of their life circumstances through their artwork. Global migrants of varying countries of origin and migration motives and pathways have been lumped together in Israeli public and political discourse as ‘foreign workers’ or, more recently, ‘labour infltrators’, and have been marginalised as the Other (Willen, 2019: 42–43). Filipina women and migrants from Africa (especially Ghana) comprise the two largest migrant communities in Israel (Abrams, 2018). The artwork of Filipina migrant workers opens a window onto the lives of women who come to Israel seeking work and fnd themselves living on the seam between two worlds—their country of temporary residence and their homeland. The transnational experiences of Filipina women in Israel are particularly valuable for understanding the complex obstacles migrant women confront (Curran et al., 2006), since Israel is an ethno-national state that strictly excludes the possibility of non-Jewish citizenship or assimilation (Kemp, 2008: 98–99). Hence, this chapter brings to centre stage a group of women who are marginalised from the public sphere, whose lives and experiences are hidden from the public eye. Their photographic works reveal conditions of vulnerability and precariousness, negotiated though and with their bodies. The artists—Sharon Miguel, Angie Robels, Esther Socalo and Marita Reyes—relate to their corporal experiences and spatial encounters, creating an activist stance through visual representations.

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I argue that Filipina artists in Israel resourcefully narrate their lives in a country in which ideology and national anxieties restrict opportunities for migrants, especially women migrants, to participate in and integrate into the fabric of society. However, albeit marginalised and oppressed, they are involved in ongoing, dynamic processes of construction of the Self. As assertive, agentic subjects, they voice a critical stance against their host society and counter their exclusion. Longing to be considered equal residents, not strangers (Arendt, 1994; Levinas, 1987; Ahmed, 2000) in Israel despite their assigned inferior status as ‘foreign workers’, they fght to achieve recognition through artistic means.

Sexual Threat Under Ethno-national Conditions Labour migration in Israel exhibits clear gender patterns,1 with men dominating the construction and agriculture professions and women comprising the majority in caregiving. The Philippine state ‘regulates and maintains a 25  billion dollar per year labour migration industry by recruiting and exporting Filipinos as migrant workers globally’ (Francisco-Menchaves, 2018: 4). Filipino transnational families rely on both men and women to support the local economy. However, most labour migrants from the Philippines in Israel are women.2 Most Filipina migrants in Israel work as caregivers. As many work in a ‘live-in’ arrangement, residing at their worksite, they are in extreme danger of falling victim to sexual assaults. Researchers recognise that domestic female work entails especially high risks, due to domestic workers’ isolation and the high frequency of exploitation or neglect (ILO, 2004). Examples abound of the slippery slope leading from economic and class exploitation to mental, physical and sexual abuse. Researchers and NGO workers are familiar with many stories of sexual harassment, to which women caregivers who live in their employers’ homes are particularly exposed (Goftein, 2012: 388–389). Coordinators of the Israeli non-proft organisation Kav LaOved, a hotline for migrant workers, noted that many female ‘migrant workers who come to get help in exercising their working rights, often also tell stories of employers that perform various forms of sexual exploitation’ (Leibowitz et al., 2013). Evidence of such cases is accumulating among NGOs such as Kav LaOved. Often, women do not report their abuse, either because of the shame involved or because they lack a valid visa and fear exposing themselves to the authorities. Hence, Filipina migrant workers with temporary visas or without proper documentation are particularly vulnerable and prone to falling victim to sexual assault. One of the greatest problems for women migrant workers is credibility, given patriarchal society’s inherent disinclination to believe women’s complaints of sexual assault. Nicola Gavey (2019: 247–255) explains that a key pillar of rape culture is the extent to which rape narratives found across diferent legal and cultural sites show the persistence of a taken-for-granted ‘masculine point of view’ that limits what can be spoken about rape, by whom and how it will be heard. Rape—both as a physical act and as an imagined threat—still keeps women in their place and protects existing hierarchies. Frequently, women migrant workers encounter a lack of belief and cooperation on the part of the police and ofcial institutions (Jordan, 2004). This circumstance is compounded in Israel by their unfamiliarity with local complaint procedures and inadequate knowledge of Hebrew. Moreover, they feel alone, isolated and lacking family or a supportive community, dissuading them from embarking on

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the complex process of fling a complaint. Hence, women migrant workers who were sexually assaulted prefer not to fle complaints, choosing rather to focus on their economic rights and keeping their work visas valid (Porat, 2017). But even when they do act, complaints fled against employers are not pursued with the requisite intensity and rigour; and the immigration authority does not sufciently punish even convicted employers who abused their female workers (Weiler-Polak, 2011). This degrading and unhuman treatment of women migrants refect the discursive exclusion of victimhood (Wagner, 2010). Under Israeli law and in accordance with liberal political discourse, a migrant woman worker is not conceptualised as a victim of sexual crime, as that notion applies only to citizens. There is no legal framework for migrant workers when wronged (Wagner, 2010: 70). Even after international pressure led Israel to recognise those who have fallen victim to the crime known as ‘human trafcking’ (Dahan and Levenkron, 2004), the government continues to ignore the rights of ‘regular’ women migrants and has made no eforts to enforce rules that can protect them. Even migrants who were not ‘trafcked’ are frequently the target of crimes such as rape and sexual exploitation, receiving no help from state systems. Therefore, under the logic of the liberal discourse, a female migrant worker in Israel is left doubly defenceless—her working laws and personal laws are equally breached (Wagner, 2010).

Re-Enacting the Trauma Sharon Miguel, an activist against deportation of unauthorised migrants and a feminist fghting for the rights of Filipina women in Israel, is also an artist specialising in photography (Dekel, 2016: 120–122). As a key fgure in the Filipina community, caregivers often confde in her, sharing how they fell victim to sexual abuse in their workplace. In an interview, Miguel explained that she often hears about cases of abuse by an elderly person being cared for, by a family member who frequently visits or even by a supervisor from the social security administration (personal communication, 5 May 2016). After hearing many such stories, in 2016 she developed a photographic series that expresses such dynamics, based on reconstructions created in a safe environment under controlled circumstances. One of the abused women was invited to re-enact the situation and tell her story, explaining the sequence of events unfolding when she was sexually harassed. First, the son of the old man she was working for came to the apartment, ofering her some leisure time from the hard work of caring for his father; then he ofered her some cofee and cake; and then he gradually started touching her. What began as an almost undetectable brush of his hand on hers turned into a light pat on her shoulder, and then he manipulatively asked to give her a hug and a kiss as a token of his appreciation for all the good work she was doing with his father. The abused woman explained to Miguel how to construct and photograph the scene. Miguel and the woman decided that the re-enactment would feel safe if the woman had been photographed with her real-life partner, her husband who came with her to work in Israel. He acted as the abuser, as this made her feel secure in a highly sensitive situation (Figure 10.1). The artistic decision to make a series of photos re-presenting sexual abuse derives from Miguel’s wish to depict the gradual blur of events that often takes place in such situations. Commonly, women facing sexual harassment fnd it difcult to recall the sequence of events and doubt themselves and the experience they underwent, often even ending up blaming themselves.

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Figure 10.1 Sharon Miguel, Untitled, 2016

With the series, Miguel reclaims the situation by refexive artistic re-enactment, which is undertaken not only to help specifc victimised women, but also to apply visual activism as a powerful tool to raise awareness of problematic social issues. Such ‘visual activism’ ‘can redefne how art and politics can be understood by bringing together unexpected elements and new confgurations, encouraging us to see the world and how it operates and presenting diferent models of art production’ (Deepwell, 2020: 10). Additionally, visual art can be especially efective in impacting its viewers; unsurprisingly, visual activism has been equated with the notion of ‘productive provocation’ (Bryan-Wilson et al., 2016: 9). Indeed, artist Sharon Miguel strives in her work to unhinge the supposedly separate spheres of the private and the public through powerful imagery, visually activating that which has been hidden from the public eye. In this series, it concerns the crimes conducted against disadvantaged women in the shadows of private homes, being also the workplace for thousands of Filipinas caregivers in Israel.

Physical Threat in Confict Zones Filipina artists such as Marylou Muga and Patt Luluquisin (Dekel, 2016: 107, 127) relate to various stressful conditions of life in Israel, a country characterised by prolonged military engagement and deeply immersed in the ongoing Palestinian–Israeli confict, as well as conficts with other neighbour states in the Middle East. Terror attacks, bombings of cities and states of emergency comprise part of life in Israel, as in the case of the 1991 Gulf War, when rockets hit Tel Aviv city and all Israelis were instructed to stay indoors and wear special protective masks against chemical bombs (Soskolne et  al., 1996; Zomer and Bleich, 2005). Much literature has been written about how national conficts shape the lives of women, and especially migrant women, and afect their gendered work (Ron, 2015; Takševa and Sgouts, 2015, Schefan Katzav, 2020). Complicated decisions must be made under unstable conditions, and extensive emotional and physical resources are needed to raise children in such circumstances. In the Israeli context, migrant mothers perform acts of activism, such as organising food contributions for Filipina mothers and children in distress and informing how to act in case of emergency. A series of photographs taken in 2015 by artist Angie Robels documents public bomb shelters. The shelters are rundown buildings, situated in the dilapidated neighbourhood of South Tel Aviv, where most migrant workers in Israel live. The area sufers from very poor infrastructure, and its residential buildings lack private bomb

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Figure 10.2 Angie Robels, Untitled, 2015

shelters included by law in newer constructions. This area is also severely over-populated, so in case of a bomb alert, neighbourhood residents must run out of their apartments and seek shelter in public areas such as those featured in Robels’ photograph (Figure  10.2). The shelters have a maximum capacity and not all in need can gain admission. Moreover, even those lucky enough to enter sufer from poor conditions in the irregularly maintained shelters, such as dysfunctional toilets or lack of running water. As a grandmother raising two children whose parents died, Robels is tremendously concerned with their safety and her own. This anxiety increases when Israel faces heightened national confict. In an interview, she confessed to this stress, saying, ‘I don’t know if I can keep them safe if war breaks out in Israel’ (personal communication, 15 June 2015). She also expressed concern about the poor infrastructure: I’m not sure if there is enough room for all of the people inside these shelters. Only the frst ones to arrive will fnd room inside. What will become of the others, especially the women and the children, who will not get in? (personal communication, 15 June 2015) In confict-ridden areas, the post-confict period lingers and has a lasting traumatic efect on women. Even when there are no sirens going of, the threat of potential need to seek shelter remains (Takševa and Sgouts, 2015: 4–5). Considering the poor infrastructure and insufcient shelter space in South Tel Aviv, the anxiety of Filipina women for themselves and for their children is a double burden and a constant source of psychological pressure and poor well-being. Indeed, in January  2003, a double suicide bombing attack rocked South Tel Aviv, killing 23 people; nearly a third of the

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victims were foreign migrants. These horrifc events were hardly mentioned in the local media and the surviving victims received no aid from the authorities, demonstrating the socio-political abjection of work migrants in the shadow of the Palestinian–Israeli confict (Willen, 2019: 164–196).3 In 2000, the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution (SCR) 1325 recognised the gender-specifc impact of confict and wars on women. This resolution raised awareness to women’s experiences and gender concerns during war and postconfict situations (Cockburn and Zarkov, 2002; Enloe, 2004; Anderlini, 2007). As the traditional social construction of gender assigns women specifc gendered roles (such as care giving), SRC 1325 helps unpack some concerns of Filipina women living in Israel as caregivers. Since they serve elderly or disabled individuals, they feel a particular anxiety—not only to seek shelter for themselves but also the person under their care. If they also happen to be parents to a child, they have yet another heavy burden. The specifc conditions of being a migrant worker in Israel comprise unique layers dictated by the multi-faceted challenges women must negotiate. In line with SRC 1325, Charlotte Lindsay, head of the Women and War project, that was conducted in 2001 by the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross), claims that some groups of women, such as pregnant women and mothers of small children, are more likely to be adversely afected by the conditions produced by armed conficts (Lindsay, 2001: 14–17). Moreover, single mothers—like most Filipina mothers in Israel—are more severely afected, since they lack a safety net of family and fnancial durance to sustain them during the time in the shelters and the tense period of confict (Takševa and Sgouts, 2015: 3). Robels’ photo series of bomb shelters reveals this acute and urgent issue that is hardly dealt with in the Israeli discourse. This photographic project gives migrant women agency by foregrounding their subjective experiences concerning vulnerability and precariousness of the female body in the Israeli context, enfolding multiple axes of oppression deriving from religion, ethnicity, gender and class. Robels engages in visual activism by documenting the overlooked, almost unseen or unnoticed public bomb shelters, used only by the poorest of people. By circulating these images into the realm of the visible and articulating them in the form of art, Robels opens to public discourse the bomb shelters’ dilapidated physical condition and humanises the migrant women who use them, forcing the viewer’s attention and reaction to their hidden plight.

Physical Threat in the Domestic Realm Even the ultimate bond of belonging, marriage with Israeli men, doesn’t guarantee Filipina women in Israel a sense of security, and the potential danger of domestic violence is always on their threshold. Research has revealed that domestic violence increases during times of war, as higher levels of stress and unemployment among men result in battery of wives (Sachs et al., 2007: 593–606). Moreover, such ‘cultural violence’, based on the internalisation of confict within religion, language or tradition—or even its lingering threat—severely afects women (Takševa and Sgouts, 2015: 4). Indeed, minority women perceived as Other, like non-Jewish Filipina wives of Israelis, are in acute danger of falling victim to domestic violence because of religious ideologies that perceive of them as foreign, inferior, never really belonging. Even the Jewish husband might be afected by such stereotypes and become an abuser of his ‘inferior’ wife.

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The art of Esther Socalo clearly demonstrates this notion. Socalo exposes a painful and silenced problem of Filipina women in Israel who enter relationships with Israeli men and since ‘fnd themselves in physical danger’ (personal communication, 10 March 2017). Israel’s unique immigration laws only allow Jewish immigrants to obtain citizenship. If a Filipina woman marries an Israeli man, she must convert to Judaism for the marriage to be registered. Only then does she become an Israeli citizen.4 Unfortunately, some men that Filipina women marry or live with take advantage of their vulnerability through emotional or physical violence (Fogiel-Bijaoui, 2017: 111). In 2017, Socalo addressed this issue in her photographic project. In the photo, a Filipina woman wearing a Jewish traditional head cover and dress is cramped on the foor of her own living room, trying to protect her face with her hands (Figure 10.3). Mixed families with an Israeli husband and a Filipina wife are quite rare in Israel. They are perceived as a threat to social order and Israeli collective identity by their very nature, as they challenge norms by disrupting social hierarchies (Fogiel-Bijaoui, 2017: 103). In Israel, a small country of 9,100,000 inhabitants deeply fssured along ethno-national lines, demographic issues are highly charged, given women’s key role in reproduction. Women’s bodies have been ‘expropriated’ in favour of the ethnonational collective through social sanctions and even some actual laws that subordinate women to men in order to maintain the gendered social order (Fogiel-Bijaoui, 2017: 105). As a tool of policing behaviour, Israeli law heavily afects mixed families of labour migrants (Hacker, 2009). The state defnes itself as Jewish, and family laws (marriage and divorce) are under the sole jurisdiction of religious tribunals, not civic courts, for

Figure 10.3 Esther Socalo, Untitled, 2017

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all citizens. A Filipina who lives with an Israeli man and attains citizenship by marrying him might lose her citizenship if divorced. Hence, such a woman is in acute risk of being extorted to overcome domestic violence or else she and any children she may have could be expelled from Israel. This understanding underlies Socalo’s photograph, which stresses the dangerous aspects and corporal vulnerability of Filipinas, who are exposed to unique domestic violence circumstances.

Embodiment Through Virtual Means Scholars have long established that global migration rearticulates traditional conceptions and strategies of femininity and motherhood (Parrenas Salazar, 2001). These new defnitions compel migrant women and especially migrant mothers to seek new ways of maintaining their familial relationships and to redefne their participation in the family life (Limpangog, 2016: 192). As Filipino families have a long history of institutionalised migration, separation and transnational experience, and as more Filipina women are migrating in recent years given the global demand for domestic labour and the lack of opportunities for work in the Philippines (Dekel, 2016: 105–106), contemporary familial arrangements are tailored to maintain alternative intimate family dynamics and alternative bodily experiences of femininity and motherhood. For migrating Filipinas, physical distance often challenges parental and familial roles. New technologies such as Skype assist in maintaining families, changing intimate relations, bodily experience and the very defnitions of women’s care in Filipino families. This kind of familial and parental conduct is not prevalent in Western countries and is often judged as a form of neglect. The Western concept of nuclear family as a stable economic unit, with all members living under one roof, is undermined by increasing global work migration patterns. By connecting online, migrant women can touch and hug their loved ones from afar. Marita Reyes is a caregiver in Israel who has not been back home to the Philippines for over fve years. In an interview she said, ‘I’m happy to have Skype. I feel like I can say hi to my children every morning, send them kisses and really feel them, as if I’m there, giving them hugs and sending them of to school’ (personal communication, 18 July 2011; see Figure 10.4). The praxis of Skype and other means of new technologies challenge the idea that any ‘good’ care work requires physical proximity, as Valerie Francisco-Menchaves argues. ‘Care work in families is adaptive and expansive in the defnitions of roles and form, especially under the neoliberal conditions of accelerated migration’ (FranciscoMenchaves, 2018: 4). The advancement of video technology makes possible more intimate, corporal-like interactions between mothers and children who live transnationally (Aguila, 2011). Such technologies enable simultaneity and a continuum of care work as a transnational practice, which Francisco-Menchaves (2018: 12) calls a ‘virtual form of care’. Like Sharon Miguel, Angie Robels and Esther Socalo, Marita Reyes also employs visual activism. Through photography, she expresses the shifting modes of her bodily experiences: of being far away from her family but fnding resourceful ways to feel close to them. Her refexive stance conveys the complex relations she maintains to concepts of the body and space under conditions of transnationalism. She explores visual articulations that engage with her life circumstances as negotiated through her body, expressing the quest to maintain her well-being while away from her family.

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Figure 10.4 Marita Reyes, Untitled, 2011

Her artwork also strives to change public opinion by creating visual representations of matters overlooked by the mainstream.

Deportation of the Abjected Body Since 2002, Israeli immigration police have been conducting late-night raids into homes of migrants. Previously, Filipinas’ fear of the police in the public space could be relaxed in the privacy of their home. But additional trauma stems from the practice of apartment raids in the late night and early morning hours, whereby police break down doors with crowbars and axes, violently drag out women and their children and have them institutionalised and quickly deported (Willen, 2019: 69–71). Sara Willen brings the testimony of one victim of such treatment, Patricia: ‘why are they treating us like animals? This is not how you treat human beings. . . . We are not criminals!’ (Willen, 2019: 70). Many testify to sleeping fully dressed in their day clothes and having one fatmate stay awake, watching for suspicious signs of police invasion. Some testifed that they escaped arrest at the very last minute by jumping out of a window or running up to the roof and into a designated hiding place (Willen, 2019: 71). Filipina migrants in Israel who are not in ‘live in’ arrangements and have young children live in eternal fear of the impossibility of managing a complex escape with infants in tow.

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As discussed above, childbearing itself is of ethno-national signifcance in Israel, and in relation to foreign workers it has become a sign of demographic threat. Given the state’s attempt at ‘reserving’ citizenship for Jewish people exclusively, Filipina migrants who bear children while working in Israel are at highest risk of deportation, as the ofcial policy forbids them from getting pregnant and bearing children while working in the country. A  Filipina who gives birth in Israel will be deported or obliged to send the baby out of the country within 15 weeks to keep her work permit and job. Israel’s aggressive national campaign of deportation developed into a sophisticated process of Othering that constructed unauthorised migrants as a new kind of national abject (Tyler, 2013). Unauthorised migrants have become racialised, illegalised and increasingly easily expelled from the country. They have become ‘illegal foreign workers’, a new kind of national abject (Willen, 2019: 70). Children of migrant mothers are not included in the national ethos by which ‘children are the future of the nation’, as not only they and their mothers are excluded from the state’s goals of continuity and prosperity, but ‘the very notion that these particular children might be the face of Israel’s future frightens those who cleave most tightly to the biopolitical logic that frames them as a demographic time bomb’ (Willen, 2019: 75). Mothers in a patriarchal world order are often those who remain at the margins—those who lack public power. Indeed, identity as a mother is habitually overlooked as a category of analysis in Israel. All the more powerless are Filipina mothers who are caregivers, temporary migrant workers, in an ethno-national state such as Israel. Nonetheless, some Filipinas rise up to express their dissent. Sharon Miguel engages with this crisis of ‘illegal’ motherhood through artistic means. In the opening image of this chapter (Figure 10.1), we saw Miguel’s photographic series inspired by difcult stories of sexual harassment she had heard from women of her community. The next series of photos she created in 2019 was based on her own life experience and her narrative of precariousness and vulnerability, negotiated through her own body. During fve long months in 2019, the immigration police tried to arrest and deport Miguel and her children from the country. Due to her high-profle activism, the immigration police targeted her and frequently came to her home, always in the late hours of night, and each time she managed to escape moments before they broke into the apartment. Refusing to give up the fght for the women of her community, she decided to go into hiding together with her kids, moving between friends’ homes, while her apartment stood empty for months. On 31 December 2019, she returned to the locked apartment, collected and packed up her personal items left behind and left her home for good. She photographed the fnal moments in the place in which she had been living for the last seven years. As a socially informed person, Miguel understands the power of activism, and of visual activism in particular. She managed, in the difcult moments of packing her personal items into boxes and bags, to also fnd the strength to record the events and convey them artistically. She is seen standing at the end of a corridor, bags and bundles against the wall, with her back to the viewer and facing the closed front door. The carefully framed perspective suggests that the future is closing in on her (Figure 10.5).5

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Figure 10.5 Sharon Miguel, Untitled, 2019

Conclusion Sara Ahmed exposes the ways in which a generalised notion of the ‘stranger’ is inadequate to account for the mechanisms that produce and reproduce Western selves, communities, and nation states (Ahmed, 2000: 16). Ahmed proposes that strangers are not merely any unknown entity; some bodies are inherently recognised as stranger than other bodies. She deconstructs the fetishisation of strangers that serves to build and fortify Western notions of identity and agency at the expense of strangers, who are reduced to human beings that lack agency. In her words, we can only avoid stranger fetishism—that is, avoid welcoming or expelling the stranger as a fgure which has linguistic and bodily integrity—by examining the

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social relationships that are concealed by the very fetishism . . . we need to consider how the stranger is an efect of processes in inclusion and exclusion. (ibid.: 6) Ahmed’s proposal reinforces the importance of bringing forth the explanations of marginalised women artists as they are articulated in their own words. As they are perceived as absolute Others, as strangers, we must not only examine the mechanisms of their inclusion and exclusion, but also listen to their own explanations about their artwork. By exposing their perspective and integrating it into the discussion, Filipina visual activists in Israel claim their own narratives and become the main source of knowledge. Ahmed’s concluding chapter deals with global feminism’s normative and ethical aspects, envisioning encounters that could avoid the strangering of the Other and claiming that ‘diference between us necessitates the dialogue’ (Ahmed, 2000: 180). Through this claim, Ahmed joins the legacy of feminist scholars, such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty and her commitment to anti-racist feminism—a key inspiration for transnational feminism—which transcends the universalising tendencies of Western feminism and produces an ethical model for cross-cultural feminist scholarship. Such a stance urges investigation of women’s variety of situations and life experiences, considering the diferent parameters between and within cultures, classes, religions, etc., while insisting on fnding the ‘similar diferences’ between women, which are contextbound, complex and fuid (Mohanty, 1998: 268–271). Transnational feminism’s focus on intersectionality (Ferree Marx, 2010)6 could enrich the discussion of the bodily experiences of belonging among Filipina migrant women in Israel. I  propose that it is politically important to study Filipina women artists situated on the margins of Israeli society. Although these women are disadvantaged, they are at the same time strong, assertive and resourceful; each one deals with complex life situations through diferent venues. We must seek to understand the ways in which Filipina artists in Israel can hold a new and critical cultural function in undermining the problematic social order, and conceptualise their precariousness, belonging and bodily experience in the discourse of nation states and the Israeli public sphere in particular. Their artworks thus become an efective case study that could shed light on other migrants in nation states worldwide. Moreover, the activist, subversive and critical artistic stance and strategies ofered by these artists can also serve as the basis for an alternative, radical form of feminist solidarity that cuts across ethnicities and the religious diferences that exist between women, ofering an efective tool to dismantle existing hierarchies imposed by the State of Israel and patriarchal society at large.

Notes 1. Filipinas constitute a considerable proportion of domestic workers worldwide (Parrenas, 2001; Lan, 2003; Stasiulis and Bakan, 2005). The Marcus regime in the Philippines has promoted this policy since the 1970s, as millions of Filipina take part in the gendered international division of labour (Liebelt, 2011a: 76). 2. Since the ousting of Palestinians from the labour market in the early 1990s because of reoccurring terror attacks, Israel became dependent on recruiting overseas workers (Willen, 2007; Kemp and Raijman, 2008). Following a government decision to subsidise care in private homes, Filipinas have been employed in large numbers in Israel as live-in caretakers since the mid-1990s (Liebelt, 2011b; Dekel, 2016).

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3. For more about the concept of abjection see Douglas, 1966; Kristeva, 1980; Tyler, 2013. 4. Israel is one of the few nation states in which religious afairs intertwine with state legislative matters. For instance, personal status for Israeli Jews is under the sole mandate of the Orthodox Rabbinical courts, and only rabbis decide on matters such as marriage and divorce, under religious, not civic, laws. 5. Moving in the public sphere is dangerous for her, since immigration police use racial profling. Asian features are relatively rare in Israel and serve as a key tool by which policemen stop Filipina women for questioning, demanding that they present valid visas. 6. The term ‘intersectionality’, coined by Kimberly Crenshaw in 1989, refers to the multiple systems of oppression or discrimination against people of non-hegemonic groups.

References Abrams, M., 2018. Data about Foreign People in Israel. Jerusalem: Population and Immigration Authority. Available from: www.gov.il/BlobFolder/generalpage/foreign_workers_stats/ he/foreigners_summary_2018.pdf [accessed 6 January 2019] [Hebrew]. Aguila, A.P., 2011. Living Long-Distance Relationships through Computer Mediated Communication. Social Science Diliman, 5 (1–2), 83–106. Ahmed, S., 2000. Strange Encounters–Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge. Anderlini, S.N., 2007. Women Building Peace: What They Do, Why It Matters. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Arendt, H., [1954] 1994. Essays on Understanding. New York: Harcourt Brace. Bryan-Wilson, J., González, J. and Willsdon, D., 2016. Editors’ Introduction: Themed Issue on Visual Activism. Visual Culture, 15 (1), 5–23. Cockburn, C. and Zarkov, D., eds, 2002. The Postwar Moment: Militaries, Masculinities and International Peacekeeping. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Curran, S.R., et  al. 2006. Mapping Gender and Migration in Sociological Scholarship: Is It Segregation or Integration? International Migration Review, 40 (1), 199–223. Dahan, Y. and Levenkron N., 2004. Trafcking in Women in Israel Under State Law. Theory and Criticism, 24, 9–44 [Hebrew]. Deepwell, K., 2020. Feminist Art Activism and Artivism: Introduction. In: Katy Deepwell, ed. Feminist Activisms and Artivisms. Amsterdam: Valiz Press, 8–20. Dekel, T., 2016. Transnational Identities–Women, Art and Migration in Contemporary Israel. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Douglas, M., 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Hove: Psychology Press. Enloe, C., 2004. The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ferree, M., 2010. Practicing Intersectionality in Sociological Research: A Critical Analysis of Inclusion, Interactions, and Institutions in the Study of Inequality. Sociological Theory, 28 (2), 129–149. Fogiel-Bijaoui, S., 2017. A Rising Tide? Mixed Families in Israel. Journal of Israeli History, 36 (2), 103–123. Francisco-Menchaves, V., 2018. The Labor of Care–Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Gavey, N., 2019. The Persistence of a Masculine Point of View in Public Narratives about Rape. In: L. Karlsson and G. Nilsson, eds. Rape Narrative in Motion. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 247–255. Goftein, A., 2012. Sexual Violence Toward Women Migrant Workers in Israel in Light of Criminal Procedure. Hamishpat, 17 (1), 379–420 [Hebrew]. Hacker, D., 2009. From the Moabite Ruth to Norly the Filipina: Intermarriage and Conversion in the Jewish Nation State. In: H. Herzog and A. Braude, eds. Gendering Religion and Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 101–124.

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ILO (International Labor Ofce), 2004. Toward a Fair Deal for Migrant Workers in the Global Economy. Geneva: ILO. Available from: www.ilo.org/public/english/standards/relm/ilc/ilc92/ pdf/rep-vi.pdf [accessed 4 January 2019]. Jordan, J., 2004. Beyond Belief? Police, Rape and Women’s Credibility. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 4 (1), 29–59. Kemp, A., 2008. Managing Immigration, Fortifying Citizenship: Reforming the Status of Working Migrant Children. In: Y. Yonha and A. Kemp, eds. Citizenship Gaps–Migration, Fertility and Identity in Israel. Jerusalem: Van Leer and Kibbutz Hameuhad Press, 92–122 [Hebrew]. Kemp, A., and Raijman, R. 2008. Migrant and Workers: The Political Economy of Labor Migration in Israel. Jerusalem: Van Leer and Kibbutz Hameuhad Press [Hebrew]. Kristeva, J., 1980. The Powers of Horrors: An Essay about Abjection (trans. Leon S. Roudiez). New York: Columbia University Press. Lan, P., 2003. Maid or Madam? Filipina Migrant Workers and the Continuity of Domestic Labor. Gender and Society, 17 (2), 187–208. Leibowitz, I., Shaover, N. and Kaufman, N., 2013. Migrating Women, Working Women, Exploited Women. Haokets [online]. Available from: https://tinyurl.com/yylnyvrg [accessed 4 January 2019] [Hebrew]. Levinas, E., 1987. Time and the Other. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Lindsay, C., 2001. Women Facing War: ICRC Study on the Impact of Armed Confict on Women. Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross. Liebelt, C., 2011a. Gendered Journeys, Spiritual Transformations and Ethical Formations in Diaspora: Filipina Care Workers in Israel. Feminist Review, 97, 74–91. Liebelt, C., 2011b. Caring for the ‘Holy Land’: Transnational Filipina Domestic Workers in the Israeli Migration Regime. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Limpangog, C.P., 2016. Mothering Duties Come First: Professional Immigrant Filipina’s Career Reconstruction Dilemmas. In: A. Kuroczycka Schultz and H. Vallianatos, eds. The Migrant Maternal–Birthing New Lives Abroad. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 190–209. Mohanty, C.T., 1998. Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience. In: A. Phillips, ed. Feminism and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 254–272. Moufe, C., 2007. Artistic Activism and Antagonistic Spaces. Art and Research, 1 (2) [online]. Available from: www. Artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/moufe.html [accessed 1 May 2020]. Parrenas Salazar, R., 2001. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work. New York: Stanford University Press. Porat, I., 2017. Elders and Their Caregivers: ‘Boundary Work’ Inspired by the State (PhD thesis). Israel: Bar Ilan University [Hebrew]. Ron, P., 2015. It Is Not Their War: The Impact of Military Operations on Philippine Migrant Care Workers in Israel. Clinical Interventions in Aging, 10, 1053–1061. Sachs, D., Sa’ar, A. and Aharoni S., 2007. How Can I  Feel for Others When I  Myself Am Beaten? The Impact of the Armed Confict on Women in Israel. Sex Roles, 57, 593–606. Schefan Katzav, H., 2020. Imaniyot–Mother Artists in Israel. Tel Aviv: Gama Press [Hebrew]. Soskolne, V. et al. 1996. Exposure to Missile Attacks: The Impact of the Persian Gulf War on Physical Health, Health Behaviours and Psychological Distress in High and Low Risk Areas in Israel. Social Science & Medicine, 42 (7), 1039–1047. Stasiulis, D. and Bakan, A., 2005. Negotiating Citizenship: The Case of Domestic Workers in Canada. Feminist Review, 57 (1), 112–139. Takševa, T. and Sgouts, A., eds., 2015. Mothers under Fire: Mothering in Confict Areas. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press. Tyler, I., 2013. Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. London: Zed Books. Wagner, R., 2010. Women Migrant Workers. Mafte’akh–Lexical Review of Political Thought, 1, 61–90. Available from: http://mafteakh.tau.ac.il/en/2010-01/06/ [accessed 4 January 2020].

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Waring, C., 2020. Visual Activism and Marginalized Communities in Online Spaces. In: K. Deepwell, ed. Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms. Amsterdam: Valiz Press, 202–213. Weiler-Polak, D., 2011. Foreign Workers Complain of Harassment and Abuse, Employers not Punished. Haaretz, 28 November, p. 4 [Hebrew]. Willen, S., ed., 2007. Transnational Migration to Israel in Global in Comparative Context. Lanham, MD and Plymouth: Lexington Press. Willen, S., 2019. Fighting for Dignity–Migrant Lives at Israel’s Margins, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Zomer, E. and Bleich, A., eds, 2005. Mental Health in Terror’s Shadow: The Israeli Experience. Tel Aviv: Ramot Press [Hebrew].

11 Women to the Front Women’s Participation and Visual Activism in Hong Kong’s Protest Movement 2019 Evelyn Kwok Introduction It was a hot Wednesday evening in the height of Hong Kong summer in 2019. I was elbow to elbow in a crowd of thousands on Chater Road in the Central Business District. This road is usually opened to trafc, but on that night it was occupied by a sea of people, with police standing at the junction between the crowd and vehicular trafc. Iconic fnancial giants and colonial monuments of Hong Kong tower over this road. These architectural giants physically and metaphorically dwarfed the crowd and stood as the concrete pillars that have shaped the political, economic and cultural identity of the city-state. A few metres away, a young woman wearing black clothing with a mask over her face was scrawling letters on willing participants’ arms. She came up to me and I put forward my wilful arm. I looked down to the letters, which read #ProtestToo in red lipstick. Nearly two months into the weekly protests that began in June 2019, thousands of people gathered on Chater Road on this balmy mid-week evening to express their specifc concerns and outrage to incidents where female protestors have allegedly been sexually harassed or assaulted by police—ranging from unlawful strip-searches to physical assault. The police department and government ofcials had made little to no response to these allegations at the time. The main protests that began in June occurred as peaceful marches rallying against the proposal of an extradition bill that could extradite Hong Kong citizens to China. As clashes between protestors and the police occurred repeatedly, rallies such as #ProtestToo emerged specifcally to protest against the police. It was the frst rally where the gender of protestors and subsequent vulnerability of female protestors was visibilised in public discourse. Prior to this, there was an assumption of a typical protestor that emerged since the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement in 2014—an able-bodied man in his early twenties, Hong Kong-born, wearing black clothing, a yellow hardhat and a face mask. This visual stereotype has since diversifed since women have centred some major confrontations with the police. The frst incident that inspired a female visual icon for the movement happened in August 2019, when a young female volunteer medic was accidentally shot in the eye by a police bean bag round. Photographs of her lying on the ground with blood streaming from her eye fooded local and international media outlets.1 Soon after this event, groups of protestors were seen with fake bloodied bandages covering one eye, chanting ‘An eye for an eye!’ with signs that emphasised the cruelty that happened. The woman’s injury represented the pinnacle of police brutality against Hong Kong citizens at the time and the gesture of

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covering one’s eye has since been adopted by as a sign of solidarity (Amnesty International, 2019; Ho Kilpatrick, 2019). Illustrations of a young woman with blood trickling down her cheek, reminiscent of a Weeping Madonna in Christian iconography, became a popularised image on social media platforms, in printed posters and other activist paraphernalia. From that point on, incidents involving female protestors gathered more media coverage; for example, a foreign female journalist was accidentally shot with a rubber bullet by the police and subsequently blinded, a naked corpse of a missing university student activist was discovered in a creek, mothers’ groups created fash rallies with the slogan ‘Don’t Shoot Our Kids’, unarmed and outraged elderly women confronted armed police etc. Similar public confrontations featuring women of all ages have inspired the visual iconography of women in activist paraphernalia created by local and international artists. The representations of women protestors have shown a signifcant number of women on the front line of this protest movement, standing alongside men in the fght. Social movements refect gender labour distribution and stereotypes, and women are often assumed to belong to caretaker roles akin to their participation in domestic labour (Choi, 2019b).2 Consequently, their active role has often been marginalised and unacknowledged. In the case of the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, despite general assumptions concerning women as more suited to supportive or administrative roles and the threat posed to their physical vulnerability compared to men, statistics have shown a nearly equal number of female and male protestors, with women protestors being active participants and instigators (Carvalho, 2019; Choi, 2019a). In this chapter, I explore visual activism in Hong Kong during the pro-democratic protests of 2019, focusing specifcally on women’s participation and its representation in print form and digital media. Visual activism in Hong Kong is closely linked to political protests, particularly with the rise of pro-democratic voices following the 2014 Umbrella Movement ( Lee, 2015; Veg, 2020). Since then, an extensive number of artistic and photographic practices have emerged to document, refect, criticise and commemorate one of the largest protests in the city-state’s history (Lee, 2019; Leung and Wong, 2020). The colour yellow has been used as a symbol of democracy to demonstrate solidarity by Hong Kong citizens marching on the streets but also by supporters wearing yellow ribbons and writing supportive messages on yellow PostIt notes displayed on mass on public walls and shopfronts. These gestures continued into the protests of 2019, yet this time, the visual activism evolved into a much larger collection that proliferated on online platforms like Instagram and Facebook as well as on physical paraphernalia on the streets. The array of visual activism within the protest movement refects how women are characterised within reductive and unrealistic archetypes of femininity that have long proliferated in art history and popular culture; the virginal saint and mother (Schubert, 1980; Olkowski, 1999; Dumenil, 2017). These representations distort the reality of women’s participation in the protest, denying their agency, resourcefulness and solidarity. Within the scope of this chapter, women’s activism is women’s participation, initiation and assertion of their voices. Vulnerability, both bodily and socially, will be discussed together with agency, beyond the assumed physical disadvantage of female protestors, echoing what Judith Butler (2015) warns as the counterproductiveness of understanding women’s bodies in public assemblies as particularly vulnerable, which

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pertains to being part of a paternalistic system that empowers men and disempowers women. Butler (2020, p. 218) defnes vulnerability as part of embodied social relations and actions [that] can help us understand how and why forms of resistance emerge as they do. . . . If our frameworks of power fail to grasp how vulnerability and resistance can work together, we risk being unable to identify those sites of resistance that are opened up by vulnerability. This chapter discusses how vulnerability and agency, when mobilised, become a form of resistance: ‘women are at once vulnerable and capable of resistance, and that vulnerability and resistance can, and do, and even must happen at the same time’ (Butler, 2015, p. 141). This chapter is divided into three sections. First, it outlines the contextual background of Hong Kong relating to its political past and present. Second, it discusses how women’s increased participation in the protests has been facilitated by its leaderless structure. Third, the chapter charts the visual activism observed in Hong Kong between June and December 2019, and brings attention to various representations of women by analysing how these depict unrealistic and one-dimensional perceptions that reduce women protestors’ agency. Women’s activism in Hong Kong not only supported the political movement but also challenged women’s social domestic roles as homemakers and mothers. Through this analysis, accompanied by imagery of protest paraphernalia representing women and/or created by women, this chapter argues for women’s activism in Hong Kong to be seen and legitimised; their resistance, along with their vulnerability and agency, should be regarded not as a weakness but as an ofer of strength, within and beyond the protest movement.

Democracy in Hong Kong Hong Kong’s colonial history and postcolonial political landscape have shaped its unique cultural identity, which can be easily overlooked as an archetype of ‘East meets West’ (Abbas, 1997; Mathews, Ma and Lui, 2008), with East being the Chinese ethnic origin of Hong Kong and West referring to British occupation (1842–1997). Yet, to categorise Hong Kong’s cultural identity as a bifurcation of cultures is superfcial and generic. Rather, it has been moulded by the complexity of the intertwined strands of Chinese, British colonial and postcolonial infuences, in addition to laissez-faire economic practices, which have created a strange amalgamation embodying aspects of capitalist cosmopolitanism, traditional Chinese values and international progressiveness. This intricate identity has formed the foundation for Hong Kong people’s lifestyle and their identifcation with democratic rights and freedoms. After Hong Kong became a British colony in 1842, the Sino-British treaty between the British and Chinese government was signed in 1984, establishing the ‘one country, two systems’ policy, under which Hong Kong’s rule of law and economic system were promised to remain unchanged for 50 years, after the handover between 1997 and 2047. This was to beneft both Britain and China, as it ensured the continuation of Hong Kong’s capitalist mixed service economy, which is distinctly diferent to China’s authoritarian, planned economy, while activating a gradual transition of ties to China towards 2047 (Lim, 2015, p.  4). Since the transition, Hong Kong has enjoyed its

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mostly unchanged freedoms; however, as democratic movements surged, the beginning of a long struggle for true democratic freedom emerged.3 The desire for a more democratic government was perceived as severing ties with the Chinese government; moreover, it was seen as a revolt against China. With Hong Kong’s history in mind, the possible dissolution of its so-called prodemocratic vision between 1997 and 2047 incited an urge to articulate the city-state’s identity among its people. This enunciation and the Tiananmen Square incident of 4 June 19894 induced a tension that set Hong Kong apart from China. Hong Kong’s current postcolonial identity ofers a unique socio-political context to this chapter, as it has infuenced the pro-democratic protest movement and the subsequent emergence of visual activism that refect perceptions of femininity and women’s social roles.

The ‘Leaderless’ Movement In 2018, a Hong Kong citizen allegedly murdered his pregnant partner in Taiwan. Due to the lack of existing extradition sanctions, the suspect could not be trialled for the crime in either sovereignty. In February 2019, pro-Beijing legislators in Hong Kong proposed changes to fugitive laws, allowing a case-by-case transfer of fugitives from Hong Kong to any jurisdiction with which the city-state lacks an extradition treaty— including China. Initially, the bill seemed to have a noble cause with immediate positive efect; however, it was also seen as a signifcant step towards the erosion of Hong Kong’s pro-democratic rights and any future democratic aspirations if alleged, Hong Kong-based fugitives were to be extradited to China. By June  2019, the proposal sparked protests, which began as peaceful marches in the streets with nearly 2 million people and became the largest recorded number in the city-state’s history. The initial agenda was to persuade the government to revoke the bill. It evolved into a request for universal sufrage, already the most important demand in the annual handover protests, seen as the most efective way to safeguard democratic freedoms. The slogan ‘Liberate Hong Kong, Evolution of Our Time’ emerged as the protests escalated every week to more aggressive clashing with the police. What began as peaceful protests soon became the largest social—political movement in Hong Kong history. This movement did not occur in a vacuum. In fact, it had evolved from the Umbrella Movement (September—December  2014), when an arterial road in Hong Kong’s Central Business District was occupied by thousands of protestors for nearly 12 weeks, orchestrating the largest sit-in protest in the city-state’s history (Ma and Cheng, 2020).5 The name came from the pinnacle moment when police shot teargas into a crowd of unarmed protestors who used umbrellas as shields. Umbrellas became the visual symbol of the movement, which began as the Chinese government issued a response to the proposed electoral reforms that denied Hong Kong people universal sufrage and imposed a pre-screening of chief executive candidates.6 Similar to 2019 events, the 2014 protests began as peaceful marches until the police retaliated with force, which intensifed into various large-scale occupations of public spaces throughout Hong Kong. The Umbrella Movement was a grassroots movement, with several public leaders, including academics and students, many of whom were men and were eventually arrested or jailed or have had sanctions imposed. The protests did not result in any specifc political changes; however, they became an important precedent for 2019, demonstrating the pro-democratic vision that many Hong Kong citizens had and their concerted efort and persistence in making their voices heard.

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There are tactical diferences between the two protest movements. First, the public marches and protests in 2019 occurred on a weekly basis on weekends instead of a long-term occupation of the streets as in 2014; and, second, there was a lack of public leaders and fgureheads to protect the identity of those involved, minimising individuals’ legal accountability for the actions of the collective.7 Susanne Choi (2019b) argues the leaderless movement of 2019 created an opportunity for women to participate, especially on the front line. The leaderless structure enabled horizontal distribution of operations and power. Instead of focusing on singular events organised and led by leaders (as in the Umbrella Movement), it allowed more fexibility for people to simultaneously initiate actions and rally for varied aspects of the cause. This also opened opportunities for women to take action rather than being relegated to background tasks.

Women to the Front Women of all ages aided in organising events in the movement, including the midweek fash rally organised by a mothers’ group where the slogan ‘Don’t Shoot Our Kids’ originated; the #ProtestToo rally organised by female university students; and the ‘Silver Hair March’, begun by a group of retired women. These examples demonstrate that women protestors have been actively coming to the fore, using the intersection of their gender, age and social roles as platforms to bring attention to their specifc concerns for young protestors, especially sexual harassment and assault of women protestors by the police, and breaking the general assumptions that only young people support the movement while older generations do not. This demonstrates what I call an intersected vulnerability, borrowing from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s ‘intersectionality’ framework (1989) and Butler’s concept of bodily and social vulnerability. This allows for an understanding of how intersected vulnerabilities—such as the economic and social inferiority of homemakers, older women, and young female university students—operate within the context of public assemblies and arguably neoliberal societies at large. With regard to the protest movement and women’s activism, the leaderless structure and horizontal distribution of power have opened up opportunities for women to legitimise their specifc concerns as related to their intersected vulnerabilities and to act upon their agency, simultaneously breaking assumptions and mobilising action beyond domestic spaces. The frst and important assumption broken by women-led events was that women were not as well suited to the front line as their male counterparts. Based on my feldwork observations of the protest events between August and December 2019, when I interviewed 32 female and male protestors at various rallies in Hong Kong, women and young girls (some as young as 13 years old) were very present, vocal and assertive within the sea of black-clad protestors.8 Many male interviewees showed surprise at the large numbers of women present. A 24-year-old male protestor stated, I am quite surprised that there are so many [women] here! I guess some women are stronger than they look. But I think it’s great to see more women here with us because this is about the future of Hong Kong for everyone, no matter men or women. (interview by author, Hong Kong, 6 October 2019)

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When I inquired further as to why he was surprised, he implied that he thought women were usually less physically resilient and persistent, while making reference to the hot weather conditions being physically draining. I used the above opinion as a point of inquiry with another protestor. A male protester (aged 31) who was with his female partner said, I’m sure they are here for good reason, just like us. I think the conditions are hot but that’s not the scary part. I’m worried they’ll get hurt frst by the police or others so I want to protect her [gesturing at his partner] and maybe it’ll be easier if they [women] stand behind us. (interview by author, Hong Kong, 6 October 2019) His female partner (aged 25) followed by claiming that she was not worried about her physical diference as a woman: ‘I’m not diferent to him. This [movement] is something that will change all of us and our future so we must all fght. I don’t think I need his protection. I don’t need to stand behind him’ (interview by author, Hong Kong, 6 October 2019). When asked whether she thinks of herself as a feminist, she hesitated for a minute: ‘I don’t think I’m a feminist because I care about all people. This movement is about everyone’s future, not just women so I don’t think whether I am a feminist or not matters’ (interview by author, Hong Kong, 6 October 2019). From my other conversations with many women in the protests, this was a common sentiment. Their responses illuminated the common misconception that feminism concerned only women’s rights, and therefore they did not think it was something to which they subscribed. They did not necessarily recognise or vocalise that their political action was breaking gender norms and social inequalities. When asked about their active participation on the front line of the protests and whether they felt physically more vulnerable than their male counterparts, more than three-quarters of the interviewees felt they were just as capable and that their bodies did not hinder their ability to participate in the protests. One woman said frmly, I think we can do what they [men] can! They [men] can’t hold us back and we don’t need to stand behind them for protection. Maybe our mothers needed protection, but these days, we can be here in the protests, we have things to say and do and we will do it. (interview by author, Hong Kong, 17 November 2019) From these interactions and some other similar conversations, it became clear that women protestors’ appearance and participation in the movement challenged and broke assumptions around physical vulnerability and women’s subordination to men. Contrastingly, the comments from male protestors speak to Butler’s critique on the assumptions of women’s unchanging and defning vulnerability, which makes the case for paternalistic provisions of protection (Butler, 2015, pp. 140–141). The risk is that it becomes the responsibility of the state, and in this case the male protestors, to provide protection for women. This suggests women’s activism can only occur with male protection, which afrms the inequality of power, situating women in a powerless position and, by implication, men in a more powerful one (ibid.). However, women use their vulnerability and agency to resist assumptions concerning their alleged physical weakness and the need for paternalistic patronage. The comments above from

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women participants showed that women disregard social expectations and persist, boldly exerting their presence. As Butler (ibid., p. 25) points out, when people amass on the street, one implication seems clear: they are still here and still there; they persist, they assemble, and so manifest the understanding that their situation is shared .  .  . the bodies assembled ‘say’ ‘we are not disposable’ . . . what they say, as it were, is ‘we are still here, persisting, demanding greater justice, a release from precarity, a possibility of a livable life’. The signifcance of women’s appearance in the movement and depictions of women in protest art are intimately linked to gender norms and social inequality in Hong Kong. The fact that more women had taken part in the movement refects the urgency of the pro-democracy matter, an escalation of the situation that prompted more activists than the Umbrella Movement. In addition, due to the leaderless structure, women are participating more on the front lines. Disregarding social expectations and assumptions driven by patriarchal power structures, women mobilise their intersectional vulnerabilities in recognition of the severity of the situation. When vulnerability is mobilised, it is no longer a discussion about individual strength against resistance; rather, it becomes a concerted political action (Butler, 2015, p. 151).

Women Seen and Unseen Since this protest movement began, visual activism in photography, illustrations, sculptures and other visual means have abounded. They often depict female and male protestors in scenes with tear gas smoke in the background, dressed in rally gear with umbrellas or as fghters against the police or other opponents. In these visual mediums, there is no denial of women’s presence in the protests. However, how women are depicted and what characteristics are exaggerated refects how women are seen, generally mirroring their social roles and expected ways of appearing in public spaces. Yet, they remain unseen—their agency and capabilities not acknowledged. In scenes where a female protestor features, the male protestor is usually portrayed shielding or protecting her.9 Contrastingly, if women are featured alone without male partners, their depictions are either of strong fghters or divine beings. In Figure 11.1, a popular image throughout activist paraphernalia, the female protestor is pictured in typical protestor gear. Her clothing has a collage of newspaper-style images and headlines of events that occurred during the movement, including the volunteer medic who got shot in the eye, the activist student whose body was found in a creek and public statements from police that denied their use of excessive force etc. The fgure appears iconographically like a heroine, in a confdent pose, and her body is drawn as slender and feminine—her slim waist is accentuated, breasts are efortlessly perky and long hair fows abundantly. Throughout art history, from Renaissance paintings to photography, visual representations of women have often been relegated to fgures of the virgin saint, sexualised beauty or mother (Schubert, 1980; Olkowski, 1999; Dumenil, 2017). These archetypes have become normalised and are commonly accepted. However, these essentialise the category of ‘woman’, subscribing to binary subject–object categorisations and mind–body entanglements (Neuhaus, 1997). Similar to depictions of female protestors protected by their male partners, women are ‘seen’ as physically more vulnerable

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Figure 11.1 Little Thunder, poster seen in many public spaces throughout Hong Kong, depicting a female protestor with the slogan `Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times’ in the background, October 2019 Source: Photograph by Evelyn Kwok

or are glorifed as beautiful icons, which does not refect the heterogeneity and multiplicity of women protesters’ positions and lived experiences. Rather, these characterisations perpetuate the normalised archetypes of femininity. Adhis Chetty discusses how media images of women during major world wars often depict stereotypes of women as defenceless, vulnerable or sexualised beings (Chetty, 2004). Chetty argues that ‘the depiction of the role of women in war is refective of the overall marginalisation of women, however important role they play’ (ibid., p. 32). Although the protest movement of Hong Kong in 2019 was not a war, the visual representations of women activists refect a distortion of reality in a time of social and political signifcance. Women protestors portrayed as a divine fgure, rendered as Lady Liberty, was another popular representation. It appeared in posters, digital images and as a threemetre statue created by users on a well-known Hong Kong-based forum that intended

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Figure 11.2 Local artist known as Daxiong, illustration depicting a saintly female fgure with the Hong Kong regional emblem watching over a protestor, November 2019 Source: Photograph by Evelyn Kwok

to create an icon akin to the ‘Goddess of Democracy’.10 The fnal design took inspiration from the female volunteer medic who was shot in the eye accidentally by the police. The statue was paraded around in many public spaces during the protests; however, it was vandalised and removed when it was placed on top of Lion Rock—an iconic mountain in Hong Kong that had been frequently used for displaying political messages that can be viewed from afar (Hong Kong Free Press, 2019a). A local artist known as Daxiong has since June  2019 created many illustrations depicting scenes inspired by the protest, portraying men and women protestors, as well as goddess-like fgures that symbolise the righteous divine watching over the pro-democratic agenda. In Figure 11.2, where a saintly female fgure foats above a protestor, her appearance is similar to the heroine protestor in Figure  11.1, where she conforms to an ideal female body. Despite her perceived power as a divine fgure,

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Figure 11.3 Group of anonymous artists known as the Harcourtromanticist, Justice in Compromise, May 2020, digital image. The image has gained much praise on social media for its dramatic symbolism of the quashing of justice in Hong Kong during the protest movement Source: Photograph by Evelyn Kwok

depictions like these could be interpreted as characterising women’s participation in the movement as something ethereal and symbolic, which has the danger of disregarding the real eforts of women protestors: it ‘beautifes an unbeautiful situation’ (Neuhaus, 1997, p. 8). A digital image created by Harcourtromanticist, an anonymous artist collective on Instagram, is another example of how women are portrayed within the movement in ways that distort their real participation and fetishise their femininity (Figure 11.3). Justice in Compromise borrows from French painter Paul Delaroche’s The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833). The original painting depicts a blindfolded 17-year-old Lady Jane Grey about to be beheaded. She is assisted by the executioner towards a chopping block, and the three others in the painting do not stop her foreseeable execution. The digital image is recreated in the same style as Delaroche’s original work, with changes made to characters. The central fgure of Lady Jane Grey is replaced by a woman who appears to be Lady Justice, blindfolded and kneeling with her emblematic objects—scales and sword—as an allegorical personifcation of fairness in the judicial

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system beside her. She is held towards the chopping block by a shadowed Carrie Lam, the chief executive of Hong Kong, who has become a disdained fgure. The characters beside Lady Justice and Lam are police ofcers, wearing anti-riot gear with frearms and the blood of white doves surrounding them. The symbolism of justice and peace being violently quashed by government authorities is clear, much like the injustice of the original event in 1554, in which Lady Jane Grey was executed for alleged crimes committed not by her but rather by her husband and father. I would like to bring attention to the fact that as Lady Justice is being held towards the execution block, she is also depicted with one breast exposed, contrary to Lady Jane Grey in the Delaroche painting—clothed and unexposed. Such a portrayal could emphasise the downfall and humiliation of Lady Justice, in comparison to the injustice and brutality exercised by police and empowered by the chief executive. However, the exposure of women’s breasts has long been used in visual art to symbolise fertility (Walker, 1994; Neuhaus, 1997), ultimately sexualising the female body and pointing to the physical vulnerability specifcally embodied by women. If the central fgure about to be executed were a young male protestor (which arguably emotes the same outrage of injustice), his exposed chest or other body parts would less likely symbolise and pertain to his vulnerability. In Justice in Compromise, the exposure of women’s breasts, connoting vulnerability, is a trope to emote injustice. Apart from illustrating women protestors as divine fgures, another common depiction of women in protest art and other activist paraphernalia is the maternal fgure. As the profle of a typical protestor is someone in their early twenties or younger living at home with their parents, there are portrayals of protestors and their families. It is common knowledge in Hong Kong that the movement has created a signifcant divide between families, especially between parents and their young adult children.11 Therefore, many young protestors do not discuss their activism with parents to avoid confrontations. This tension between generations and diverging political ideologies is conveyed through images representing, for example, mothers sending of their children in solemn farewells as in Figure 11.4. Images like this are common. They refect how women, especially mothers, are characterised as supportive carers. They are depicted without afrmation or opposition to the political agenda, and their neutrality and apathy are often emphasised by the lack of dialogue between them. Where dialogue features, it only centres on their concern for adequate food and water and worries for their safety. Their clothing also refects this singular focus on their role, as they are depicted wearing casual clothes that signify their domestic duties, for example an apron and indoor slippers in Figure 11.4. There is a stark contrast between these representations of mothers as silent supporters and what occurred in the movement, such as the rallies initiated by mothers’ groups and retired women, ‘Don’t Shoot Our Kids’ and the ‘Silver Hair March’. In fact, Choi (2019a) was one of the initiators in the mothers’ group behind the ‘Don’t Shoot Our Kids’ rally, which mobilised thousands of people to spontaneously gather in Victoria Park in Causeway Bay on a Wednesday evening in September 2019. In reality, many mothers in Hong Kong are not typically timid or unopinionated. Mothers could have been represented diferently as the intelligent initiators, strong activists and loud protectors that they are, rather than passive supporters behind the scenes. Women’s political agency does not diminish because of their motherhood. However, through the patriarchal gaze, women are often seen through tropes of femininity, for example as mothers, saints or martyrs, which reduces the opportunity to

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Figure 11.4 Anonymous, one of the posters from a series exhibited in Yellow Objects, November 2019, Openground, Hong Kong. An exhibition featuring eighteen anonymous local artists Source: Photograph by Evelyn Kwok

empower women protestors and adapt motherhood as a disruptive strategy within the movement. Annelise Orleck (1997, p. 10) argues that motherhood can often galvanise radical political activism: ‘the idea that motherhood entitles women to speak to and for entire societies has moved women to organize courageous movements against military dictatorships, to confront poverty, environmental degradation, and racial inequality’. Echoing the sentiment that mothers have the agency and capacity to galvanise political movements, Kim Miller analyses how women’s political agency was represented in antiapartheid visual culture. Images of South African mothers carrying guns with babies strapped to their back were used in anti-apartheid magazines published by the African National Congress in 1968 to ‘present the “good mother” in an unconventional—if not uncomfortable—role, that of soldier’ (Miller, 2009, p. 68). These images emphasise the importance of motherhood and maternal responsibility, yet also establish an important message that domesticity and motherhood can be militarised as rebellious care against national political causes. In addition, they gave the perception of their

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strength, which empowers women, not just mothers, to take action. Orleck argues that mothers’ activist movements have motivated women who were previously apolitical to engage in political action; as she states, ‘for many women in cultures around the world, motherhood is a powerful political identity around which they have galvanized broadbased and infuential grassroots movements for social change’ (Orleck, 1997, p. 7). Images of women protestors have proliferated in many visual representations throughout the movement. However, their ability to galvanise political action has not been represented; instead, they have been pigeon-holed into tired tropes of femininity. Their agency as women has remained unseen, thus diminishing their resistance and capabilities as well as their active role in propelling the cause of the movement.

Implications for Women’s Activism in Hong Kong Women’s increased involvement in the protest movement has implications on women’s activism in Hong Kong and beyond.12 At the public talk where Choi presented her fndings about women’s participation in the movement in October 2019, she stated, ‘we are mothers before we are feminists’, referring to herself and other women protestors she personally knew (Choi, 2019a). This sentiment is echoed by the female protestors I interviewed. Feminist discourse addresses multiple identities embodied and enacted by women, which in the protests allow for roles of both mother and activist to exist. The social role of the mother is normatively afliated with domesticity and passivity, yet in the case of the movement in Hong Kong, the leaderless structure opened opportunities for women who were part-time or full-time homemakers to harness their ideas and galvanise collective action. This meant that their roles as mothers facilitated their activism and the co-existence of those roles without prioritising one over another. Choi’s remark about placing motherhood before her political activism does not dismiss her own activism, but rather prioritised her role as a mother before activist. This implies that women cannot be both, but it also refects the power that women have in their intersected vulnerability when legitimised and galvanised to empower individuals into a collective agentic body. Women’s activism not only supported the political movement but also challenged their domestic role as homemakers and the perceived one-dimensionality of motherhood. Adelyn Lim, who has written extensively about feminism and women’s movements in Hong Kong post-1997, states, ‘feminism is activism with the goal of challenging and changing women’s subordination to men’ (Lim, 2015, p. 15). In the protest movement, women of various ages challenged this by taking action on the front lines. Their participation concerns opportunity, solidarity and agency. Despite women’s representations that draw upon archetypes of femininity and whatever the exact motivations were for individual women protestors, one factor was common— resistance has emerged, and Hong Kong women are no longer silent or conforming to status quo. As Butler notes, if we accept that there are sexual and gender norms that condition who will be recognisable and ‘legible’ and who will not, we can begin to see how the ‘illegible’ may form as a group, developing norms of becoming legible to one another, how they are exposed to diferential forms of living gender violence, and how this common exposure can become the basis for resistance. (Butler, 2015, p. 38)

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Figure 11.5 A collection of images of activist paraphernalia, May 2020 Source: Photograph by Evelyn Kwok Note: From top left to right, a) a group of young women wearing posters with pro-democratic slogans on their backs at the #ProtestToo rally in August 2019, b) the #ProtestToo slogan scrawled on protestors’ arms at the #ProtestToo rally in August 2019, c) a poster promoting the sentiment of the #MeToo movement at the #ProtestToo rally in August 2019, d) a handmade sign featuring the iconography of the female medic who was accidentally blinded by the police at the #ProtestToo rally in August 2019, e) a handmade sign that also used the same iconography as the previous sign at a protest rally in November 2019, f) a makeshift memorial at Hong Kong University created by students for the deceased student activists, November 2019, g) the statue of Lady Liberty designed and crowd-funded by local activist groups that appeared physically at protests as well as being used as a visual icon in other forms of visual activism, h) illustration by Daxiong featuring divine fgures foating above a protest icon, as a gesture of divine protection for the cause and its advocates, i) a paste-up of a cartoon illustration of a protestor, with a pro-democratic slogan written on it, as seen at Hong Kong University in November 2019, j) one of the posters from a series exhibited in Yellow Objects, at Openground, Hong Kong. This one features the chief executive of Hong Kong and changes her surname from ‘Lam’ to ‘lame’ to criticise her role against the movement.

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It is important to acknowledge that women have appeared on the front lines in large numbers and instigated signifcant events in 2019. Their collective public appearance and participation for the pro-democratic cause and specifc objections to brutality towards women and youths have become visible. Some individual women protestors’ physical sufering and even death have motivated and mobilised thousands of people to stand up and speak out. While records have shown that nearly half of the protestors have been women, the dominant fgures portrayed within visual activism are still predominantly men. This is not to argue for equal visual representation in quantity, but to demonstrate how women are still marginalised and invisibilised by representations that should show their active involvement rather than drawing on the confnes of their assumed social roles and heteronormative gender norms. In order for perspectives to shift and visual activism to refect an agentic and empowering image of women protestors in this and future causes, women’s vulnerability, agency and capacity to resist must be regarded simultaneously not as weakness but rather as an ofer of strength.

Notes 1. See articles such as ‘An Eye for an Eye: Hong Kong Get Figurehead in Woman Injured by Police’, Guardian [online]; ‘Medic Shot in Eye During Hong Kong protests’, Reuters [online]; ‘Woman Who Sufered Severe Eye Injury During Hong Kong Protests Has Not Gone Blind, Hospital Source Says’, South China Morning Post [online], see Cheung (2019) and Kato (2019). 2. At a talk held in November 2019, Susanne Choi Yuk Ping discussed how gender roles in the home are refected in the distribution of roles in social movements. Choi gave examples of movements in Ukraine, Ireland and China in which women are unacknowledged in their roles as they were mostly operating in the background. 3. Every year since 1997, on the anniversary of the handover on 1 July, mass protests take place in Hong Kong, as well as on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square incident on 4 June  1989, when weeks-long, student-led demonstrations in Central Beijing were dismantled by the government troops’ lethal retaliation, which reportedly killed thousands of protestors. Despite global reportage of the Tiananmen Square incident, ongoing protests and the historical event are still unacknowledged by the Chinese government. 4. See endnote 3. 5. Technically the Umbrella Movement in 2014 is still the largest sit-in protest in Hong Kong, as the 2019 protests were not continuous sit-in protests. In 2014, public spaces were continuously occupied by protestors for 12 weeks without pause, while the protest movement in 2019 included weekly protests that ebbed and fowed. 6. The Chief Executive holds the highest power in Hong Kong. Currently, three candidates are pre-selected by the Chinese government; their loyalty to China and the National Party is a major criteria for selection. The pre-selected candidates are then voted on by a Hong Kong election committee of approximately 1,200 members. 7. For further details of Umbrella Movement’s motivations, structure and how it pioneered protest activism in Hong Kong, see Ma and Cheng (2020). 8. Black was the recurring colour of choice by pro-democratic protestors because of its association with death and mourning. 9. In the movement, young heterosexual couples were often seen protesting together on the streets and have been documented in journalistic photography. The narrative of lovers being torn apart by police brutality makes a more compelling message to the public about the excessive force of the authorities. 10. Lady Liberty was known to be inspired also by the Goddess of Democracy created during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. 11. Typically, the older generation disagreed with the movement and criticised the youth of Hong Kong for disrupting the peace and economic stability of the city-state (Hong Kong Free Press, 2019b; Ting, 2019).

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12. Simona Sharoni (1997, p. 152) discusses how Jewish Israeli women used the imagery of motherhood in their political activities while insisting that they were ‘not feminists, but rather mothers concerned with their sons on the battlefeld’ during Intifada. In 1990, Sri Lankan women formed a grassroots organisation called the Mothers Front to protest the disappearance of their sons and husbands during the civil war, and they also persisted in the usage of their social roles as mothers and wives to protest, insisting on not protesting as feminists (De Alwis, 1997, p. 22).

References Abbas, A. (1997). Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Amnesty International. (2019). How not to police a protest: unlawful use of force by Hong Kong police [online]. Available at: www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa17/0576/2019/ en/%20%C3%A2%E2%82%AC%C2%A6/ [accessed 21 April 2020]. Butler, J. (2015). Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Butler, J. (2020). The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind. New York: Verso. Carvalho, R. (2019). #ProtestToo: the women at the forefront of Hong Kong’s anti-government movement. South China Morning Post [online]. Available at: www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/ article/3025146/protesttoo-women-forefront-hong-kongs-anti-government-movement [accessed 17 October 2019]. Chetty, A. (2004). Media images of women during war: vehicles of patriarchy’s agenda? Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity, 59, 32–41. Available at: www.jstor.org/ stable/4548112 [accessed 22 December 2019]. Cheung, E. (2019). Woman who sufered severe eye injury during Hong Kong protests. South China Morning Post [online]. Available at: www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/ article/3024147/woman-who-sufered-severe-eye-injury-during-hong-kong [accessed 20 April 2020]. Choi, S.Y.P. (2019a). Gender and leaderless protest: mothers and female fghters in Hong Kong’s 2019 pro-democracy movement. Paper presented at the CUHK HKIAPS Gender Research Centre, 23 October. Choi, S.Y.P. (2019b). Women on the front line: gendered opportunities and constraints in Hong Kong’s 2019 leaderless protests. Paper presented at the Hong Kong Sociological Association Annual Meeting, 30 November. Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989:1, Article 8. Available at: http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/ vol1989/iss1/8 [accessed 1 May 2020]. De Alwis, M. (1997). Motherhood as a space of protest: women’s political participation in contemporary Sri Lanka. In Basu, A. & Jefrey, P. (eds), Appropriating Gender: Women’s Activism and the Politicization of Religion in South Asia, London and New York: Routledge. Dumenil, L. (2017). Visual representations of women in popular culture. In The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I (pp. 204–254). Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Ho Kilpatrick, R. (2019). ‘An eye for an eye’: Hong Kong get fgurehead in woman injured by police. The Guardian [online]. Available at: www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/16/ an-eye-for-an-eye-hong-kong-protests-get-fgurehead-in-woman-injured-by-police [accessed 1 September 2019]. Hong Kong Free Press. (2019a). In pictures: Hong Kong’s Lion Rock ‘fnal resting place’ Lady Liberty democracy statue. Hong Kong Free Press [online]. Available at: www.hongkongfp. com/2019/10/13/pictures-hong-kongs-lion-rock-fnal-resting-place-lady-liberty-democracystatue/ [accessed 25 October 2019].

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Hong Kong Free Press. (2019b). War at the dinner table: Hong Kong families divided over protests. Hong Kong Free Press [online]. Available at: www.hongkongfp.com/2019/09/17/ war-dinner-table-hong-kong-families-divided-protests/ [accessed 25 October 2019]. Interview by author, Hong Kong, 6 October 2019. Interview by author, Hong Kong, 17 November 2019. Kato, I. (2019). Medic shot in eye during Hong Kong protests. Reuters [online]. Available at: www.reuters.com/news/picture/medic-shot-in-eye-during-hong-kong-prote-idUSRTS2MBDL [accessed 20 April 2020]. Lee, E. (2015). Space of disobedience: a visual document of the umbrella movement in Hong Kong, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 16:3, 367–379. Lee, W. (2019). Derivative work and Hong Kong’s umbrella movement: three perspectives. In Dibazar, P. and Naef, J. (eds), Visualizing the Street: New Practices of Documenting, Navigating and Imagining the City (pp. 29–56). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Leung, C.  & Wong, S. (2020). Praxis of cultivating civic spontaneity: aesthetic intervention in the umbrella movement. In Ma, N. and Cheng, E. (eds), The Umbrella Movement: Civil Resistance and Contentious Space in Hong Kong, revised edn (pp. 125–148). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Lim, A. (2015). Transnational Feminism and Women’s Movement in Post-1997 Hong Kong: Solidarity Beyond the State. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Ma, N. & Cheng, E. (eds). (2020). The Umbrella Movement: Civil Resistance and Contentious Space in Hong Kong, revised edn. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Mathews, G., Ma, E.K. & Lui, T. (2008). Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation. New York: Routledge. Miller, K. (2009). Moms with guns: women’s political agency in anti-apartheid visual culture. African Arts, 42:2, 68–75. Neuhaus, J. (1997). Colonizing the cofee table: ‘National Geographic’ magazine and erasure of diference in the representation of women. American Periodicals, 7, 1–26. Orleck, A. (1997). Tradition unbound: radical mothers in international perspective. In Jetter, A., Orleck, A. & Taylor, D. (eds), The Politics of Motherhood: Activist Voices from Left to Right (pp. 3–23). Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Olkowski, D. (1999). Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sharoni, S. (1997). Motherhood and the politics of women’s resistance: Israeli women organizing for peace. In The Politics of Motherhood: Activist Voices from Left to Right (pp. 144–160). Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Schubert, G. (1980). Women and symbolism: imagery and theory. Women in Art, Oxford Art Journal, 3, 29–34. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/1360176 [accessed 6 December 2019]. Ting, V. (2019). Survey reveals widening rift between generations of Hong Kongers over antigovernment protests. South China Morning Post [online]. Available at: www.scmp.com/ news/hong-kong/politics/article/3041298/survey-reveals-widening-rift-between-generations [accessed 26 October 2019]. Veg, S. (2020). Creating a textual public space: slogans and texts from the umbrella movement. In Ma, N. & Cheng, E. (eds), The Umbrella Movement: Civil Resistance and Contentious Space in Hong Kong, revised edn (pp. 149–182). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Walker, A. (1994). Giving the party: Aunt Jemima, Mammy, and the goddess within, Ms, 4:6, 22.

12 ¡Madres! Reconfguring ‘Abducted Motherhood’ in Mónica Mayer’s Personal and Collective Artwork Karen Cordero Reiman The critique of motherhood as associated with women’s place and identity in patriarchal society has been a key focus of feminist thought and activism throughout its history, in ways that address central issues such as the gendered division of labour and the organisation of childbearing, childcare and childrearing in society, conceptions of biological determinism, women’s right to control their reproductive processes and the right to health care, among other aspects. Rethinking the representation of motherhood has also been an important topic for feminist art, as it places in question the limited, ideologically charged patriarchal stereotypes of motherhood that have populated the history of art throughout the ages, circumscribing the aspects of motherhood that are represented and therefore imagined, articulated and questioned. In this respect, feminist art becomes a vehicle of activism, giving voice to the experience of motherhood from the vantage point of women’s bodies, emotions and social interactions; making visible its diversity and complexity; and, thus, contributing to its reconceptualisation in both individual and collective, social terms. The myth of motherhood was one of the frst targets of second-wave feminist activism in Mexico in the 1970s in demonstrations, caricatures and publications, in which visual representations played a fundamental role. These vehicles deconstructed the contradictory symbolic usage of motherhood in Mexico and its place at the root of women’s oppression. Motherhood has continued to be a focus of feminist activism in Mexico in the ensuing decades even as the issues it unpacks have been contextualised in diferent ways by the exploration of diverse models of families and parenting, expanded discussions of sexuality and gender roles, changing legislation and the persistence and escalation of gender violence and feminicide. The work of Mónica Mayer (Mexico City, 1954), a pioneering Mexican feminist artist and activist, has interacted constantly with this process since the 1970s. Through the deployment of diverse strategies of visual activism and conceptual dynamics in Mayer’s individual and collective work, her own body and those of her collaborators take on an integral role in both graphic representations and performative actions that combine references to cultural conventions and personal experiences as part of this critique. This chapter explores key examples of Mayer’s works that deal with the resistance to and breaking down of stereotypes regarding motherhood. Through the  comparison, contrast and dialogue between these examples, I  hope to illuminate  the specifcity of feminist visual activism in Mexico; some of its changes and continuities over the past four decades; and its dialogue with feminism and gender

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discourse in other cultural and geographical contexts, as well as the particular role of Mónica Mayer’s work in articulating distinct possibilities in this respect.

Mexican Feminism, Mother’s Day and the Critique of the Mother Myth As linguistic anthropologist Liza Bakewell (2010) has noted, the word madre, or mother, in Mexican society has a series of complex and contradictory implications. They reveal a conception of motherhood that moves between rhetorical extremes of idealisation and systematic degradation and dehumanisation, without ever considering the lived experiences of women and the impact of this symbolic construction on many aspects of social reality: interpersonal interactions, parent–child relationships, public policy in the legal and health services spheres and the endemic gender-marked aggression expressed by the continuous and increasing rate of feminicides, among others. One of the founding acts of contemporary Mexican feminism was a 1971 Protest Against the Myth of the Mother on the occasion of Mother’s Day1 organised by the newly formed group Mujeres en Acción Solidaria (Women in Solidary Action), known as MAS, at the Mexico City Monument to the Mother. In the request for permission to carry out the event presented to the Ministry of Internal Afairs, they disguised it as a ‘domestic social orientation for Mexican women’. However, the press release; the ironic poster caricaturising the enthronement of women on Mother’s Day and their oppression the other 364 days of the year; and the pamphlet they distributed titled Somos madres ¿y qué más? (We are mothers, and what else?) could not have been clearer in their critical perspective (Ana Victoria Jimenez Archive, 1971). In fact, the celebration of Mother’s Day in Mexico is a ‘tradition’ that was invented by the newspaper Excelsior in April  1922, in direct reaction to the advent of the ‘modern woman’ in the post-revolutionary period in Mexico and the anti-clerical bent in public education in certain national contexts of the time, particularly in the southeastern state of Yucatán. This is where the socialist Felipe Carrillo Puerto had been elected governor two months earlier, and in 1916 the then-governor Salvador Alvarado had motivated the organisation of the frst feminist congress in Mexico (Cano 2016). The article in which the director of Excelsior, Rafael Alducín, proposes this new holiday (on a date he claims emulates the U.S. Mother’s Day celebration) argues that it is necessary in order to combat the rampant denigration of ‘woman’s highest function’. He posits as proof of this assertion the fact that in the Yucatán, the local government was distributing among female schoolteachers leafets containing information on sex education and birth control based on Margaret Sanger’s writings and activities in the U.S (Acevedo 2012, 10). Excelsior’s initiative had far-reaching consequences that continue to resonate in the importance given to Mother’s Day in Mexico today, ranging from proposals regarding gifts to give mothers, which fuelled the current commercialisation of the holiday, to contests rewarding qualities such as abnegation and the quantity of children produced, among others (Acevedo 2012, 57–64). The proliferation throughout Mexico of monuments to motherhood in the ensuing years, adopting the massive fgurative style that characterised ofcial postrevolutionary sculpture, underlined in the public sphere

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the stereotype of the mother as a selfess protector, and the conception of motherhood as concomitant with female identity.

Mayer’s Formation and Initial Refgurations of Motherhood Mónica Mayer studied art between 1972 and 1976 at the National School of Fine Arts in Mexico City, and her initial involvement with feminism and feminist art was a result of her experience in that context, where women artists were expected to relegate their personal creative and political concerns to the broader ‘revolutionary’ goals of their male colleagues, as well as to social expectations such as motherhood. She quickly surmised that she needed to become a feminist in order to become a successful artist, and since that time her development in those two aspects became inextricably intertwined (Mayer 1998, 47–48). In 1975, Mexico City was the site of the United Nation’s frst World Conference on Women, sparking a furry of parallel activities in the art world, including the exhibition La mujer como creadora y tema del arte (Woman as Creator and Theme of Art) at the city’s Museum of Modern Art, which included primarily male participants (Goldman 1994, 179–180). In reaction, Carla Stellweg, an assistant to the director of the museum, organised a conference at the museum on women’s art and aesthetics, and in 1976 published an issue of the magazine Artes visuales (Visual Arts), of which she was the editor, that included documentation of the discussions during the conference placed in dialogue with articles related to the emerging movement around feminist art education in the U.S. (Stellweg 1976). The publication prompted Mayer to explore the work being carried out by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro in the Feminist Art Program in California,2 and—after an initial exploratory trip—her decision to travel to Los Angeles to further her studies of feminist art. In the ensuing years—while she and her partner, Victor Lerma, saved money for this endeavour—she participated in the organisation of a number of explicitly feminist exhibitions in Mexico City and in the Cine-Mujer (Film-Women) collective, which produced documentaries on issues of social, medical and legal abuse of women (Mayer 1998, 49). During this period, she also began to explore participatory strategies in conceptually oriented works, such as Lo normal (On Normality) of 1978, a series of postcards that constitute a playful survey about desire and gestuality; and El tendedero (The Clothesline), also from 1978, in which she invited women to make visible their verbal testimonies of gender-based violence in the city. In 1978, Mayer and Lerma moved to Los Angeles, and she signed up for the master’s programme ofered by the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman’s Building,3 where she worked closely with Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, and their group Ariadne (A Social Art Network), enriching her knowledge and skills regarding feminist theories and methodologies and their application in the arts. From this context emerged her experience with and commitment to combining individual work with collective initiatives and her conviction regarding the efcacy of the methodology of working in small groups. As part of Lacy and Labowitz’s visual project Making It Safe in the Ocean Park area of LA, she developed a second version of The Clothesline in which she explored more radical exhibition strategies in non-art spaces: from the street to local libraries, as well as on ephemeral ‘clotheslines’ strung between lamp posts, utility poles and other artifacts of the urban milieu. She also honed her abilities in linking art, social action and activism, since the questions posed by the piece

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in this case addressed not only the problem, but also possible solutions suggested by the participants. Mayer’s master’s thesis presented and analysed her project Traducciones: un diálogo international de mujeres artistas (Translations: An International Dialogue of Women Artists), in which a dialogue was established between feminist artists from Los Angeles and from Mexico.4 Several artists from the Woman’s Building participated in a visit to Mexico City, Cuernavaca and Oaxaca, where they exchanged information and experiences, producing a collective written document accompanied by images that registered the results of the encounter. One of the points highlighted in the resulting documentation is precisely the diference between the conceptions and representations of motherhood in the two countries, and the importance of Catholic representations for Mexican models of motherhood and womanhood: Mothers have been put on a high pedestal (more like a prison). They are venerated as the center of life and the family, but they have no real power. By orders of the Virgin and Christ, we are deprived of the control of our bodies and our lives. (Mayer 1980, 13) Similarly, several of Mayer’s works created during her time in Los Angeles use images referring ironically to religious iconography in order to critique the contradictory archetypes of femininity in Mexican cultural tradition: the virgin, the prostitute and the selfess wife and mother. This reveals a more explicit focus on the critique of social stereotypes, informed by an increasing awareness of feminist theory of the time. Among these works are the series of drawings Nuestra señora (Our Lady) (1977– 1978), in which the virgin’s body evokes both a vagina and a phallus; and La Dolorosa (Our Lady of Sorrows) (1978–1979), in which phallic symbols and the word ‘rape!’ are juxtaposed with an ofering box decorated with the image of the Virgin of Sorrows.5 Upon Mayer’s return to Mexico, however, she found that the local public that encountered these works in exhibitions was often ofended by the ironic manipulation of religious icons, diverting their focus from the underlying message. Therefore, she switched her strategy, and began incorporating into her work photographic and photocopied images of herself in poses that evoked Virgin or Madonna fgures, in a process that Erin L. McCutcheon (2016, 143–144) has pertinently characterised as two-dimensional performativity, to which I will return later. A number of other early drawings and collages of this period already reveal, however, more complex, afective refgurations of motherhood and their relation to activism, as they incorporate fragmented images of Mayer’s own body and that of her mother, Lilia Lucido—also a feminist activist—during their participation in public demonstrations in favour of free, legal abortion.6 These alternative images of women not as passive victims, but rather as active agents in a process of social change that links mothers and daughters in sorority, are embedded in works whose very material construction evokes movement and fux through the bodily and sensorial engagement of their viewers. Primero de diciembre 77 (1 December 1977) and the polyptych Genealogías (Genealogies) (1979) (Figure 12.1) inaugurate a process that Mayer has continued throughout her graphic and conceptual work of imbricating, reworking and re-signifying elements from her vital archive (literal or performed, photographed or photocopied)— incorporating them by means of drawing, collage, stitching or interweaving, and later

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Figure 12.1 Mónica Mayer, Genealogías (Genealogies), 1979, mixed media, 66.5 x 51  cm. Polyptych (1 of 4) Photograph: Jorge Arreola Barraza

on through digital graphics, performative lectures and publications in periodicals, blogs and books. This fuid, intermedial operation constitutes not only a metaphor for the integral character of her life and work, but also an artistic proposition in itself as it articulates a dynamic dialogue between art and experience, or—in feminist terms—between the personal and political, a key element in her treatment of motherhood throughout her work. The playful and at the same time obsessive process that underlies these pieces lends a rich tactile quality to our perceptual relationship with them and denotes a montage-like procedure that evokes the ordering and reordering

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Figure 12.2 Mónica Mayer, Mito #1 (Myth #1), 1981, mixed media, 41 x 31 cm Photograph: Jorge Arreola Barraza

of signifers in a suggestive, poetic fashion that belies the possibility of constructing fxed meanings and interpretations. Genealogías, created in Los Angeles, but drawing on elements from a Mexican context, incorporates images of Mayer at a demonstration with her mother, combining them with other elements that impede their conventional reading as journalistic documentation. Brightly coloured hand-drawn framing devices transport the images into a personal conceptual space in which the artist’s diverse, conficted relationship with them is suggested by formal interventions. In one of the pieces in this series, the photograph of Mayer and her mother is located in a cloud-like frame in the upper register and below is inverted, veiled by a semi-translucent gauze fragment and located in a gestural frame that suggests an infernal context. In another, the principal image has a somewhat psychedelic fowerlike frame, while below a reiterated image of Mayer’s

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mother in a demonstration is cropped sequentially in cinematic fashion; a sort of wall of brightly coloured squares—that suggests both an artist’s palette and garish bathroom tiles—increasingly encroaches on the image, until it covers everything but the artist’s mother’s face. And in a third case, the lower image presents a dramatic contrast with the photo of activism, showing an archetypal representation of a Mater Dolorosa (Our Lady of Sorrows) in a somewhat ominous, baroque context.7 These three early images establish a quality that persists both in Mayer’s drawings and performative work, the combination of an apparently light-hearted, humorous and colloquial tone with more sombre, disturbing undercurrents that refer to the complex social and psychological context in which the battle for transformation of gender stereotypes and personal autonomy is waged.

Embodied Motherhood as Art During the 1980s, when Mayer returned to Mexico and procreated her two children, her artistic refections on motherhood drew on her own corporeal and social experiences as a source for the creation of both two dimensional and collective, performative works that continued to subvert conventional representations, publicly consolidating the presence of feminist activist art in Mexico. The series entitled Concepción (Conception), developed between 1981 and 1982, refers directly to the artist’s physical and emotional experience of pregnancy and childbirth around the birth of her son Adán in 1981, fusing an evocation of the bodily experience with a symbolic allusion to the broader vital transformation implied by motherhood. Mito #1 (Myth #1, 1981) (Figure 12.2), Separación (Separation, 1982) and Tú (You, 1982) all utilise an iconic egglike form to suggest the growth of a new being within the uterus, while the collage application of tiny heads of winged cherubim around its perimeter suggests both an acute consciousness of interior physical space, and—through the Mater Dolorosa that appears within the ovoid form in Mito #1—the omnipresence of conventional defnitions and representations of motherhood in tension with personal embodiment and lived experience. Undulating lines in watercolour suggesting internal fuidity and a certain calmness are punctuated in all three cases by elements that call our attention to the fragile balance between the body’s interior and exterior, and its transgression in the process of procreation and nurturing. In Mito #1, a vaginal opening within the elliptical form spews out blood and a series of small male fgures surrounded by aureoles, recontextualising an image of Victor Lerma, Mayer’s partner, as a child. In Separación, miniature versions of Mayer’s head, in the same scale as the surrounding cherubim, foat in an ocean of amniotic liquid, each dangling a small ‘bloodied’ gauze fragment from a rippled line that suggests an umbilical cord. And in Tú, the ovoid form seems to exceed the limits of a bloodied gauze passageway; each of the cherubic faces that surround it is cancelled out with an X, while in its interior a single angelic visage foats unscathed, accompanied by a centrally located question mark and the word ‘tú’ (you) inscribed in a circle lodged on the lower register of the elongated shape. The inclusion of words as part of the images, an element that becomes characteristic of Mayer’s work of this period, adds a suggestion of sound, expanding the multisensorial qualities of these tactile, mixed media works that also include corrugated board, sewing and Letraset. At times the words are insistently repeated, as in Separación, where the words simbiosis (symbiosis) and separación (separation), applied in black,

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alternate their presence below the pieces of fabric, adapting themselves to the directionality of the waves, while the name Adán, in bright yellow, occupies forms that approximate fagella and which seem to attempt to penetrate the ovoid form from the outside. Similarly, in the series of large-scale works on paper titled Diario de las violencias cotidianas (Diary of Everyday Acts of Violence) (1984), images of Mayer in dramatic poses emulating religious images of Virgins and Madonnas are superimposed on pages marking the days of the week, in which any semblance of a rational ordering of time is displaced by fgurations of the constant demands that engulf her. The content of these images transmits a sense that assuming the role of a mother puts everything into fux, as a woman literally becomes the embodied site of stereotypical gender distinctions, an aspect powerfully evoked and analysed in the groundbreaking 1976 text Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution by the U.S. feminist writer Adrienne Rich (Rich 1976). In addition, the treatment of materials and processes suggests the production of a sense of self through the creative composition of contrasting and at times conficting fragments, as in Rich’s 1977 poem Transcendental Etude: ‘yarn, calico and velvet scraps .  .  . dark against bright, silk against roughness, pulling the tenets of a life together’ (Rich 1978, 76–77). The title of Mito #1 also recalls the ironic Protest Against the Myth of the Mother organised by MAS on 9 May 1971, at the Monument to the Mother in Mexico City. Thus, Mayer creates a conceptual and material synthesis that explores her personal experience of motherhood in the light of a feminist analysis, giving visible form to a complex range of emotions that are both deeply personal and contribute actively to the public rewriting of simplifed social codifcations of women’s identity. In De niñas y pesadillas (On Girls and Nightmares, 1987–1989) and Los naufragios del cuerpo (The Shipwrecks of the Body, 1990), two series of drawings created later in the same decade, Mayer digs deeper into the expressive possibilities of drawing, graphics and spatial illusion, using graphite, ink and image transfers to create a series of unstable scenarios in which she and her second child, her daughter Yuruen, are the principal actors. The fgures are represented through stock performative, almost archetypal postures repeated in diferent combinations and orientations throughout the series in distinct relations to a vertiginous context: the child, naked in an expectant stance, and Mayer in a bathing suit—or occasionally a jumpsuit—in active vertical and crouching poses suggesting a subtle eroticism. Using devices gleaned from metaphysical painting and op art, the spaces created here evoke variations on a state of anxiety in oneiric constructions that seek to process the experience of motherhood, and—as Mayer has commented—her memory of her own mother’s mental instability and its efect on her perceptions regarding motherhood (Mayer, personal communication, February 2016).8 In addition to Mayer’s two-dimensional creations and her conceptual works that catalyse conversations within and between communities regarding issues related to gender, a signifcant part of her career has involved work in artistic groups prioritising performative actions around cultural and social issues, drawing on her formation with Lacy and Labowitz in the Woman’s Building.9 In 1983, with Maris Bustamante, she formed the group Polvo de Gallina Negra (Black Hen Powder), the frst feminist art group in Mexico, which for a decade carried out performances and actions for live publics and through mass media. The name of the group comes from a powder sold in traditional markets in Mexico believed to protect people from the evil eye, a quality that seemed appropriate to Bustamante and Mayer, given the precarious situation

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of art in Mexico at the time, and its exacerbation in the case of women artists and feminist artists. Their long-term, multi-faceted project ¡Madres! (1983–1990)—its title echoing the complex and contradictory social usage of the noun cited by Bakewell—was conceived as a way to integrate the art and life of its participants, at a time when both had small children; they even went so far as to claim that the coordinated conception and birth of their daughters was part of the project. ¡Madres! comprised various elements, among them mail art projects, actions and performances, many of which had as their hallmark the usage of aprons and Styrofoam bellies alluding to the social stereotyping of women in terms of domesticity and motherhood (the latter represented in narrow biological terms identifed with pregnancy). In one of the best-known episodes of Polvo de Gallina Negra’s ¡Madres! project, for example, they invited various men to be ‘Mothers for a Day’ (Figures 12.3 and 12.4), among them the host of a popular television programme, Guillermo Ochoa, who in turn invited them to participate in his talk show, donning the apron and belly and his crown as Queen of the Home while he interviewed them with respect to the project, feminism and feminist art (Mayer 1998, 55–56). Another phase of the project, Egalité, liberté, maternité (Equality, Liberty, Maternity), consisted of a series of mail-art dispatches sent to the artistic and feminist community and the press, in which the group addressed various aspects of motherhood in

Figure 12.3 Polvo de Gallina Negra (Mónica Mayer and Maris Bustamante), ‘Madre por un día’ 1987, still from the television programme Nuestro Mundo (Our World) with Guillermo Ochoa Courtesy Maris Bustamante

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Figure 12.4 Polvo de Gallina Negra (Mónica Mayer and Maris Bustamante), ‘Madre por un día’, 1987, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City Courtesy Mónica Mayer

a satirical manner. The competition Carta a mi madre (A Letter to My Mother) called on the general public to write letters expressing everything that they would have liked to tell their mothers but never dared to, announcing in its press release: Today, the Feminist Art Group ‘Polvo de Gallina Negra’ announces a violent and efective attack on the stereotype of The Mother, that makes women with children feel so bad, since however much they try they will never achieve the ideal of The Mother, and that makes children feel miserable, since they live feeling— consciously or unconsciously—that their mother is no more than a mere human being. (Polvo de Gallina Negra 1987)10

The Protest of the Day After (Mother’s Day): Against ‘Abducted Motherhoods’ A more recent collective project, No a las maternidades secuestradas (No to Abducted Motherhoods) (Figure  12.5), synthesises a number of aspects present in Mayer’s earlier projects in a process-based public art event integrating art and activism. On the afternoon of 11 May 2012, a group of about 60 women, and a number of men, with protruding pregnant stomachs and aprons in various solid colours with the words ‘No a las maternidades secuestradas’ fled into the Zócalo, the main square of Mexico City where the National Palace, Cathedral and the central city government ofces are located. Each held a sign inscribed with a personal defnition of ‘abducted

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Figure 12.5 Mónica Mayer, La Protesta del Día Después (Protest of the Day After), 11 May 2012, Zócalo (Central Plaza), Mexico City Photograph: Yuruen Lerma Mayer

motherhood’ and, as the group moved forward, its members—refecting a wide range of ages and professions, and including several well-known artists—in turn pronounced these defnitions, in response to the collective chant: ‘Una maternidad secuestrada es . . .’ (An abducted motherhood is . . .). In a bustling urban context, in a space that was still occupied in part by the infrastructure for the public Paul McCartney concert that had been held in the Zócalo the day before for Mother’s Day, this idiosyncratic procession may have seemed at frst just another crazy occurrence in a complex and conficted social forum. It was, however, in fact a work of conceptual, participatory, feminist art, and the culmination of several months of a workshop—the Taller de Arte y Activismo Feminista (the Workshop of Feminist Art and Activism) or TAAF—led by Mónica Mayer. This project in turn formed a part of a group of projects called ‘visits to the archive’ that Mayer has carried out and documented in a corresponding blog since 2011. In this case, it referred to the archive of Ana Victoria Jiménez, who was a member of the frst group of feminist activists of the 1970s women’s movement in Mexico, and who amassed a vast photographic and documentary archive of the movement spanning from the 1970s through the 1990s.11 The project proposed a dialogue with and reactivation of this archive, based in part on Mayer’s observation of the rich and highly creative visual content of the early feminist actions and demonstrations, an unselfconscious performativity avant la lettre that emerged from the questioning of gendered myths and stereotypes, and their social consequences.

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Mayer, in her blog, describes the process of the project that led to the formation of the TAAF in the following manner: The visit to the archive has been constructed little by little. I  have once again reviewed its materials, I have attended workshops and seminars on art/community or social sculpture, I have surfed the internet for hours to immerse myself in current art and activism projects in diferent parts of the world, and I have read and reread texts on art and politics. I have also personally organized gatherings with potential future accomplices in order to establish ties related to work, but also—most importantly for me—afective ties. And fnally, I started the Workshop of Feminist Art and Activism (TAAF) with the objective of individual and collective production. All of this takes its time, and this must be respected, because this type of social project aims to create a social network. (Mayer 2013) She also notes that the process comprised by the action Maternidades secuestradas (Abducted Motherhoods) is susceptible to being described and defned in diferent ways, depending on whether it is framed or inscribed from the standpoint of political activism or from that of art: From the point of view of feminism I would defne it as a consciousness raising campaign with respect to our right to self-defnition that circulated through the internet, the media, and a public event: The Protest of the Day After. From an artistic standpoint I would say that it is an intervention in three acts/spaces that kept expanding: a) the dinners, b) the internet, c) the street and the media. (Mayer 2013) The name Protest of the Day After refers to the fact that the event was planned on the day after Mother’s Day, while also resonating with the name in Spanish for the ‘morning-after pill’, a form of emergency contraception after unprotected sex; and in general with the idea of a kind of ‘hangover’ or ‘rude awakening’ that makes one aware of the consequences of one’s unthinking actions. Thus, the title is placed in deliberate counterpoint to the conventional social construction of motherhood in Mexico, and its consecration on a particular day with a celebration of the linkage of women with their ‘biological destiny’ that deliberately eclipses the often contradictory and oppressive implications of this imposed identity for both women’s and men’s lives. The conceptual art project Abducted Motherhoods took up in its organisation and use of images various archival sources: the Ana Victoria Jiménez archive with its graphic and documentary portrayal of the use of performativity and humour in early Mexican feminist demonstrations; the historical documentation on Mother’s Day in Mexico amassed by Marta Acevedo in her 1982 book on the subject;12 the personal archive and direct transmission of experience by Mónica Mayer and the experiences of direct and indirect participants in the event that permitted the creation of an archive of accumulated vital, afective memories, through a methodology of requesting responses to fll in the blank in the statement: ‘An abducted motherhood is . . .’ This strategy in itself recalls the participatory dynamic of El tendedero (The Clothesline) in which, for a collective exhibition of young artists on the theme of the city in 1978, Mayer invited women from diferent backgrounds to fll out little pieces of pink paper completing

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the phrase: ‘As a woman what I detest most about the city is . . .’, and hung the results on a simulated clothesline in Mexico City’s Museum of Modern Art, propitiating a dialogue about the violence experienced by women in public spaces and echoing in the format of the piece the aesthetics and politics of everyday feminine activities. Mayer’s decision to work collectively on her archive project is in itself also a refection of her feminist perspective and vision of feminist activist pedagogy, founded in her formation in the 1970s that forged her commitment to combining individual work with collective initiatives and her conviction regarding the efcacy of the methodology of working in small groups. She comments in her blog regarding Abducted Motherhoods: ‘This practice of getting together to talk and listen in an orderly manner that allows the personal to really become political seems to me to be a fundamental methodology for any feminist project’ (Mayer 2013). In the case of the TAAF, this initial methodology served to lay out the complexity of the issues involved in motherhood, the topic they chose to work on, because it touched all of the participants in some way. Following an internal discussion within the group, each member organised dinners or breakfasts with other women—both mothers and non-mothers, as well as a few men—in order to widen the scope of the ‘archive’ of issues and experiences they had started to accumulate and the range of ‘accomplices’ in the project. In the process, the concept of ‘imposed motherhoods’ that they had begun with—which included issues of lack of sexual education and family pressures to become mothers—began to seem too limited to encompass other issues that emerged, such as the situation of women whose children had been victims of forced disappearance or had died in violent circumstances that have plagued Mexico in recent years. Hence they coined the term ‘abducted motherhoods’, alluding more clearly and yet more subtly to the possibility of self-determination being snatched away. The tone of the project thus began to highlight more clearly the violence of the social institution of motherhood, while remaining open to diverse responses and experiences. Only after these intimate conversations had taken place, consolidating the group and clarifying the conception of the project, did they widen their sphere of questioning to include virtual space and social media, by opening a group in Facebook called Una maternidad secuestrada es (An Abducted Motherhood is) and a hashtag in Twitter #UnaMaternidadSecuestradaEs, through which they invited a broader public to contribute their ideas. They also printed the phrase ‘No a las maternidades secuestradas’ on aprons of various colours intended to be used in the protest, and in several prior performative actions in public spaces: universities, subways and other demonstrations. All of these elements enriched the complexity of their embodied knowledge of motherhood as a social phenomenon that touches everyone. The resulting slogans and afective knowledge became the basis of the Protest of the Day After. Reactivating the legacy of the 1971 Protest Against the Myth of the Mother and Polvo de Gallina Negra’s ¡Madres! Project, on 11 May 2012 the group involved in the Abducted Motherhoods project met at the Ex Teresa Contemporary Art Centre on Moneda Street, donned their aprons and ‘pregnant’ bellies and marched the two blocks to the Zócalo carrying small signs enunciating diferent examples of abducted motherhoods, including: not having enough money to support your children, dying during an illegal abortion, not having birth control information, social rejection of lesbian motherhood, etc. At the Zócalo, a large catwalk-like rug made of jerga—a cloth used in Mexico to scrub foors—was placed on the ground, and the demonstrators paraded on it dressed up as nuns, schoolgirls and brides, reading the slogans on

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their signs out loud. Several performances also took place on the catwalk. In one of them, to the rhythm of pop singer Gloria Trevi’s song ‘A la madre’ (To the Mother13), the ‘nuns’ started dancing and crashing their fake bellies into one another, while waving dildos and singing the popular song, which is heavily loaded with innuendos and sarcastically depicts how motherhood is lived in certain popular urban sectors. The public’s reaction varied: some people were curious, others ofended, and some of the bystanders joined the demonstration. After the foor-cloth catwalk performance or jergarela had concluded, the participants made a line, took of their aprons and bellies— symbolically divesting themselves of ‘abducted motherhoods’—and walked slowly back to the place where they had started. Following the event, the project has continued on the internet, constantly expanding and being enriched by diferent perspectives. Mayer has also compiled the documentation of the project, including testimonial narratives of its principal participants, refecting a rich and prismatic diversity of experiences and allowing for the possibility of a more complete and nuanced reconstruction of the project and the Protest of the Day After. In 2016, in the context of a retrocollective exhibition of Mayer’s work—both individual and collective—the photographic and verbal documentation of the piece was displayed, together with one apron of each of the colours produced, including a black one intervened by Edith López with images of children who have been forcibly disappeared (Álvarez Romero 2016, 66–67). The installation also included a computer where the public could add their own visions of ‘abducted motherhood’ to the compilation on the web by posing with aprons and signs with slogans (referring specifcally to ‘abducted motherhoods’ in the art world and museum context) and taking photos of themselves with the images of the protest in the Zócalo in the background, thus photographically incorporating themselves into and continuing the protest in the context of the museum.

Moving Forward The cumulative trajectory of Mónica Mayer’s critical artistic initiatives regarding motherhood, which incorporate a wide variety of media, afective nuances and strategies of participation, constitute a continuous process of refection and dialogue with various cultural contexts, and with the diferent moments in the development of feminism, her own process as an artist and her life in which they occur. The examples highlighted here, only a small fraction of her vast production and activity in this respect, underline the integral nature of her artistic project, at once fercely independent and deeply embedded in its social contexts, which intertwines art and activism in an indivisible manner. With respect to motherhood as experience and institution, it continually interrogates and proposes creative critiques and alternative modes of addressing an issue of social injustice that has yet to be resolved, but which, through her work, opens up new perspectives and possibilities regarding a phenomenon that her early work characterised as ‘a prison’, reinforcing and continually expanding opportunities for solidarity, dissent and creative imagination. From the 1970s on, her work has introduced novel bodily discourses that challenge not only the prevailing modes of corporeal representation but also the concept of political art characterising the dominant narratives of Mexican art in the twentieth century. In contrast to the homogeneous, monumental conception of the political

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body that marked muralism and related artistic movements, Mayer’s work explores the diferentiated experiences of bodies and the polysemic and fragmentary nature of corporeal experience in contemporary culture. Her work also introduces innovations in visual and conceptual artistic language and in the use of materials in order to take into account a gendered understanding of the body and a situated analysis of subject– object relations, as well as to address a variety of social and historical issues (Cordero Reiman 2017). The distinctive contribution of Mayer’s feminist art to activism is that it allows the development of a politics of afect, which preserves the voices and experiences of individuals without insisting on a homogeneous agenda or strategy. Rather, these works focus on creating a space in which personal testimonies can be shared in a context of respect and empathy, allowing a common recognition of the political nature of the personal, in contrast to the more dogmatic and homogenising discourse of many political movements, that fosters adherence rather than introspection. Through generating processes that can be replicated in diverse circumstances and moments, while taking into account the particularities of distinct contexts, Mayer’s work creates a model for a more horizontal politics. Tied into everyday practices, it fosters dialogue with others as an objective in itself, while recognising the radical potentiality of this position in a society too often characterised by repression of dissent and diference.

Notes 1. Mother’s Day in Mexico is celebrated on 10 May, but the event took place on 9 May. 2. The Feminist Art Program, frst established at Fresno State College in 1970 and later at the California Institute of the Arts in 1971, was a radical educational initiative to explore, through collective discussion and collaborative creation, proposals for an art based on women’s experience and consciousness-raising. One of its best-known manifestations is Womanhouse (30 January–28 February 1972), an experimental art installation and performance space, where the teachers and students of the programme transformed an abandoned Hollywood mansion into a showcase for an artistic critique of women’s conventional social roles and the expression of their subjectivity. 3. The Feminist Studio Workshop, an independent art school for women, was founded in Los Angeles in 1973 by artist Judy Chicago, graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and art historian Arlene Raven. It ofered artistic training in various media from a feminist perspective, focusing on the development of women’s identity, sensibility and political consciousness, and the translation of these elements into their artwork. 4. The degree of ‘Mistress of Feminist Art’ given by the Feminist Studio Workshop was formalised as an M.A. in Sociology of Art issued by Goddard College in Plainfeld, Vermont. Mayer’s thesis, dated 1980 and directed by Susan Rennie and Suzanne Lacy, is titled Feminist Art: An Efective Political Tool (Documents in Pinto mi Raya Archive, Mexico City). 5. Mayer also participated with Ariadne: A Social Art Network in the elaboration of a foat for the historic 1978 feminist demonstration Take Back the Night in San Francisco. On one side it had Our Lady of Sorrows and on the other a three-headed lamb carcass that referred to the Greek goddess Hecate, from which a food of pornography emerged. 6. Mayer often notes, in her lectures, that her mother began accompanying her to feminist meetings and demonstrations because she feared for her daughter’s safety at a time when Mexican dissident movements were often the object of violent government repression. Lucido then became interested in feminism herself and joined the Movimiento Nacional de Mujeres (National Women’s Movement). 7. This same image, taken from an ofering box in a church in Oaxaca, was used by Mayer in a 1978–1979 work titled La Dolorosa that referred explicitly to the issue of rape, as well as in several later works. 8. Mayer’s mother sufered from bipolar disorder and committed suicide in 1980 (Mayer, personal communication, March 2015).

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9. In this respect, Mayer’s development can also be contextualised in relation to the Mexican artistic phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s known as ‘Los Grupos’ (or ‘Generación de los Grupos’), conceptually focused collectives that introduced interdisciplinary artistic approaches aimed at deinstitutionalising art. 10. All the translations of quotations from Spanish language sources into English for the purpose of this chapter are by the author. 11. The archive is now housed in the Francisco Xavier Clavigero Library of the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. 12. The book was re-edited in a revised version in 2012 (Acevedo 1982, 2012). 13. This is the literal translation, but the title can also signify ‘fed up’, in keeping with the multiple colloquial uses of the word ‘madre’ cited by Bakewell (2010).

References Acevedo, Marta (1982) El 10 de mayo. Mexico City, Martín Casillas Editores, Cultura/SEP (Colección Memoria y Olvido: Imágenes de México, VII). Acevedo, Marta (2012) El diez de mayo. Mérida, Ule Libros. Álvarez Romero, Ekaterina, ed. (2016) Mónica Mayer: Si tiene dudas .  .  . pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva/When In Doubt . . . Ask: A Retrocollective Exhibit. Mexico City, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM and Fundación Alumnos47. Ana Victoria Jiménez Archive (1971) Biblioteca Francisco Xavier Clavigero. Mexico City, Universidad Iberoamericana. Bakewell, Liza (2010) Madre: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun. New York and London, W. W. Norton & Company. Cano, Gabriela (2016) ‘A 100 años del Congreso Feminista de Yucatán’, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=7RaUW3Ij9WI, accessed 30 June 2020. Cordero Reiman, Karen (2017) ‘Corporeal Apparitions/Beyond Appearances: Women and Bodily Discourse in Mexican Art, 1960–1985’ in Fajardo-Hill, Cecilia, and Giunta, Andrea (coords) Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985. Los Angeles, CA, Hammer Museum, 271–279. Goldman, Shifra M. (1994) ‘Six Women Artists of Mexico’ in Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the United States. Chicago, IL and London, The University of Chicago Press. Mayer, Mónica (1980) Translations: An International Dialogue of Women Artists (Transcript of lecture accompanying slide presentation). Mexico City, Pinto mi Raya Archive. Mayer, Mónica (1998/1999) ‘De la vida y el arte como feminista/On Life and Art as a Feminist’, n.paradoxa, online issues 8 and 9, November 1998 and February 1999: 36–58, www.ktpress. co.uk/pdf/nparadoxaissue8and9_Monica-Mayer_36-58.pdf?, accessed 20 February 2020. Mayer, Mónica (2013) ‘Documentation of the Protesta del día después (Protest of the Day After) on Mayer’s blog’, De Archivos y Redes (Of Archives and Networks), 19 May. https:// tinyurl.com/y49j8gxx, accessed 3 September 2016. McCutcheon, Erin L. (2016) ‘Drawing Time: Mónica Mayer’s Two-Dimensional Performance’, in Álvarez Romero, Ekaterina (ed.) Mónica Mayer: Si tiene dudas . . . pregunte: una exposición retrocolectiva/When In Doubt . . . Ask: A Retrocollective Exhibit. Mexico City, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM and Fundación Alumnos, 47. Polvo de Gallina Negra (1987) Boletín de Prensa, Concurso ‘Carta a mi madre’, 20 July. Mexico City, Pinto mi Raya Archive. Rich, Adrienne (1976) Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York, W. W. Norton & Company. Rich, Adrienne (1978) “Transcendental Etude” (1977) in The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 72–77. Stellweg, Carla, ed. (1976) ‘Mujeres/Arte/Feminidad’, Artes Visuales, no. 9.

13 Corpo-Afective Politics of Anxious Breathing On the Agential Force of Bodies and Afects in Vulnerable Protest Magdalena Górska Often, when anxiety is invoked as a lived experience, it is framed as an individual problem: a problem that usually leads to stigmatisation through interpellation of failure, weakness and shame. This chapter aims to ofer a diferent understanding of anxiety.1 But this anxiety is not one. It has heterogenous enactments, heterogenous articulations and heterogenous efects in relation to specifc intersectional and geopolitical operations of power. Moreover, such enactments, articulations and efects are often imperceptible and hard to comprehend both to those who do and those who do not experience anxiety. This is where art has been a powerful metaboliser and articulator of afect, its power and its dissent to specifc cultural, social, economic and political environments in which an embodied and afective living is situated. In this chapter, I therefore turn to the music video Big Girls Cry (Sia, 2015) that, in my reading, articulates the forcefulness of anxiety. Following the video’s enactment of anxiety and its resonances with my own experiences of anxious living, I articulate my situated understanding of corpomaterial and afective dynamics of anxiety in order to argue for their understanding as a political force of protest. A form of protest that, I believe, needs to nuance critical queer feminist imaginaries and practices of resistance, which are still dominated by locating political agency in a traditional understanding of protest, such as demonstrations, prides, occupations of spaces or political organisation and participation. Recognising corpomaterial and afective forcefulness as political is necessary to further develop critical queer feminist resistances which are otherwise exclusionary of those whose corpomaterial and afective ways of living limit possibilities of ‘showing up’ within conventional forms of protest. It is important to engage also with forms of politics that are not organised and do not take place on the streets, for politics that take place in quotidian bodily and afective ways of living. In order to do so, I frst explain how my engagement with the video is enacted. Then I develop a dispersed autoethnographic analysis, which provides an account of my anxiety-situated engagement with the video. Finally, I ofer a situated theorisation of anxiety that articulates its forcefulness in terms of politics of ambivalence. Ambivalence is central to this politics as it is crucial not to simply glorify anxiety as a political force. Anxiety is not simply afrmative because of the forcefulness of dissent it enacts. Its corpomaterial and afective daily metabolisations are ambivalent. They are immobilising in their painful forcefulness while also activating in their forceful refusal.

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Emergence of Resonance Sia is an Australian songwriter and a musician whose work predominantly addresses mental health struggles. While she came up as an independent musician, in 2014 she gained more mainstream recognition for the single Chandelier (2014). Her work is well known for evocative music, lyrics and music videos. In this chapter, I discuss Sia’s music video Big Girls Cry (2015) and focus on the audio-visual dimension of the afective concert her work ofers. I do so because, for me, Sia’s music exceeds its lyrical components. The carefully curated videos—that she co-directs—overflow beyond lyrics. The lyrics give a direction but the sonic and visual aspect of her work spills beyond this directionality. The sonic and visual intensity invokes resonances with the viewer/ listener—or rather entrant, as defined by Wibke Straube (2014)2—and connects on a level of situated resonance. Resonance is situated in specific corpomaterial and affective—or rather corpo-affective,3 as I call it—vibrances of the entrant and the music video. In my case, the situated resonance with the music video takes place through anxious breathing: through shallow inhalations and exhalations, holding breath and barely exhaling, rapid deep contractions of diaphragm, tensing muscles, contortion of limbs, painful tension in the jaw, affective flashbacks and simultaneous dissociative impulses that emerge in the moments of audiovisual intensity. This type of resonance—through which I invoke the anxious afect that is at the centre of this chapter—is a moment of co-constitution that is not driven by intentionality of the artist or the entrant, but rather is enacted through intra-active4 (Barad, 2007) vibrancy that constitutes the two: a vibrancy in which the audiovisual material and the entrant are intra-actively constitutive and transformative. The music video obtains encounter-situated depth, meaning and resonance through vibrancy with specifc corpomaterial and afective situatedness of the entrant. So does the entrant’s corpomaterial and afective intensity emerge through the intraactive encounter. We co-become. In that sense, neither music video nor entrant are entities independent of each other (a pre-existing relata, in line with Barad (2007)). While it may seem that the music video has a fxed form (i.e. its formal content is always the same when the video is played), its meaning, interpellation and resonance form throughout the situated encounter. A material-semiotic situated and dispersed intertextuality5 takes place. This process of resonant creation is situated in the specifcity of the video’s intensity intra-actively enacted with the entrant’s momentary afective existence and an impulse of relating. Simultaneously, this temporarily, materially and afectively situated process is also located in a dispersed political ‘context’ that shapes its form, meaning, intensity and resonance or dissonance. Such dispersed context is not a background to the encounter but is rather constitutive of it. For example, the broader personal (e.g. one’s lifelong corpo-afective existence), cultural, societal, economic and geopolitical relationalities also constitute the video’s meaningfulness, the entrant’s engagement and the situated character of the viewing/ listening event of interpellation and meaning-making. In that sense, it is a powerfull intertextual and intersectional event. It is within such an understanding of my relation with the audio-visual dimension of Sia’s video that the following analysis is developed.

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Artistic Articulation of the Power of Afect The music video Big Girls Cry is directed by Sia and Daniel Askill, and choreographed by Ryan Hefngton. The video consists of a performance by American dancer Maddie Ziegler, who is dressed only in a fesh-coloured leotard and a blond wig, and is performing against simple black background. With only gestures and facial expressions, Ziegler enacts a powerful roller-coaster of anxious forces. In its breath-taking intensity the video, I believe, can be read as a specifc artistic articulation of the power of afect: a power where breath and afect critically matter for feminist politics. Sara Ahmed’s words become a motto here, as they articulate the urgency of aspirational breathing, critical analysis of sufocation and breath-full imagination: the struggle for a breathable life is the struggle for queers to have space to breathe. Having space to breathe, or being able to breathe freely is .  .  . an aspiration. With breath comes imagination. With breath comes possibility. If queer politics is about freedom, it might simply mean the freedom to breathe. (Ahmed, 2010, p. 120) Sia’s video speaks to the corpomaterial and afective sufocation of anxious living in current neoliberal and unjust times that call for politics of breathability: a living that is often devalued through individualisation and pathologisation, and which still stays on the margins of the queer feminist political imagination. In my own anxiety-situated reading, the video is an artistic articulation of the power of afect—of the power of anxiety. In the opening scene (Figure 13.1), a beige-toned body appears against the black background. It emerges from a depth of darkness, looking directly into camera, breathing shallowly, almost imperceptibly. The breath captures, resonates with my own shallow breathing; the eyes interpellate; the slowly developing music calls in; the tension grows: the performer’s defated body; the stillness of her breathing; her facial expression of resignation. They signal that something is to come; it is already here; it is coming. Tension in my chest deepens. Inhale abruptly, yet deeply. Exhale. The hidden life of anxious becoming becomes visually articulated, at least for me, right here, right now, through diferent privileges and lacks thereof that constitute my specifc resonance, a relation that can be dissonant for others whose anxious living is situated in diferent racial, gendered, social, cultural or geopolitical intersections. Here it comes (Figure  13.2). Breathing in. Intensifying sound. A  hit, a wave, an explosion of pressure. The performer’s hand is taking her face into its fngers. It moves the face abruptly in unexpected directions. The terrifed expression in the performer’s

Figure 13.1 Screenshot of Sia, Big Girls Cry, 2015, caption of YouTube video

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Figure 13.2 Screenshot of Sia, Big Girls Cry, 2015, caption of YouTube video

eyes is simultaneously knowledge-full of what is to come and not knowing what is coming. The singer’s breath, grating against vocal cords, develops a deep, smoky, painful yet comforting shade of sound. The words—however beautiful—don’t speak to me here. A diferent conceptual, corpomaterial and afective plateau becomes articulate for me: articulates me. The voice, the piano, the drums, the synthesisers, the body emerging from darkness and enunciating the depth of this darkness are what lures me in. They speak of anxiety, of (my) ongoing struggle to live, of (my) attempts to take control while living out of control in durations of sufocation, in practices of self-shaming, self-silencing and hiding. The vicious fght of lips, eyes, teeth, swinging hair and hands signify the whooshing while sedimenting anxiety and its sweeping power. The horrid shifts from contorted smiles to dreadful fear enact ongoing daily processes of living in corpo-afective tottering and haunting thoughts. They take place simultaneously, with attempts to ‘straighten out the face’ and fx it into being presentable, into being a ‘proper human

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Figure 13.3 Screenshot of Sia, Big Girls Cry, 2015, caption of YouTube video

subject’. Their persistence is knotted-in with the forces of social norms and expectations, with the wounding attachments to life and to desired, while also refused, normativity. The normativity enacts a cruelly optimistic promise, that while anxious living is sufocating, corpo-afectively normative life can be breathable. The performer pinches herself, fxes the face, moulds it in hands, forces a smile which is almost convincing, only if the eyes weren’t slightly of. How much can you (I) withstand? How far can an optimistic belief take you (me)? How long, how intensely, how can you (I) live on through the painful cruelty of the promise that in itself, as Lauren Berlant (2011) makes clear, is never meant to be fulflled? The cruel optimism of normativity demands complicity. This is where the moment of queer feminist criticality and politicisation becomes forcefully present (for me). But wait. Not yet. How much can you (I) withstand? Here it comes again. A hint, a tide, an expansion of pressure (Figure 13.3). The slow release of a hand foating away only to come back and punch harder; the duration of extreme afective intensifcation while the body is foating and swirling in the air; the sound voicing words in short, punchy pokes. The video (I/we) articulate the temporality of anxious tides; of living in a bouncing dynamic along the continuum from feeling better to feeling worse; of desire for a break, of hoping to move on, yet falling right in again. Here we go again (Figure 13.4). Inhale. Hands appear from behind the performer. Stop. Like overpowering thoughts of darkness, the hands are taking the performer (me) into spaces of deadly despair and terror. Simultaneously, they are pushing to continue living; continue living a corpo-afectively normative life; continue living ‘life as usual’ while swimming in the sea of sufocation, silencing and social alienation. Shifting between invisible sufocation, gasping for breath, tears of desperation, silent screams, disassociation and compulsively swallowing medication while self-pinching articulate the acuteness and dis/orienting (Ahmed, 2006) daily negotiations of the bodily and afective vulnerability of living in un/liveability.

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Figure 13.4 Screenshot of Sia, Big Girls Cry, 2015, caption of YouTube video

By now you (I) get used to it (Figure 13.5). ‘Life as usual’ is not only about sufocation of normativity but also about a sufocation of getting used to the tormenting sound of the (my) voice, deep vibration that the material–semiotic–afective soundscape (of my thoughts) creates in a subject. The sufocation is deadly. It grasps you (me), it holds you (me) in its grip, it brings you (me) to places of disappearance, of wanting to jump out of ones (my) own skin, of wanting to stop, of wanting to not be. Breathe in only to start the roller-coaster all over again, with even more intensity, self-shaming, self-blaming and disassociation that push the anxious forces away briefy in order to explode again and break space and time apart. Here we go again. depth of darkness, imperceptibility, shallow breathing, interpellation of normativity, defation, stillness, whooshing, resignation, tension; BREATHE IN intensifcation, a hit, a wave, an explosion, grating, duration, sedimentation, sweeping; BREATHE IN contortion, wounding, desire, refusal, optimism, sufocation, breathing; BREATHE IN withstanding, intensity, cruelty, complicity, criticality; BREATHE IN a hint, a tide, an expansion; BREATHE IN

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Figure 13.5 Screenshot of Sia, Big Girls Cry, 2015, caption of YouTube video

foating, swirling, punching, poking; BREATHE IN hoping and falling; BREATHE IN continuing, gasping, screaming, swallowing; BREATHE IN how much more; how much longer can you (I) withstand?

Anxious Politicisation Living in anxious sufocation is exhausting, isolating and (in my case) often imperceptible. Why should this ghostly appearance of sufocating anxious breath matter? Why should it matter for critical queer feminist politics? Mainstream Western discourses—such as therapeutic, neurological or pop-cultural— delimit anxious dynamics in a contrasting manner to what is normatively considered a ‘proper human subjectivity’, delineated within Western and colonial universalised

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notions of the Man and humanity (Wynter, 2003; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018). This normative notion of subjectivity operates in a biopolitical (Foucault, 2003) and necropolitical (Mbembe, 2003) manner. It articulates how a (my) normative society values and privileges certain forms of human subjectivity and embodiment in relation to particular concepts of (white, male, heterosexual, Western) humanness, worthiness, well-being, success, health, happiness etc. These same notions lead to disregard, and stigmatisation of diverse forms of afective and physical vulnerability such as physical, cognitive, neurological or afective disability and health. These ways of living are then understood as subjective problems and/or inadequacies, and/or signs of weaknesses, failure, not being able to ‘deal with life’ or not being strong enough, good enough or determined enough. If vulnerable dynamics of anxiety are recognised and accepted within these frameworks; they often become yet another part of neoliberal commodifcation of corpoafective life, a part of a booming well-being industry, and are subject to neoliberal discourses of productivity. In such practices of commodifcation, monetarisation and discourses of productivity, anxieties are often tolerated as only temporary ‘phases of not doing well’, reactions to difcult life events or vulnerabilities to be quickly overcome through specifc, individualised therapeutic practices and medication. While therapeutic and medical practices can be central to one’s survival, their neoliberal side efects include rejection of vulnerable ways of living where anxiety is seen only as an unproductive force, a trouble that is to be put aside to ‘go on’ with one’s life. Within such delimitations, it is then common to either blame yourself or blame your body. ‘My brain chemistry is fucking with me’, [said someone close to me once]; ‘I just need to learn not to trust my brain, take distance. . . . Now I know that all that happens is not true’. But is it not? In the daily negotiations of anxieties, one might struggle to believe in the validity of what is happening to oneself and in the signifcance and relevance of such dynamics. Often, these states of being need to be narrated through specifc discourses—such as mentioned mainstream discourses but also alternative ones such as activist and artistic—in order to become intelligible at all, not to mention accepted as relevant or politically signifcant. Sia’s video is one such articulation. In its specifcity, it speaks to my situated experience of anxious living. The anxiety I engage here is shaped though my situated choreography of an anxious self. But it is important to keep in mind that diferent intensities, temporalities, embodiments and intersectional positions tell diferent stories of anxieties. Anxiety is not a universal, uncontextual experience. As Jose Muñoz points out, when writing about depression, afect is ‘not one’ and is shaped through a specifc afective ‘stance’ (2006, p.  676), or as I  would say, intersectional situated and dispersed positioning. Such afective life is not merely individual. It is constituted also through structural operations of power, inequalities and processes of privileging and de-privileging. In those processes, it is hegemonically normative forms of subjectivities, types of bodies, types of economic and geopolitical existence that are privileged while those who do not ft into the narrowly defned hegemonic understandings are politically, socially, culturally, symbolically and materially positioned on the margins. For example, the mere ability to attend to afective sufocation, to be able to pay therapeutic attention to it, to allow it to semiotise one’s experience, is shaped by structural afordances. To allow yourself to be vulnerable, to (aford to) see a doctor, to obtain medication (or not)

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are matters of intersectional situatedness and dispersal within local and global power relations. Such positionality also enacts diverse ways of (not) coping and living and dying with anxieties. Some bodies, therefore, can breathe more smoothly, and some can breathe less. For some, sufocating or hyperventilating are extraordinary matters, while for others they are commonplace matters of structural operations of power. The diverse processes of anxious breathing are—importantly—both individual and structural. For some, anxious living may lead to a loss or transformation of privilege while it simultaneously articulates another privilege: a privilege that enables recognition of and work with anxiety’s persistence (as in my case). For others, the transformation of privilege (the movement from having non-anxious to having an anxious living) may nevertheless not enable a possibility of such recognition and work due to their intersectional situated and dispersed positioning, i.e. situated cultural, gendered, racialised and geopolitically specifc context of living. And for many others, anxious breathing may be a condition of living from the frst breath onwards. A mere ability to recognise, name and deal with anxieties is, therefore, a matter of power dynamics, of processes of intersectional privileging, de-privileging and marginalisation that materialise in differential ways and with diferential efects. To reiterate, this intersectional, situated character of anxiety and its dispersal in relation to diferential cultural, social, geopolitical relations, articulates non-universality of afect; and it shows the importance of quotidian, individual and structural enactment (and analysis) of afect. Moreover, it also articulates a political potentiality of afect for critical queer feminist politics. In the discussion of Sia’s video, I aimed to invoke such non-universality, an entanglement of quotidian, individual and structural enactments of afect, and political problems anxieties open up. I also wanted to sparkle a dis/resonance with the reader while articulating my way of anxious living. The articulation of anxious dynamics in the above autoethnographic corpo-afective analysis, especially the constant insistence on inhalation, hoped to invoke sufocating corpo-afective anxious breathlessness in a reader who felt interpellated to co-breathe the written text. This way the specifc understanding of anxiety that saturates this chapter also delineates afordances and limitations of my analysis. And it also hints towards my situated understanding of political relevance of anxious living. But contemporary approaches to political agency locate political actions within forms of protest that are often detrimental to and exclusive of vulnerable forms of existence. Political agency is usually identifed in actions such as demonstrations, occupations of spaces, political participation. Even when resistance is understood in relation to vulnerability, protest is conceptualised predominantly in relation to collective presence (Butler, 2009, 2004). But the mere possibility of engagement in most conventional forms of political actions can be restricted by bodily and afective vulnerability. This is why it is crucial to develop a critical queer feminist understanding of politics that incorporates the agential signifcance of quotidian corpo-afective agencies as forces that also enact political resistance. In that sense, striving for breath and for breathable lives is a matter not only of acts of and aspirations for change in a ‘traditional’ sense—which prioritises ‘showing up’ in as a literally physical and/or energetic presence and involvement—but also recognition of diferential forms of political practices. In doing so, an analysis of resistance needs to focus not only on how bodies and afects act in politics but also how they enact politics in a quotidian manner; how they articulate how embodiment and subjectivity, individual situatedness and power

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structures intra-actively relate and are enacted in quotidian practices of living and dying. This is precisely a moment when work of Franz Fanon speaks loudly. In A Dying Colonialism (1965), Fanon makes an explicit connection between political character of situatedly dispersed enactment of embodiment, subjectivity and power relations. He argues that ‘there is not occupation of territory, on the one hand, and independence of persons on the other . . . the individual’s breathing is an observed, an occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing’ (1965, p. 65). Fanon’s notion of combat breathing articulates the sufocating, corpo-afective operations of social power relations. As Perera and Pugliese put it, combat breathing ‘names the mobilization of the . . . subject’s life energies merely in order to continue to live, to breathe and to survive the exercise of state violence’ (2011, p. 1). Combat breathing articulates how governmental, colonial, capitalist, racist and gendered norms—to name only a few here—are embodied and afective. It articulates how individuals are compressed, as Fanon terms it, to ‘target bodies’, which are disposable in a necropolitical sense. Bodies whose ‘energies are fully committed merely to surviving; [“the notion of target bodies” articulates how] the logic of state violence is predicated on ensuring that the subject cannot begin to expand their energies in resisting, contesting or subverting the power’ (Perera and Pugliese, 2011, p. 2). Fanon discussed combat breathing already in 1965 in relation to the French colonisation of Algeria. Combat breathing relates closely to colonial and imperial violence and to bio- and necropolitical processes of dehumanisation. It is, therefore, a leap to transpose this specifc concept into anxious breathing that is marked by my (and Sia’s video) privilegisation through whiteness and Western-ness (operational in my case through my epistemic canon and the Western European academic positionality that I  currently hold despite/while being Eastern European). I  make this leap here because I  hear a resonance between Fanon’s criticism of colonial dehumanisation and dehumanisation that takes place through normative efects of bodily and afective ableism as well as intersectional processes of discrimination within the Western normative and hierarchising discourses of the ‘proper human subjectivity’. For example, such discourses are vital political matters of the contemporary deadly operations of structural racism, in the contemporary expanding fortifcation processes of Europe, and in the sufocating efects of privilegisation and de-privilegisation of whose lives (do not) matter and what ways of living (do not) matter. While recognition and attending to anxiety is to some degree a white Western privilege, differential operations of global power relations also have global sufocating and anxiety producing efects. These efects carry diferent names, diferent ways of relating to it (or not), and this diference is signifcant—it is precisely the non-universalising and situatedly dispersed operation of diference that makes afect signifcant in differential manner. For me, combat breathing becomes a tool for understanding corpo-afective materialisations and enactments of contemporary structural operations of power as I focus on the Western social norms enacted in the specifcity of my (and Sia’s video) anxious living. Simultaneously, it is important to keep in mind that power operates in a differential manner that cannot be reduced into claims of sameness, which overlook diferential structural power relations. The anxious living discussed here bears resonances but also dissonances with anxious existences that are intersectionally positioned diferently6.

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Quotidian, Individual and Structural Politics of Anxieties Thus, what kind of politics do anxieties articulate? I would like to argue that anxieties articulate specifc quotidian politics that are individual and structural. Politics where embodiment, afect and power are mutually constitutive. Politics where quotidian practices of breathing are a way of living in vulnerability, or rather a vulnerable living. Politics that do not take place only on the streets or in forms of organised governmentality but also in everyday bodily and afective practices. Such practices are both individual and collective. While they may often (but not always) take place in physical isolation, they can also create collectivities.7 The signifcance of afective dynamics has already been articulated in the existing body of feminist afect scholarship, exemplifed in works of such scholars as Ann Cvetkovich (2003, 2012), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003), Sara Ahmed (2004, 2010), Sianne Ngai (2007), Heather Love (2009), Laurent Berlant (2011) and Jack Halberstam (2011). Its political relevance has been also addressed by activist groups such as Public Feelings or Feel Tank Chicago and art projects such as The Alphabet of Feeling Bad (Michalski, 2012) or An Unhappy Archive (Michalski and Baumann, 2014). Those authors have shown how diferent afects such as depression, normative ideals of happiness, afective attachments, shame, trauma and failure are a part of the operations of power. Ann Cvetkovich, for example, argues that depression is a ‘manifestation of forms of biopower that produce life and death not only by targeting populations but also more insidiously by making people feel small, worthless, hopeless’ (2012, p. 13). Afect became recognised as a valuable response to the dynamics of social power relations, and as a manifestation of diverse oppressive structures such as racism, classism, colonialism, heteronormativity, gender normativity, sexism and ableism. But, additionally, I would like to argue that afective dynamics are also more than just reactions, manifestations and responses to social conditions. Anxieties are also material and afective enactments of and challenges to contemporary power relations that are enacted individually and structurally. Anxieties transform dynamics of living by enacting a break and necessitating change. In such a way, they enact specifc materialisations, productions as much as transformations and alternatives to the dominant social norms and power relations. But, as transformative forces, they are also often very painful, unbearable and undesirable. They are not alternatives in an ideational sense of desired ways of being. And, simultaneously, in their painfulness they break the norms apart. Such a break is terrifying but also opens potentialities of being otherwise. The political potentialities of anxieties are, therefore, not easy, happy and optimistic in themselves or for the sake of being alternatives, but they are enactments of diferent directionalities. They enact change in the form of radical disruption, immobility and rejection of the normative pressure of being a corpo-afective subject of the neoliberal political, social and cultural economy. They claim what it means to be a human-embodied subject in a diferential way. In their sufocating forcefulness, they are also articulations of the necessity to take space, to take a breath and to live a breathable life. They are murky forms of political resistance. As Jack Halberstam points out, ‘alternatives dwell in the murky waters of a counterintuitive, often impossibly dark and negative realm of critique and refusal’ (2011, p. 2). And although imagining lives otherwise involves engaging with the ambivalence of mutual constitution of

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immobility and potentiality and of painfulness and empowerment, it is such ambivalence that I believe is at the core of critical queer feminist corpo-afective politics— politics which enact ruptures, transformations and negotiations of hegemonic norms of embodiment and subjectivity. I would, therefore, like to underline that the political potential of anxieties for social justice—that is, strived for in critical queer feminist thinking and activism—is not, in my opinion, in simply embracing them as phenomena of resistance. Their political importance is in the dynamics of the complex and ambivalent articulations they open up by the ways they break worlds apart and demand change. Political interventions of vulnerability are not in simple acceptance of the failure to achieve the norm—even though social and individual acceptance and recognition are important on yet another ‘level’ of their political potentiality—but in the recognition of the political power such failure enacts in calling out individual and systemic intersectional operations of power relations and in calling in (Trần, n.d.) for afnities through similarities and diferences. Such ambivalent politics call for social, cultural, geopolitical and paradigmatic changes as well as for daily changes of living. They call for approaches in which politics and change do not idealise resistive phenomena but work with their simultaneous potentiality and unbearability, painfulness and undesirability. Simultaneously, to come back to my earlier points, such politics cannot be generalised and universalised. They are always situated in their particularly intersectional enactments and they are dispersed in the structural patterns of the operations of intersectional power relations.

Conclusion What I  have striven to articulate in this chapter is a signifcance of corpo-afective intensities and dynamics of anxiety, not merely as non-normative ways of living but also as forms of political agency; an agency that is not simply residing in a subject’s intentionality, but that is enacted through bodily and afective metabolisation of power-full intersectional ways of living. Such agency is of an ambivalent character— its non-normativity and the refusal it enacts by breaking worlds apart are a political force of demanding life otherwise; simultaneously, the painfulness of living in suffocation makes such politics not only difcult to sustain but also difcult to cherish. And this ambivalence is precisely what is at the core of the critical feminist corpoafective politics I have tried to articulate at this chapter—politics where aspiration for change is painful while hopeful, debilitating while enabling, immobilising while activating practice. Such political practice materialises in a quotidian, individual and structural manner; and in an intersectionally situated and dispersed manner. Such politics are always provisional, under constant negotiation. In such politics, processes of privileging and marginalising matter and shift as part of the dynamic coalitional and separatist vulnerable social justice work: work that builds temporary afnities and separations based on specifc interventions rather than identities.

Notes 1. Parts of this chapter have been previously published in Breathing Matters (Górska, 2016). 2. Straube (2014, pp. 63–65) introduces the notion of an entrant in order to overcome conventional occularcentric terms such as spectator, viewer or audience. The concept attends to multisensorial, corpomaterial and afective dimensions of cinematic experience and articulates engagement of an entrant and a flm as an intra-active process of co-becoming.

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3. The notion of corpo-afectivity is developed in Breathing Matters (Górska, 2016) in order to articulate that corpomateriality and afectivity are intra-actively constitutive and diferential. The intra-active aspect of the term—the insistence on their co-constitution without assuming corpomateriality or afect as pre-existing relata—highlights how afect is embodied materially and how material embodiment is afective. The hyphen indicates their simultaneous differentiality in order not to collapse the two into sameness and homogenise their specifcities. 4. My analysis is informed by Barad’s agential realist approach, which ofers a quantum physics-based understanding of relationality. A  common understanding of relationality is grounded in an interactive causality. In such an approach, atomistically understood entities pre-exist relations and hold their individual characteristics and properties before they relate with other entities (or relata as Barad calls them). But, drawing on quantum physics, Barad problematises such an understanding of causality and develops a neological concept of intra-action to articulate a diferent form of relationality. It is through agentially intraactive process—rather than through the meeting of pre-existing entities—that phenomena are constituted. In such an approach relations are not secondarily derived from independently existing ‘relata’, but rather the mutual ontological dependence of ‘relata’—the relationon—is the ontological primitive. . . . relata only exist within phenomena as a result of specifc intra-actions (i.e. there are no independent relata, only relata-within-relations). (Barad, 2003, p. 815; italics in original) It is such an understanding of relationality that informs my engagement with Sia’s video and my conceptualisation of anxiety as a political force. For my further elaboration on agential realism, its other aspects and relation to power and politics, see Breathing Matters (Górska, 2016). 5. The notion of intertextuality was developed by Julia Kristeva (1984). While Kristeva ofered its semiotic understanding, I work with the concept as material-semiotic (Górska, 2016). 6. See, for example, Muñoz’s critique of the white character of depression discourse and his argument for necessity to recognise and analyse diferential, minoritarian, enactment of afect in relation to race and how it relates to ‘a larger collective mapping of self and other’ (Muñoz, 2006, p. 679). 7. See, for example, A Public Feelings Project discussed by Ann Cvetkovich (2012).

References Ahmed, S., 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Ahmed, S., 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Ahmed, S., 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press, Durham, NC and London. Barad, K., 2003. ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’. Signs 3, 801–883. Barad, K., 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Berlant, L., 2011. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Butler, J., 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, London and New York. Butler, J., 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Verso, London and New York. Cvetkovich, A., 2003. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Fanon, F., 1965. A Dying Colonialism. Grove Press, New York. Foucault, M., 2003. Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976. Picador, New York. Górska, M., 2016. Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability. Linköping University Press, Linköping.

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Halberstam, J., 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Kristeva, J., 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. Columbia University Press, New York. Love, H., 2009. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Mbembe, A., 2003. ‘Necropolitics’. Public Culture 15, 1–40. Michalski, K., 2012. ‘The Alphabet of Feeling Bad’. Available at http://karinmichalski.de/alphabet_ of_feeling_bad_1.html, accessed 15 July 2015. Michalski, K. and Baumann, S., 2014. ‘An Unhappy Archive (Exhibition Project)’. Available at www.karinmichalski.de/unhappy_archive_flm.html, accessed 15 July 2015. Mignolo, W. and Walsh, C., 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, and London. Muñoz, J., 2006. ‘Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Afect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position’. Signs 31, 675–688. Ngai, S., 2007. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Perera, S. and Pugliese, J., 2011. ‘Introduction: Combat Breathing: State Violence and the Body in Question’. Somatechnics 1, 1–14. Sedgwick, E. K., 2003. Touching Feeling: Afect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Sia, 2014. ‘Chandelier’. Music Video. Available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vjPBrBU-TM, accessed 4 April 2020. Sia, 2015. ‘Big Girls Cry’. Music Video. Available at www.youtube.com/watch?v= 4NhKWZpkw1Q, accessed 15 July 2015. Straube, W., 2014. Trans Cinema and Its Exit Scapes: A Transfeminist Reading of Utopian Sensibility and Gender Dissidence in Contemporary Film. Linköping University Press, Linköping. Trần, N.L., n.d. ‘Calling IN: A  Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable’. Available at www.blackgirldangerous.org/2013/12/calling-less-disposable-way-holdingaccountable/, accessed 1 April 2015. Wynter, S., 2003. ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation-An Argument’. The New Centennial Review 3, 257–337.

14 The Revolutionist Gendered Violence, Black Radical Feminism and the Decolonial Creative Revolution Nomusa Makhubu In 2019, the South African president, under pressure from civil society, declared femicide a national crisis. At a sitting on 30 October 2019, the social development ministry announced that ‘more than half of South Africa’s murdered women (56%) were killed by an intimate partner, which is more than double the rate in the US’ and that ‘South Africa’s female homicide was 5 times the global average’ (Social Development Committee 2019). Gendered violence is alarmingly commonplace. For womxn, it is the spaces of familiarity, such as the home, the workplace and other community spaces, that are most dangerous.1 In her book Rape: A  South African Nightmare, Pumla Dineo Gqola (2015) asks: why has South Africa been labelled the ‘world’s rape capital’ and pinpoints high profle cases, including the chilling rape of a 9-month old baby, Tshepang. There has been a rising femicide rate of ‘15.2 murders for every 100 000 adult women’, yet it was only in 2019, after mass marches to parliament, that concerns about gender-based violence made it onto the national government’s agenda.2 Owing to the global cultural normalisation and celebration of male violence as an articulation of masculinity, long-standing physical and psychological violence against womxn, including rape, goes unreported and unaccounted for. Particularly striking is the prolonged suppression and trivialisation of womxn’s narratives and experiences of violence (AmINext 2019). The highly publicised rape and murder of University of Cape Town (UCT) student Uyinene Mrwetyana galvanised concerted eforts to address gender-based violence, leading to the movement #AmINext (Wilkinson 2019). Leading major political and social movements such as Fallism, womxn activists have challenged the onslaught of masculine violence, even within progressive movements.3 Integral to this activism are public creative protests and interventions, which I call the decolonial feminist creative revolution. Focusing on three artists—Gabrielle Goliath (South Africa), Milumbe Haimbe (Zambia) and Sethembile Msezane (South Africa)—I probe the radical struggle repertoires created by womxn activists and artists. These artists not only engage in visibility politics but, more importantly, show the precariat-isation and situatedness of black womxn lives. I analyse how live art, art interventionism and illustration interrogate systemic racialised, classed and gendered violence. Live art, as Goliath (2019, p. 130) aptly defnes it, creates ‘occasions for encounter’, which make indiscernible systemic violence palpable. Creative protest questions governance and the marginalisation of womxn. Through themes such as giving voice and silent protest, being and subjectivity and politics of afect, these artists exemplify the broader decolonial feminist creative revolution, which, I argue, embodies a distinct set of struggle repertoires that counter

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the abiding ethos of hypermasculine coloniality and its reinforcement of gender disparity, even within decolonial movements.

Decolonial + Feminist A photograph by Candice Wagener captures a male-dominated FeesMustFall (FMF) protest at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2016.4 In the forefront is Chumani Maxwele, known for igniting the RhodesMustFall (RMF) protests in 2015, violently grabbing the feminist and Fallist activist Thenjiwe Mswane’s breast while forcefully trying to remove Mswane from the protest.5 Mswane was staging a powerful intervention, using a whip to demonstrate their rage at the sexual assault of another female student.6 This symbolic whipping of the ground as a demonstration was used by womxn and transgender activists to disrupt the hypermasculine protest which excluded womxn and queer members of the movement. For their actions, Mswane was manhandled, strangled and kicked by the protesting male students. In response, Wanelisa Xaba, a founder of the South African Young Feminist (SAYF), declared that the feminist community is outraged. . . . Homophobia and transphobia has been prevalent in the FMF and Rhodes Must Fall movement [sic]. We are seen as derailing the movement when we call it out. The history of black radical action is designed to silence womxn. It won’t work because we built the movement. (Isaacs 2016) In his defence, Maxwele argued that this was a smear campaign aimed at dividing the movement (Isaacs 2016). This incident, which involved several male students assaulting Mswane, revealed the thrust of patriarchal violence within the decolonial movement itself. Take, for example, the hypermasculine hero story that pervades the RMF and FMF movements. Although it was radical feminists, womxn and transgender scholars such as Shaeera Kalla, Kealeboga Mase Ramaru, Mbali Matandela, Wanelisa Xaba and Sandile Ndelu, among others, who led the Fallist movement, the narrative remains masculine.7 Writing in 2015, Mbali Matandela asserts, ‘we knew how easily patriarchy can dominate any context, even protests about equal rights, and they [black radical feminists] were not going to let the Rhodes Must Fall movement become one of them’. It therefore became important, she argues, ‘to voice the pain that black females experience based on how the “ideal” personality of an elite white male has infuenced how black men treat black women and LGBTQIA people’ (Matandela 2015). Black womxn and the LGBTQIA+ are facing, from within the movement, gendered marginalisation through varied forms of violence. It is not surprising that during the height of decolonial revolt in 2015 and 2016, university campuses such as the University Currently Known as Rhodes (UCKAR) were shut down not only to protest against rising fees and the colonial ethos but also against an entrenched rape culture. In years preceding 2016, womxn students and academics launched annual public creative protests such as silent protests, placing duct tape over their mouths for a full day of demonstration. At UCKAR, the University of the Witwatersrand and UCT, womxn students have staged naked protests (Ndlovu 2017). As part of the struggle against gender-based violence, in 2016, womxn students

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compiled and publicised a reference list naming male perpetrators of sexual violence, but that resulted in violent arrests of womxn activists. These distinct struggle repertoires, such as the silent and naked protest, and naming would be taken up on other campuses. Wanelisa Xaba (2017, p. 101) points out that ‘resistance within FMF was not neutral but highly gendered. There are countless images of students holding knobkerries, sticks and throwing stones, exhibiting a highly masculine form of resistance’. Xaba (ibid.) critiques the movement’s reliance on Frantz Fanon, arguing that his text ‘expands on the gendered nature of White supremacy, but does not give a gendered analysis of decolonial responses to colonial violence’.8 Although hypermasculine violent protests predominate, Xaba indicates that there were also other forms of protest, such as the naked protest and creative protest, ‘like the one at Hiddingh Campus and the University of the Western Cape, [which] were queer-positive and used art as a form of resistance’. The hypermasculinity, Xaba argues, was ‘also embodied’ by ‘Black radical feminists, queers and some diferently-abled student activists’. It was, in many ways, also shaped by masculine police violence meted on protesters. Even in these circumstances, black radical feminists used creative interventions such as live art, exhibitions and songs to catalyse distinct decolonial politics and struggle. Instead of singing ‘Nantsi indonda emnyama [Here is the black man]’ during protests, radical feminists changed it to ‘Nangu umfazi omnyama [Here is the black womxn]’. This song, composed by Vuyisile Mini and Miriam Makeba in the 1950s, was sung during the struggle against apartheid and was a warning to Hendrik Verwoerd, the prime minister of the apartheid government between 1958 and 1966, to beware of the black man. In their revision, radical feminists were asserting ‘beware the black womxn’. Despite the patriarchal culture weighing decolonial movements down, radical feminism insists on creating the spaces for deliberation through which we can understand the ‘coloniality of gender’ (Lugones 2010) and how it manifests in the post-apartheid Fallist decolonial phenomenon. Radical feminism emerged in 1967 during the civil rights movement in the US and ofered a nuanced understanding of how imperialist power is mechanised through multiple intersecting oppressions and what Patricia Hill-Collins (2000, p. 228) defned as a ‘matrix of domination’. Cognisant and critical of systemic state violence against black people and particularly women, black radical feminists recognised that gender and sexuality cannot be treated separately from race. In efect, there can be no decoloniality without black radical feminism. Decoloniality necessitates radical feminism, while feminism, which has been increasingly criticised for its universalism and racism, needs to be decolonised (Mohanty 2003). Chandra Mohanty (2003, p. 8) argues that if sexism, heterosexism and misogyny are central to the social fabric we live in; if indeed these processes are interwoven with racial, national and capitalist domination and exploitation such that the lives of women and men, girls and boys are profoundly afected then decolonization at all the levels . . . becomes fundamental to a radical feminist transformation project. The decolonial project, poised against a hypermasculine coloniality, performs that hypermasculinity as mode of oppositionality, sustaining the continuities of heteropatriarchal social structures.

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I make a distinction between Latin American decolonial scholarship and Fallist decoloniality. That distinction, however, does not serve to disassociate one from the other but rather to pinpoint the circumstantial specifcities of Fallist decoloniality. In South Africa, Fallist decoloniality confronted diferent kinds of colonialisms and insidious coloniality, including the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. It also raised, more pertinently, the very construction of gender and racialised sexual violence as ‘an important paradigm or trope of [continued] colonial rule’ (Mohanty 2003, p. 60). Ideas garnered from the Latin American decolonial scholarship were useful for probing the conditions of violence in contemporary colonialities and in critiquing modernity. For example, the idea of ‘the coloniality of power’ has been particularly useful to decode South Africa’s economic apartheid and other abiding colonialisms that are undoubtedly there but not easily discernible (Quijano and Ennis 2000). Other examples are Grosfoguel (2008), whose theorisation of Fanon’s conceptualisations of violence that dehumanises the oppressed subject (zone of non-being) is located in ‘the matrix of modernity’. Concepts such as ‘epistemic violence’ resonated with Fallist decoloniality, which began as a pushback to assimilationist Eurocentric epistemology, institutionalism and the corporatisation of knowledge that lies at the core of modern African nations. It was particularly the Western European languages, values, ideas, knowledges that were, in and of themselves, a profound violence because they performed, on the African imagination, an assault to the sense of human-ness and belonging, thereby negating local processes of knowledge creation. In general, however, decoloniality, as a male-dominated discourse, begs for nuanced Fallist radical feminist perspectives of racialised gendered power. The focus on the ‘black subject’, imagined as male, obfuscates the question of gendered violence, particularly in the context of families torn and displaced through forced removals and the migrant labour system. To address these issues, decolonial feminism therefore drew from feminist scholars such as Patricia Hill-Collins and Kimberlé Crenshaw. Crenshaw’s (1991) notion of intersectionality enabled the localised articulation and nuanced understanding of the compounded nature of multiple oppressions arising from the double colonisation (Dutch and British) of South Africa and the Afrikaaner-led nationalist apartheid. The heteropatriarchy that pervades pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial history, as well as anti-colonial and decolonial struggle, alienates and overshadows black womxn and LGBTQIA+ communities. Targeting racism, sexism and classism as inextricably interlinked modes of coloniality, the decolonial creative revolution is hinged on intersectionality. The black radical feminism of the post-apartheid Fallist decolonial movements addresses the violence faced by black and queer womxn. Furthermore, it uses particularly creative means to generate struggle repertoires, utilising powerful symbolism to address the silencing and annihilation of those in the category of ‘woman’ and those refusing genderspecifc categories. In my discussion of Goliath, Haimbe and Msezane below, I turn my attention to artworks that represent the distinct struggle repertoires formed within the milieu of black radical decolonial feminism. Although not all these artists call themselves decolonial feminists, their work exemplifes emergent forms of creative protest directly addressing race and gender as the products of colonial violence.

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Voice—The Resonant Revolution In 2013, celebrated artist Zwelethu Mthethwa kicked Nokuphila Khumalo, a 23-yearold sex worker, to death. Khumalo’s only known image is a mugshot taken by the police after she died. Countering the indiference to gender-based violence, the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) commissioned the artist Astrid Warren to produce a painting portraying Khumalo based on the mugshot. This tragic image represents a multiplicity of silences. Khumalo, defned as a prostitute, is presented with no other narrative apart from the brutal fact of her death. Since then, SWEAT has campaigned for the removal of Mthethwa’s work from the exhibitions Our Lady, which opened on 11 November 2016 at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town, and All in Day’s Eye: The Politics of Innocence (24 September 2019–30 April 2020) at the Javett Art Centre in Pretoria.9 This form of protest—the deliberate silencing of the perpetrator and not the victim—has pushed for conscientiousness in how power operates through in/visibility and in/audibility. The removal of already mounted works by Mthethwa, as demanded by SWEAT, drew attention to the erasures of Khumalo’s death, pointing to the resounding silences about the salient forms of violence in Mthethwa’s work, an issue that should be explored in a diferent paper. The strategy of naming and addressing silences resonates with the work of Gabrielle Goliath, who centres the names and narratives of black womxn and explores the process of grieving. Goliath, an artist and academic, dedicates her work to womxn who have lost their lives through domestic violence, rape and femicide. In general, survivors and victims become nameless, faceless statistics; and even though the statistics are alarming, there has not been a proportionate response to what should be defned as a crisis. In her work, specifc womxn’s names are given prominence. Through processes of mourning, Goliath makes the injustice palpable. Her early work, Berenice 10–28 (2010), was dedicated to a friend who was shot during a domestic violence incident. The work consists of 19 portraits of womxn ‘standing in’ for Berenice, each looking directly at the viewer. By representing Berenice, each womxn refects an unsettling familiarity. Berenice could be any black womxn. Portraying Berenice through the faces of other womxn is a reminder of the shared fate and that the individualisation of the problem contributes to its invisibility. If we see Berenice’s death not as an isolated incident but as the systemic annihilation of black womxn’s lives and erasure of their stories, then we can address the issue politically. This is what Crenshaw (1991) defned as a structural vulnerability of womxn of colour. Crenshaw distinguishes diferent forms of intersectionality. Among these is structural intersectionality, defning the ‘ways in which the location of women of color at the intersection of race and gender makes our actual experience of domestic violence, rape, and remedial reform qualitatively diferent than that of white women’ (Crenshaw 1991, p.  1245). Another is political intersectionality, addressing the marginalisation, concealment and routinisation of violence against black womxn. Berenice 10–28 (2010) opposes the normalisation and trivialisation of violence against black womxn. The shift from seeing rape and battering ‘as private (family matters) and aberrational (errant sexual aggression)’ to recognising these ‘as part of a broad-scale system of domination that afects women as a class’ has been an important step towards the politicisation of gendered violence (Crenshaw 1991, p. 1245). It is crucial, therefore, to translate the staggering numbers of womxn who die at the hands of men into broader advocatory movements to unveil the suppressed narratives

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of gender-based violence and to bring them to public consciousness. Goliath’s Personal Accounts (2014) shows the disregard of womxn’s experiences of sexual violence. In the fve-channel video installation, fve womxn give their testimony about sexual violence and rape. However, we hear not the narratives but rather the breaths and swallowing in between words. As Charmaine, Brenda, Zipho, Christolene and Mercia relay their experiences, the viewer only hears the breathing before each womxn utters a sentence. With each breath and omitted sentence, the viewer has to look at the faces of the womxn who are speaking. It evokes a certain level of complicity in how stories of gender-based violence are heard but seldom listened to. In many cases, womxn report sexual and domestic violence but are often either met with indiference or are blamed for what happened to them (see Sleath and Bull 2012). The resounding silence of the erased narrative shows the apathy with which horrendous testimonies of sexual violence are treated. Conversely, the work Elegy (2015–ongoing) (Figure 14.1) is a long-term project in which voice is the main mode of recognising womxn’s agency. It consists of live art performances dedicated to womxn who have died through gendered-based violence. The womxn include Eunice Ntombifuthi Dube, Sizakele Sigasa and Salome Massoa (who were murdered through hate crimes against LGBTQIA+), Kagiso Maema, Lekita Moore, Noluvo Swelindawo and Sinoxolo Mafevuka. Performed by diferent womxn opera singers, who each take a turn to stand on a platform and sing a sustained single note, the eerie, mournful, word-less song is continuous, as if sung by one womxn. It is aptly defned by Neelika Jayawardane (2019) as ‘a shared note [that] sounds out as purely—and for about the same duration—as a struck tuning fork’. In an interview with Antwaun Sargent (2016), Goliath defnes Elegy as ‘a durational funeral song . . . dedicated to a woman raped and murdered in South Africa’. Each

Figure 14.1 Gabrielle Goliath, Elegy/Joan Thabeng, 2018, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, part of series Elegy (2015–ongoing) Source: Photograph by Ayka Lux

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iteration is accompanied by a poem or testimonial that dignifes their lives. Goliath also states that she seeks to ‘counter the spectacle of violence’ (Sargent 2016). Without focusing on representation of violence itself but rather on the lamentation of life, she counters the apathetic response to the routine rape and murder of black womxn. In a similar vein, the subsequent work, This Song is For . . . (2019), in which Goliath collaborates with womxn and gender-queer singers, songs were dedicated to womxn who have survived rape and gendered violence who are named and those who chose to withhold their names. These interventions collectively mourn life, freedom, dignity and well-being. Writing about the artwork of Tracey Rose and Donna Kukama, Goliath (2019, p. 127) argues that ‘the imperative to mourn becomes signifcant . . ., as something both political and social—granting recognition, Kylie Thomas insists, to subjects otherwise unacknowledged in the political sphere’. Naming, therefore, as Goliath (2019, p. 136) rightly points out, ‘becomes such an important gesture, as the invocation of specifc human presence makes possible opportunities for intersubjective encounters’. Through the aesthetics of sound, these sonic interventions present the multiple meanings of resonance as sounding out (the silences), as an echo (in the sense of mystifcation of black womxn’s trauma), and emotional resonance (as feeling someone else’s pain). In Goliath’s work, silence as sound and as a protest strategy bears resonance. It bears the weight of trauma that can be defned as the echoing reverberation of gendered violence. As a decolonial praxis, afect and feeling with others counter the destructive continuity of racialised and sexualised violence.

Being—The Ontological Revolution Between 2013 and 2016, Zambian artist Milumbe Haimbe created the graphic novel Ananiya the Revolutionist, in which human womxn formed an underground movement, the Army for the Restoration of Womanhood, which was established to fght for the rights of womxn in a society that is run by totalitarian and patriarchal ONE Consciousness Corporation. This corporation, led by three authoritarian white male rulers, manufactures ‘sex robots, cold and soulless machines that Arachnidites could exploit and upon whom they could exert their libidinous aggressions without risking their very humanity’ and whose existence will eventually lead to the obsolescence of human womxn (Haimbe 2016). From the ffth generation, humans could marry robots. Threatened by the rising preference for robotic womxn, the intermarriage between human men and robotic womxn and subsequent extinction, covert womxn organisations worked to combat a biopolitical war that is waged against them. The protagonist, Ananiya, is a member of the Army for the Restoration of Womanhood that seeks to infltrate the ONE Consciousness Corporation. Ananiya, who joined the revolution as a teenager, takes on an undercover operation to stop generation eight from being mass-produced. She sneaks into the lab and accidentally activates the prototype. By activating it, she unknowingly gets imprinted on its memory as its Master. This prototype, named Freja, would have been destroyed by the corporation given that it had already been activated, but because it had ‘higher cognitive function’, which the corporation considered ‘a bug in the wiring’, it was kept alive by Chief Technician Jung (Haimbe 2016). Robots, in this graphic novel, represent the ideal of ‘woman’ as a category. They are activated by men and refer to them as Master. Bought, owned and rented by men,

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they are not meant to have higher cognitive function but are created as sex objects without agency and no reproductive or procreative abilities. Sex robots and human womxn are frequently brutalised. In one scene, Ananiya fnds herself in a protest for justice against the Corporation, which does no more than fne men who brutalise human womxn and leave them in the gutter. Decommissioned or stolen robots end up in the black market, known as the silicone market, ‘a trading place where decommissioned and stolen robots are bought and sold’ and where ‘silicone is mint and the female form is debased’ (Haimbe 2016). As Ananiya walks through the silicone market, there are scenes of men raping the robots and urinating on them; bodies of abused robots lay on the streets, and billboards advertise naked robots for rental at 2000 units per hour. This ideal—of an abusable, commodifable and disposable nonthinking empty shell female body—is realised through the annihilation of thinking womxn. This annihilation of womxn is portrayed as the mechanism of corporatised governance or as ‘strategies for the governing of life’ (Rabinow and Rose 2006: 195). The Revolutionist uses science fction to question the biopolitical category of womanhood. The power over the ‘relation between letting die (laissez mourir) and making live (faire vivre)’ (Rabinow and Rose 2006, p. 195) rests with the corporation but faces resistance from the underground movement, the Army for the Restoration of Womanhood. The preference for robotic womxn means that procreation is replaced by scientifc method that will lead eventually to the obsolescence of human beings. This is both in the sense of the loss of humanity—that men can brutalise robotic and human womxn without consequence makes them animalistic (as stated in the graphic novel: ‘man is a wolf to man’)—and in the sense that the human species, without procreation and only the replication of sex robots, will cease to exist. Haimbe’s work deals with this reality. The control over sex and procreation is exemplifed by forced sterilisation, especially among poor black womxn. In the United States, Shatema Threadcraft (2016, p. 3) points out, mounting evidence of these eforts to curtail black fertility—75  000 in all and thus one half of all women sterilised in federally funded clinics—convinced many women active in the Civil Rights, Black Power and Women’s movements that they must organise around the issue of race and reproduction. Threadcraft (2016, p. 3) notes that ‘black women were sterilised at twice the rate of white women’ and that it was their dependence on state facilities that made them vulnerable. Eugenic programmes were framed as a necessary step towards ‘creating good citizens’ by ‘turning human reproduction into a rational practice’ (De Zordo 2015, p. 208). Writing about Brazil in particular, Silvia De Zordo (2015, p. 208) defnes it as ‘a “biopolitics” aimed at building a modern developed nation by improving the quality of its population’. The control over reproduction targeted specifc populations to deprive them of existence. The control over sex—the reproduction that the male corporation appropriates into scientifc replication—is rooted in violence. In efect, Haimbe portrays modern governance as a gendered and racial monopoly of violence. In the graphic novel, Haimbe defnes the corporation as ‘the steely grip’ through which ‘power, greed and lust’ oil an oppressive system ‘where the worth of a woman is measured in a unit pound of fesh’ (Haimbe 2016). It is run through the legitimisation of violence against womxn

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and an invention of the category of ‘woman’ as an object of scientifc invention and a repository of masculine libidinal aggression. In this dystopian city, Supercity Arcanarc (a portmanteau of arch and anarchy), womxn live subterranean lives—they are tyrannised into the underground. Arachnida is a colony removed from planet Earth, built by the male-led corporation, and through a lottery only the rich could become residents. On Earth below and in the ruins is the sub-city where human womxn and decommissioned robots are subjected to routine violence—it is a place built on ruins where ‘non-conformists seek refuge, moderates seek afliation, young students seek new pedagogies and paradigms, tourists from mainland earth seek pleasures and thrills but [where] the resistance seeks a stronghold’ (Haimbe 2016). This situatedness points to governance as an ontological question for womxn. Governance, in this graphic novel, depends on the obsolescence of human womxn. As a corporate body, it operates through de-citizening womxn who can claim no rights. Haimbe’s The Revolutionist introduces a curious perspective to Donna Haraway’s cyborg. Haraway (1990, p. 292) defned the cyborg as ‘a condensed image of both imagination and material reality’ and ‘a creature in a post-gender world’. It ‘is our ontology’ and ‘gives us our politics’. The cyborg whose ‘sex’ is replicative and ‘is uncoupled from organic reproduction’ has the capacity for cultural reinvention. As a race-less, sex-less creature, the cyborg transcends Western humanist ideals. Haraway’s text shaped a diferent feminist politic that disarticulated feminism to specifc identities. For Haraway, ‘gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism’. There is no such thing ‘as “being” female’, which is ‘a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientifc discourses and other social practices’. In Haimbe’s graphic novel, Freja is humanoid cyborg, defying all expectations of other pure robots. But having been created by the corporation, she is made to ft the ideal of ‘being’ a white ‘woman’, as the other robots. In this context, cyborgs and robots are gendered and racially defned and created specifcally for sexual desire and consumption. The cyborg replicates rather than transcends the society in which it is made. Freja, however, due to her cognitive abilities, becomes a slave to Ananiya, a black womxn. For Ananiya, however, taking care of Freja is a burden ‘on Ananiya’s heavy shoulders’ (Haimbe 2016). That Freja becomes a recruit in the underground resistance movement is a powerful subversion of the corporation’s regime. Haimbe goes against the typically sexist and racist content in the comic strip or graphic novel format. Once popular for generating the construct of a white hypermasculine superhuman hero, digital illustration in America during the inter-war years promoted war and the purchase of war bonds (Weiner and Eisner 2003, p. 3). It reinforced conservatism and sustained a portrayal of ‘women’ as the superhero’s prize for his ‘hard work’. There are no heroes in The Revolutionist, but feminist solidarity and struggle, even with its various class and race fractures, is portrayed as crucial in recognising governance as a system that feeds on the (psychological, physical, spiritual) death of womxn.

Feeling—The Sentient Revolution In 2016, the Black Academic Caucus (BAC) and Womxn’s Collective at UCT organised a silent protest against gender-based violence. As the womxn of BAC stood in

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front of the imposing neoclassical main hall of the university, South African artist Sethembile Msezane stood on a plinth carrying a pole on her shoulders, with two large cloths on either side that had the words of the Freedom Charter—a document written in 1955 by the African National Congress (ANC)—printed on them. This intervention, titled The Charter, sought to remind people of promises to land, education and basic rights, made by the South African ruling party and yet never kept. For this intervention, Msezane’s face is veiled with black lace. Wearing a black academic gown, Msezane tries to control two large cloths as they fap in the wind and dip into the wine that stains the cloth so that it looks like blood in the two galvanised metal tubs beneath her. During Msezane’s performance, people could write on the plinth on which she stood. This strategy opposes the dominance of public statues representing a hypermasculine history of men and war. By standing on a plinth, she becomes a monument representing womxn. She refers to these interventions, however, as living sculptures or embodiments. They become discursive spaces, enabling interaction. People are invited to write on the plinth. Unlike plinths or pedestals on which male statues are erected, giving a singular historical narrative, Msezane’s plinth becomes a place where people can write multiple narratives. The words ‘Lest we forget’ were initially written on the plinth of The Charter. After a few iterations, other phrases, such as ‘#Remember Khwezi’, were inscribed on the plinth. This is reminiscent of the protest by four womxn at an ofcial event against the former president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, which took place on 6 August 2016. As the former president gave his speech, the womxn stood in front, dressed in black and holding posters with the words ‘Remember Khwezi’, ‘10 years later’ and ‘I am 1 in 3’. This was to remind the public of the injustice that the late Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo faced when she charged Zuma for rape in 2005. Kuzwayo, who was also known as ‘Khwezi’, was the daughter of an ANC Chief Representative and had been abused and raped by members of the ANC since she was a young girl (Tlhabi 2017). A year later the case was dismissed and Kuzwayo faced threats. After feeing to the Netherlands and then Tanzania before returning to South Africa in 2011, she died in 2016. Although Zuma was acquitted, the members of the One in Nine Campaign emphasise that the criminal justice system has ‘continued to fail womxn’ and that it ‘exist[s] within a patriarchal system’ that is used ‘to police womxn’ (Mbandazayo and Mathabela 2016). Msezane’s performance is a powerful protest against the ‘historical victory’ of imperialist mythologised men and is in many ways the glorifcation of crimes (war, colonial rape and murders) concealed in the bolstering of national identity. Targeting the use of public statues in constructing masculine national ideologies, Msezane’s embodiments have been time-based and site-specifc. Selecting specifc public holidays in The Public Holiday Series (2013–2014), she chose locations linked to a specifc public holiday. For example, as an alternative to the removal of racist monuments, Msezane placed her plinth at Freedom Park in Pretoria, a park that was built adjacent to the Voortrekker Monument, a patrifocal apartheid beacon. From where the photograph was taken, the ominous Voortrekker monument can be seen in the background.10 Msezane holds the post-apartheid South African fag and a bible. It is presented here not to celebrate the fag but rather as a question about the construction of national identity and womxn’s absence in it. One of her powerful embodiments is Chapungu: The Day Rhodes Fell (2015), a live art intervention that took place on the day that the Cecil John Rhodes statue

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was removed from UCT after RMF protests. Msezane stood on a plinth on the stairs above where the Rhodes statue was being hauled of its pedestal. Zimbabwe, formerly known as Rhodesia, was named after Rhodes. Chapungu is the Zimbabwean spirit bird, often carved by soapstone sculptors. Rhodes owned one which he acquired from the trader and hunter, Willi Posselt. The stonebird is Zimbabwe’s national bird. By representing this bird in association with Rhodes’ fall, Msezane captures a decolonial ethos: the renunciation of imperialist ideals represented in public statues and a reclamation of Indigenous paradigms. Chapungu: The Day Rhodes Fell (2015) has become representative of the decolonial creative revolution. It engages the ubiquity and assumed innocence of colonial emblems. More signifcantly, it points to the conspicuous absence of womxn in national discourse. Msezane wears a veil for each intervention so that she is not representing herself or specifc womxn, but seeks to create a living sculpture where ordinary womxn can see themselves refected in her image. Msezane resists calling her work performance art and opts rather for the term embodiments. By doing this, she points to the signifcance of body politics and afect in decolonial and feminist praxis. If one takes for example, Love in the Time of Afrophobia (2015), where, as a living sculpture Msezane hugs passers-by, feeling (pain, anger and frustration) is a political gesture. Conversely, love represents the opposition to the stranglehold of colonially produced nihilism. On the plinth are the words: ‘I breathe like you, I bleed like you— hug a fellow African’. Msezane is dressed in a skirt with African fags printed on it. This particular intervention is a response to the xenophobic violence, known as Afrophobia, that was targeted specifcally at African migrants, taking place mostly in working class townships. As opposed to the cold bronze sculptures, Msezane becomes a thinking, feeling sentient representation of the decolonial aesthesis of love. In this way, violence is countered by a humane act of embracing and dignifying another African.

Conclusion Congregating under the banner of decoloniality, with an emphasis mainly on race given South Africa’s deeply entrenched racisms, there are diferent yet intertwined intersectional forms of struggle. Heteropatriarchal culture, however, suppresses and alienates womxn and LGBTQIA+ activists. Black radical feminism, therefore, is central to decolonial Fallism. I  have suggested that there is a distinct multivocality in collective action and struggle repertoires emerging from it. Through an analysis of live and interventionist art by Milumbe Haimbe, Gabrielle Goliath and Sethembile Msezane, I discuss how the interplay between giving voice and silencing, the questioning of the precarious position of womxn and the politics of afect, establish modes through which novel and potent struggle repertoires are developed. These struggle repertoires of the decolonial creative revolution render the rage, disillusionment and resistance into powerful public resistance, because they use visual and creative modes that are poignantly familiar and appeal to social conscience. They are not always about aggressive demonstrations but also about humanising each other. The challenge is to take artistic strategies into everyday life and form links with grassroots movements. The decolonial creative revolution ofers multiple ways of understanding intersectional struggles because it readily facilitates the shift from the personal to the political. It is self-refexive and responsive to the fast-evolving insidious contemporary colonialities that threaten to co-opt it.

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Notes 1. The spelling of womxn is an intersectional intervention. As an inclusive term, countering cis-genderism, it was used by Rhodes Must Fall (RMF). It is a response to the question ‘Aint I  a Woman?’ (a distorted version of Sojourner Truth’s powerful 1851 speech re-written by Frances Gage in the abolitionist newspaper, the Anti-Slavery Bugle, in 1863), which pointed to the exclusion of black womxn from that category and those who do not adhere to cis-genderism (Painter 1994, p. 464). It is used in this chapter as an inclusive term except in quotes and where the problematic category of ‘woman’ as an exclusive unattainable destructive ideal is referred to. 2. The mass marches were mobilised by members of #TheTotalShutDown and Asijiki, movements protecting the rights of sex workers and advocating against gender-based violence. 3. Fallism erupted in 2015 when university students called for symbols of colonialism to be removed, Western-centric institutions to be transformed, the recognition of black pain, the dignifying of black lives and for radical fee-free Africa-centred decolonial education. Fallism includes movements such as RhodesMustFall and FeesMustFall. Other advocatorial movements using the phrasing of ‘MustFall’, such as DataMustFall, have been popularised after 2015. 4. This image was published on IOL and can be found at www.iol.co.za/news/maxwele-underfre-from-feesmustfall-feminists-2005721 accessed 8 April 2019. 5. On 9 March 2015, UCT students demanded the removal of the statue of the imperialist and former Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, Cecil John Rhodes. Following the student’s campaigns, on 9 April 2015 the statue was removed. Although the movement was coined RhodesMustFall, it sought to address the broader injustices of racial, gender and economic inequalities in South Africa (see also Nyamnjoh 2016). 6. The italicised ‘their’ is used here as a gender-neutral pronoun to refer to Mswane. 7. In general, it is mostly male Fallists such as Chumani Maxwele, Masixole Mlandu, Athabile Nonxuba, Mcebo Dlamini and Ntokozo Qwabe whose narratives dominate Fallist history. 8. Nigel Gibson (2017) writes about ‘the spectre of Fanon’ in contemporary student movements, drawing from Achille Mbembe’s defnition of student protest as the ‘Fanonian Moment’. During the occupation of the main administration building, which students re-named Azania House, there were teach-ins and among the key texts were those by Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks. These texts, as Gibson (2017, p. 580) observes, resonate with students because they give a theoretical dimension to the politics of racism, the nationalist elite and class disparity in South Africa. 9. The curators of All in A Day’s Eye, Gabi Ngcobo, Donna Kukama, Simnikiwe Buhlungu and Tshegofatso Mabaso, wrote an open letter in response to SWEAT, stating: ‘as womxn working in the arts, we feel that the misogyny that is often hidden in art spaces and has long afected womxn personally, professionally and violently needs to be discussed openly with diferent constituencies of society’ (Ngcobo et  al. 2019). They state: ‘it is our duty too, as black womxn in art spaces, to create platforms where these forms of violence can be exposed, challenged, and or criminalised’. We too, declares the open letter, ‘are saying #SayHerName. We too, are screaming #StopCelebratingZwelethuMthethwa’ (Ngcobo et al. 2019). 10. There have been divided views about whether the Voortrekker monument should be removed as a reminder of South Africa’s Calvinist and racist ideologies (Coombes 2003). Afrikaaner Calvinism was solidifed through the 1830s migration of the Afrikaaners, descendants of Dutch settlers, inland. Having survived the migration, known as the Great Trek, they believed they were God’s ‘chosen people’. The Voortrekker monument was erected as a vow to God for ensuring their victory (Coombes 2003). The notion of being the ‘chosen people’ reinforced racism against black people.

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Coombes, A. (2003) History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Crenshaw, K. (1991) ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. De Zordo, S. (2015) ‘Programming the Body, Planning Reproduction, Governing Life: The “(Ir-) Rationality” of Family Planning and the Embodiment of Social Inequalities in Salvador da Bahia (Brazil)’, Anthropology & Medicine, 19(2), 207–223. Gibson, N. C. (2017) ‘The Specter of Fanon: The Student Movements and the Rationality of Revolt in South Africa’, Social Identities, 23(5), 579–599. Goliath, G. (2019) ‘“A Diferent Kind of Inhabitance”: Invocation and the Politics of Mourning in Performance Work by Tracey Rose and Donna Kukama’. In: J. Pather and C. Boulle, eds. Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 124–147. Gqola, P. D. (2015) Rape: A South African Nightmare. Johannesburg: MF Books. Grosfoguel, R. (2008) ‘Transmodernity, Border Thinking, and Global Coloniality: Decolonizing Political Economy and Postcolonial Studies’, Eurozine, 4 July, available at www.eurozine. com/transmodernity-border-thinking-and-global-coloniality/, accessed 11 April 2019. Haimbe, M. (2016) The Revolutionist. Printed by Milumbe Haimbe. (self published) Haraway, D. J. (1990) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. 1st edn. New York: Routledge. Hill-Collins, P. (2000) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York and London: Routledge. Isaacs, L. (2016) ‘Maxwele Under Fire From #FeesMustFall Feminists’, IOL, 6 April, available at www.iol.co.za/news/maxwele-under-fre-from-feesmustfall-feminists-2005721, accessed 3 February 2020. Jayawardane, M. N. (2019) ‘Gabrielle Goliath’s “Elegy” Is a Powerful Lamentation for Victims of Sexual Violence’, Frieze, 31 May, available at https://frieze.com/article/gabrielle-goliathselegy-powerful-lamentation-victims-sexual-violence, accessed 16 January 2020. Lugones, M. (2010) ‘Toward a Decolonial Feminism’, Hypatia, 25(4), 742–759. Matandela, M. (2015) ‘Rhodes Must Fall: How Black Women Claimed Their Space’, Mail and Guardian, 30 March, available at https://mg.co.za/article/2015-03-30-rhodes-must-fall-howblack-women-claimed-their-place/, accessed 29 December 2019. Mbandazayo, K. and Mathabela, M. (2016) ‘One in Nine Campaign Explains Silent Protest’, ENCA News, 9 August. Mohanty, C. T. (2003) Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Ndlovu, H. (2017) ‘Womxn’s Bodies Reclaiming the Picket Line: The “Nude” Protest During #FeesMustFall’, Agenda, 31(3–4), 68–77. Ngcobo, G., Kukama, D., Buhlungu, S. and Mabaso, T. (2019) ‘Response by the Curator and Research Team of Collaborators of the Exhibition All in Day’s Eye’, Javett Art Centre, 1 October, available at https://javettup.art/news/press-releases/response-by-the-curator-andresearch-team-of-collaborators-of-the-exhibition-all-in-days-eye-the-politics-of-innocencein-the-javett-family-collection-to-an-open-letter-issued-by-sweat, accessed 14 March 2020. Nyamnjoh, F. (2016) #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa. Bamenda: Langaa. Painter, N. (1994) ‘Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth’s Knowing and Becoming Known’, The Journal of American History, 81(2), 461–492. Quijano, A. and Ennis, M. (2000) ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America’, Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3), 533–580. Rabinow, P. and Rose, N. (2006) ‘Biopower Today’, BioSocieties, 1, 195–217. Sargent, A. and Goliath, G. (2016) ‘Gabrielle Goliath’s Gunshot’, Interview Magazine, 30 November, available at www.interviewmagazine.com/art/gabrielle-goliath, accessed 16 January 2020.

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Sleath, E. and Bull, R. (2012) ‘Comparing Rape Victim and Perpetrator Blaming in a Police Ofcer Sample: Diferences Between Police Ofcers With and Without Special Training’, Criminal Justice and Behavior, 39(5), 646–665. Social Development Committee. (2019) ‘Plans to Combat Gender Based Violence, Femicide, Violence and Murder of Children: DSD Briefng’, available at https://pmg.org.za/committeemeeting/29203/, accessed 29 December 2019. Threadcraft, S. (2016) Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic. New York: Oxford University Press. Tlhabi, R. (2017) Khwezi: The Story of Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers. Weiner, S. and Eisner, W. (2003) Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel. New York: Nantier. Wilkinson, K. (2019) ‘Five Facts: Femicide in South Africa’, Africa Check: Sorting Fact from Fiction, 3 September, available at https://africacheck.org/reports/fve-facts-femicide-in-southafrica/, accessed 29 December 2019. Xaba, W. (2017) ‘Challenging Fanon: A Black Radical Feminist Perspective on Violence and the Fees Must Fall Movement’, Agenda, 31(3–4), 96–104.

15 Fragmented Traces. . .  The Tactile Feminist Un-Monuments of Sheila Levrant de Bretteville Caroline Wallace

Monuments in the twenty-frst century are ugly things. The violence and domination of space, bodies and history enacted in public spaces by monuments has been imaged in events around the world, nowhere more so than in the fatal violence of Charlottesville, North Carolina, in 2016, where confict encircled, literally, the University of Virginia’s monument to Robert E. Lee. At the same time, monuments have gathered around them a space of collective resistance for communities reclaiming the right to determine the meaning and memory of place. This point of becoming—becoming activist, becoming community, becoming seen—is formed through this relationship between site, bodies and material marker. Alongside calls to remove Confederate memorials in the American South, statues have been toppled in South African and British universities, colonial markers have been defaced in Australia and a victory column has been the canvas for feminist slogans in Mexico City—a coalescing of activism around the making of memory and identity in the shape of the monument.1 The activism of these protesters is focused on challenging the meaning of these sites, opening up the potential for new forms of monuments that act as tools for social change. Monuments deliberately make visible authorised histories and memories, so a monument as visual activism would give form to the experiences of those rendered invisible within capitalist urban spaces. As a specifcally feminist visual activism, monuments would need to be reshaped not exclusively through their subject and site, but also by considering embodied identities as emergent and inter-relational. This chapter proposes a model for this kind of activ(e)ist rethinking of the form and function of the monument through the works of American designer and public artist Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. Beginning as a graphic designer and feminist educator in the 1970s, from the 1980s de Bretteville moved into a series of text-based public artworks in concrete, brass and stone. Although de Bretteville rejects the categorisation of her works as such, monuments are defned through their function, the way they ‘coalesce memory’, and in their social efects as ‘living, vital, immediate, and accessible’ (Nelson & Olin 2003: 3). De Bretteville’s public projects mediate a relationship between the past and present, engaging with marginalised histories and identities, drawing up, as she says, the ‘history from below’ (Sfigiotti 2016). These collective histories—of labour rights, dispossession, urban displacement and resilience—are based around the active participation of communities in their formation. As such, they are both about urban memory and urban social space, and engage head on with the active role of art in shaping the concept of a public and public space (Deutsche 1996). Where de Bretteville’s work difers from the traditional conception of monuments is in the agency given to its publics (recast as participants): ‘my work poses the idea

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at a site. It is about how best to make permanent things that invite the participants at the site to continue to participate in the signifcation of the site’ (de Bretteville in Sfigiotti 2016). This is a radical distinction from the traditional relationship between monuments and site, where the fxed form of the memorial acts on place to establish similarly fxed understandings of memory and history. Monuments are defned through their spatial relationship, what Rosalind Krauss (1979: 34) called the ‘logic of the monument’: explicitly sited, at home and located in place. In their ‘intentional’ form, monuments fx ofcial memory into place, performing a social function, in ‘the desire to commemorate, to mark a place, to represent the past to the present and future, to emphasize one narrative of the past at the expense of others, or simply to make the past past’ (Nelson  & Olin 2003: 2). The conventions of traditional European monuments, exported throughout the colonised world, repeat a series of forms harvested from classical antecedents—obelisks and arches, equestrian heroes and disembodied busts—drawing on a recognisable vocabulary to make specifc and localised expressions of power and authority. These are the kinds of monuments that have attracted recent activist attention, as both a subject of protest and a platform for visibility. These monuments stand in for authority and establish fxed material meanings that eface and render invisible the presence and memories of oppositional or oppressed bodies. De Bretteville’s public artworks, as physical sites of memory that resist authority, legibility and fxed meaning, challenge the traditional function and language of monuments. This aspect of de Bretteville’s work can be connected to other artists and designers working to unseat the traditional monument from its pedestal, particularly through the ‘counter-monument’. Associated with the explicit rejection and refusal of traditional modes of valorisation and history making, counter-monuments attempt to unsettle histories. Originally describing a tendency in German public memorial from the 1980s as a reaction to the trauma of the Holocaust, James E. Young (1992: 271) defned counter-monuments as ‘brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premises of their being’. The examples cited by Young are located within a broader interrogation of memory in the later 1980s and into the 1990s, considering of the function and form of memorialisation as a national or collective function (Huyssen 1996), and the interrelationship between ofcial history and memory (Nora 1989). Counter-monuments are counter to specifc memorials of the past, and counter to the concept of memorials (Stevens et al. 2012). In the United States, the controversy over Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial (1982), an early example of counter-monument, was provoked by the way it resisted the literal elevation of its subject in favour of a wound-like cut into the earth, anchoring the weight of its history. Although the names of the dead inscribed on the glossy wall are visible (and tactile) when close, from a distance it is illegible and unrecognisable as a monument of war. The memorial, described by Lin as an ‘anti-monument’, becomes the site of often contradictory narratives and uses, between the ofcial ceremonial elevation of war, to individual moments of grief at the futility of the dead (Sturken 1991). Today, the formal characteristics associated with counter-monuments—fragmentation, allusion, ambiguity and a lack of clear legibility—have been conventionalised and integrated into a new mode of ofcial monument that forms part of a broader cultural obsession with memorials. These monuments, such as the 9/11 Memorial in New York City, manifest social anxieties over an increasingly fragmented public sphere, acting as what Erica Doss (2010: 13) in her analysis of contemporary

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‘memorial mania’ has described as ‘archives of public afect’. The preponderance of new monuments, alongside heated emotion around their historical forebears, speak to an unsettling of social spaces and an attempt to fx in site ideas about identity and history. Along with the broader memorial industry, which substitutes the consumption of individualised experience (as sentiment) for a critical engagement with the efects of history (Sturken 2007), contemporary monuments are at risk of afrming the values they were designed to unsettle. By contrast, de Bretteville’s works are not ‘counter-monuments’ or ‘anti-monuments’ but rather un-monuments, that undo the authority of the monument in favour of open forms that make space for often marginalised publics to shape and reshape the meaning of place. This emphasis on openness and making space is central to the work of these un-monuments, described, in de Bretteville’s own language, through the linguistic and conceptual mark of the ellipsis, ‘whenever possible I choose marks such the ellipses’ three dots . . . which I see as giving a location for someone’s else thoughts’ (de Bretteville in Sfigiotti 2016). The ellipsis appears in de Bretteville’s work as both a graphic sign and as a spatial logic in the form and structure of her work. It is intimately connected to her approach to working with collaborators and communities, and in the subject of her works that record collective rather than individual histories. The ellipsis is an indicator of absence—a visual signifer of something missing—that both connects and ruptures, an ‘infrastructure of relation’ (Berlant 2014). In this substitutive material presence, it echoes the intent of the monument, but where monument uses a single form to stand in for a vast and complex history and fx it in place, the ellipsis marks the space for something unexpressed. The ellipsis is a visual mark that moves across and between, an indication of space and time outside the linearity of the text. In a linguistic and literary sense, the ellipsis indicates something missing— a syntactic gap; or incompleteness—aposiopesis. The break or rupture of the ellipsis is absence but also an indicator of more outside the text, a surfeit of meaning beyond the limits of the frame.2 Beyond its recurrent use as a semiotic mark dotting her public artworks, the ellipsis is the open mark that de Bretteville uses as an indicator of other bodies, a space for the experiences outside her own and a device to signify the collaborative and social. It has become increasingly important to me to devise ways of welcoming the viewer into the creation of meaning in my work. I started inserting ambiguity and various meanings and voices, some more obvious and others less so, and then later leaving ‘. . .’ (Roberts & de Bretteville 2006: 138) This openness is a central part of de Bretteville’s un-monuments—the gap imposed by the ellipsis is, for Jacques Derrida (1978: 295), elliptical, the site without return, the mark of deferral or diference: ‘It is not absence instead of presence, but a trace which replaces a presence which has never been present, a origin by means of which nothing has begun’. The ellipsis here is indicative of a fold, a space of something missing but without volume or measurability.3 Monuments are by their nature elliptical, as they mark a history that returns to an event that is constructed through their presence. However, the traditional monument aims to deny this space, in the certainty and solidity of its form. An elliptical monument is one that is always in the process

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of being remade in meaning. Jean-Luc Nancy (1988) has drawn out the afective and tactile quality of the Derridan ellipsis, as an omission in space and meaning not only linguistic but afective; the space of the ellipsis is the space between touching and feeling. The limits of the tactile, mediated by skin, are for Nancy the limits of language and meaning. The visual mark of the ellipsis stands in for contact between bodies and between understanding, it indicates text as a felt thing, as Jenny Chamarette (2007: 39) describes (coining a neologism), a ‘visual ellipsis emphasizes the texturality of text’. The ellipsis is thus both temporal and spatial, present and absent, poetic and pragmatic. In de Bretteville’s monuments, the ellipsis is literal (inscribed as a textual marker) and conceptual (in the space between histories, open to reshaping in meaning and use). The elision is across time and between bodies, where the works function as points of contact touching across, a spatial and social ellipsis as feminist strategy and intersubjective ethics of embodiment. Central to de Bretteville’s elliptical approach is a drawing together of design principles and feminist pedagogy, articulated in forms that allow for a ‘plurality of voices’ (de Bretteville 2018). At both Cal Arts School of Design (1971–1973), and the Woman’s Building (1973–1984), de Bretteville employed explicitly feminist approaches to problems of design, using strategies from consciousness raising, a central principle and method of 1970s feminist activism, as a model for teaching and a dispersed form of participatory design.4 This politics is articulated in de Bretteville’s 1974 manifesto on feminist design, arguing for a shift in the structural logic of design: If the design material is organized in fragments, multiple peaks rather than a single climatic moment, it has a quality and rhythm which may parallel women’s ontological experience, particularly her experience of time. Although I used this fragmented organization in an efort to refect a community of the arts in formation to encourage the reader to participate, I  realized simultaneously that this form of visual organization corresponds to what is considered by our society to be women’s way of working. (de Bretteville 1974: 117) Throughout this text, de Bretteville connects examples of her own practice and teaching to imagine a utopian feminist design with radical social implications, where nonhierarchical design principles model ‘non-hierarchical organization’, and where the divide between designer and ‘user’ is broken down. The potential for design to constitute a space for a multiplicity of voices underpins de Bretteville’s experiments in print—where ‘fragmentation’ creates multiple spaces across the page. The formal structures proposed by de Bretteville and their political intent of collectivised, socially engaged feminism come to the fore in Pink (1973). Designed in response to the American Institute of Graphic Arts’ design prompt of a single colour, de Bretteville solicited contributions on the subject of ‘pink’ from a range of women, organising the responses in a dispersed grid formation across the poster, leaving squares blank, suggestive of a participatory potential. The grid here performs like her later ellipses—as a device of proximity and distance between the contributors, and an indicator of a surfeit outside the text. In 1974, de Bretteville plastered the poster across the streets of Los Angeles (Figure 15.1), shifting the work from the typographic to the topographic—a grid laid across the city blocks.

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Figure 15.1 Sheila Levrant de Bretteville posting Pink, 1973, in Echo Park, Los Angeles, CA Source: Courtesy of the artist

This translation of feminist design principles to urban sites underpins de Bretteville’s move into public artworks, where the activist intent of her work was redirected onto the social space of the city. De Bretteville’s feminist urban activism connects to ideals of spatial justice, arguing not only for equal access to resources, but also the right for communities to determine the use and meaning of their environment.5 By contrast, monuments make meaning and memory from the position of authority, using visibility and spatial occupation to eface the unrepresented and provide a boundary to reshaping space. However, aiming to simply reverse representation by rendering the experience of women and marginalised subjects visible repeats the epistemology of the monument, with the potential to reinscribe diference.6 De Bretteville’s public works, like her earlier design practice, push against the production of clearly legible subjects, instead questioning the hierarchies and structures of representation and allowing space in the work for the site and subjects to shape meaning. In the Public Announcements/Private Conversations project, which had two iterations across 1981 and 1983, de Bretteville led a group of artists from the Women’s Graphic Center at the Woman’s Building to create works that took as their subject and space public sites in the city of Los Angeles.7 As indicated in the conjunctive slash in its title, Public Announcements/Private Conversations connects the spatial (public

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and private), and the declarative (announcement and conversation), site and voices. Participants in the projects were required to write, design, print, post their posters, negotiate with the owners of the public places, and collect responses about and for places in the shared environment. . . . Within this theme each woman gives graphic form to her concerns, placing this work—and thus placing herself—in public view. (de Bretteville 1975) Each work took a diferent approach to this investigative prompt. Qris Yamashita’s Redress/Reparations Now!/Little Tokyo (1983), for example, drew out the forgotten histories of Los Angele’s Japanese Americans, by reproducing a World War II-era evacuation notice set in front of vernacular photos, images of American concentration camps and newspaper clippings. The authoritative text of the archival order is annotated in red, marked with the efects of its dispassionate language on the lived experience of the ‘persons’ to which it refers: ‘So much was lost! So much was destroyed . . . including pride and dignity . . . much never regained or replaced’. By pasting this work up in Little Tokyo in 1983, the layering in the print was echoed in the laying over lived space, a neighbourhood irrevocably changed by the dispossession of internment, but also reclaimed as a site for Japanese American identity.8 Where Redress/Reparations Now!/Little Tokyo was direct in its address of time, space and identity as a memorial, a non-monumental marking, Helene Ly’s Chinese Woman (1981) was deliberately elusive in its meaning, relying on gaps and spaces in legibility to question the naturalness of gender and race in public spaces. Her poster, a logo of the word woman, replaces the ‘w’ and ‘an’ with the Chinese character for woman: 女. This ideogram functions as both linguistic sign, and marker of cultural diference, challenging the legibility of the word/sign in either language (Otis College 2011). Plastered around Chinatown, the poster blended into the multi-lingual commercial signage, suggesting a slippage between two senses of understanding of both gender and place.9 Public Announcements/Private Conversations, with its focus on women’s experiences of the urban space of Los Angeles, draws out a less immediately visible (or legible) part of the city’s texture.10 Unlike Pink, which can be infnitely reproduced and repostered in new locations, Public Announcements/Private Conversations is dependent on location for syntax. The marking of Los Angeles through Public Announcements/Private Conversations forms a temporary feminist inscription on the city, making explicit the making of space through a ‘multiplicity’ and ‘coexisting heterogeneity’ (Massey 2005: 9). Key themes of de Bretteville’s broader practice underpin the Public Announcements/ Private Conversations project—a direct engagement with the politics of urban spaces, collaborative production and an emphasis on afective language. This nexus of space, body and text is focused in her public artworks marking sites of history and community, starting with Biddy Mason: Time & Place (1989) (Figure 15.2). This 81-foot cast concrete wall, embedded at the base of a new ten-story building in Los Angeles, is part of a larger memorial project helmed by urban historian and architect Dolores Hayden: Biddy Mason’s Place. As part of Hayden’s larger project The Power of Place (1984– 1991), a feminist urban activism project that sought to investigate and commemorate the social history of downtown Los Angeles, Biddy Mason’s Place marked the site

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of its subject’s nineteenth-century home with fve intersecting projects in text, public artwork and print, resisting a monolithic single memorial.11 At the centrepiece of the project, de Bretteville documents Mason (1818–1891) through material traces, following her life from Mississippi to California, from slave to landowning freedwoman. Women’s lives, and specifcally the lives of women of colour, are (still) almost invisible in American urban histories and on the ofcial markings of place, making the presence of Biddy Mason’s Place a radical gesture. The process of production of de Bretteville’s wall (like the project more generally) was based in community consultation and initiated through a series of public meetings, devising a work that functions as a form of connection in its contemporary context (Hayden 1989). This marks a reconceptualisation of the marking of memory in the city space, to emphasise the community building function of citizenship beyond the mere development of capital, and provides a conceptual as well as material template for de Bretteville’s later public projects. This is a connection explicitly centred on the bodies of its public. In her writing on The Power of Place, Hayden’s ambitions for the social value of urban history are located through Edward Casey’s ‘place memory’—the dependence of memory on a bodily experience of site (Hayden 1995; Casey 1987). Hayden emphasises the intersecting spaces at work in place memory, echoing Henri Lefebvre’s triadic model of social space of the lived, the planned and the imagined (Lefebvre 1991). Place is the locus of diferent forms of memory and can be afected by even the smallest public marker (or presence) that draws out the bodily experience of individuals or the shared experiences of communities. In later writing, Casey (2004) emphasises the importance of monuments in translating individual, social and collective memory into public memory, fxing it as a sited, bodily and historical marker (a ‘horizon’ against which both the past and future are conceived). While Casey’s phenomenological location of memory in place is abstracted from sexed and raced corporeality, Biddy Mason: Time  & Place is a horizon that is established through individual bodies that are addressed through their shared histories and reshaped through contemporary connections (Figure 15.2). The wall of Biddy Mason: Time & Place is scattered with information about its site and subject—dates, text and photographs (such as Mason’s 1855 ‘freedom papers’ and an image of her homestead)—along with more allusive imprints and impressions of objects associated with Mason’s life (wagon wheels, agave leaves, a midwife’s leather bag, a picket fence) (Figure 15.3). The traces left of these cast objects set into the concrete, described by Hayden as ‘fossils’, are an absence and a mark, something both lost and permanently recorded. This use of absence allows the subject of the memorial to be elided, memorialising both the presence of Mason’s life and the absence of knowledge of histories of the marginalised. A similar strategy informs de Bretteville’s 1995 project West End Echoes (Boston, Massachusetts), where the underpass of a highway is cast with the shadows of homes it displaced as part of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s. Here the simplifed concrete cast architraves are indicative of the lost neighbourhood without being descriptive, a memorial to lost community rather than an attempt at depiction. A ghost mapping in the form of brass street names set into the concrete ground similarly marks the lost urban environment, a ‘haunting’ (de Certeau 1984) of memories of lost homes and community. Ideas of belonging and at-homeness are built up across Biddy Mason: Time & Place, which fxes in a single site Mason’s long journey across space but also identity. Although the work moves in a linear narrative across the space of the wall, the variation in material and motifs echoes Mason’s own constantly changing identity in relationship to place, law and

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Figure 15.2 Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Biddy Mason: Time & Place, 1989, Los Angeles, CA Source: Courtesy of the artist

Figure 15.3 Detail, Biddy Mason: Time & Place, 1989 Source: Courtesy of the artist

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governmentality. Marsha Meskimmon (2007) (drawing on the work of Rosi Braidotti) has described this quality in Biddy Mason: Time & Place as a fguration of the ‘denizen’, where embodied subjectivity is formed through being in place, rather than the ofcially conferred ideas of statehood implied by the idea of citizenship. The fragmentation and partiality of de Bretteville’s wall rejects the impulse to contain Mason as an ideal citizen. Leaving space for a formation of identity outside the recognised governmental and legal marks of selfhood, the empty ellipses of Biddy Mason: Time and Place indicate its multi-layered subject as unknowable within ofcial language. As Jennifer DeVere Brody describes in her analysis of the writing of Ralph Ellison, the ellipsis is a radical signifer of the representability of the co-existent presence and absence of black identity. By breaking the clear and easy legibility of the text, ellipses suggest a breaking up in the naturalness of linguistic structure and ‘function as points of disorientation and perhaps democracy’ (2005: 693). In leaving space in her memorial to Mason, de Bretteville allows for this ‘disorientation’ as a political act, the clearing gesture of the ellipsis as indicating an unmeasurable space of experience outside the text and opening up a more democratic possibility for public memory making. Biddy Mason: Time & Place draws on the materials of modernist urban architecture—poured concrete, slate, limestone and granite—to shape a memorial both to Mason and to forgotten histories of Los Angeles. Critical to this project is its textu[r] al physicality, embedded in the material of the city; the project is perceived not just through vision, but is an embodied and haptic experience. This centrality of bodies and enaction to the meaning of this work can be understood as an example of Mechtild Widrich’s (2014) ‘performative monuments’, forming its public through the encounter and enaction with the work (and its documentation).12 Set in stone, Biddy Mason: Time & Place abandons the entropy of de Bretteville’s earlier public posters and has endured, fxed into its changing urban landscape. The surface of the concrete has weathered, marking the passing of time, with a patina of weeping water and smog marks. The porous nature of concrete allows for the tracing of time and changing environmental conditions despite the ostensible permanence of its material. It retains a contemporary relevance as a narrative site—included in Los Angeles walking tours and used as a site for community events marking Mason’s life as a signifer of black socio-spatial agency within the city and cultural sign—as a legacy of the urban activism of its inception. The focus of the Biddy Mason’s Place project on the relationship between urban space and histories of race and power has a revived currency in rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles—the wall is only minutes away from Skid Row and Downtown, streets away from Boyle Heights and recent heated battles over the role of art and gentrifcation.13 The wall, now more than ever, is a boundary, an in-between of building and public space, and an ‘inscription’ (Grosz 2001) where the mutual process of becoming between raced and sexed identity and the space of the city is made corporeal in work that touches and is touched by its city/bodies. The formal vocabulary of Biddy Mason: Time & Place established the lexicon of de Bretteville’s subsequent public projects. These signs (images and text in brass or carving) are scattered and dispersed, with de-centred composition, and set into and onto (often functional) architectural urban forms. In de Bretteville’s later works, the cohesive and chronological narrative of Biddy Mason: Time & Place, and its connection to a fxed and singular place, memory is dissipated in favour of looser, smaller, individualised points extrapolated and connected through open and discontinuous syntax. In these works, marks can be textual, as with an untitled installation at Hillhouse

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High School (New Haven, Connecticut, 2003) and At the Start . . . At Long Last . . . (Inwood, New York, 1999); or image-based as in Omoide noShotokyo (Los Angeles, California, 1994) and West End Echoes (Boston, Massachusetts, 1995). More recently, these marks are translated into digital form, as with .  .  . 所以 .  .  . (Hong Kong Design Institute, Hong Kong, 2012) where LED text is generated through the smart phones of its student users. What de Bretteville’s works share is a centring of the public in the creation of the text and content of the work, iterated through materials associated with traditional monuments but brought to the level of the public. These works are a mimicry of traditional monuments, they repeat the material conventions of the form but subvert them through intimacy and disruption, as a feminist play on ofcial structures. Elliptically, they return the idea of monuments and memorials in a stuttering form that disrupts integrity and legibility. Although materially de Bretteville’s public works echo counter-monuments, in their subjects and engagement with community in both formation and ongoing interaction they establish new forms of relationship away from a dialectal reliance on the traditional monument. Where the counter-monument assumes the productive role of the material marker in shaping memory (and social space), de Bretteville’s un-monumental memorials are open and relational. Rather than signifers (monuments) of memory, they form memory through an embodied process of becoming, and are memorials always in the process of being formed. This openness is exemplifed by the functional poetics of Workers Constellation: Take a Break . . . Out to Lunch . . . Back to Work (2000) (Figure 15.4), in the grounds of the Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training. A series of stone elements—a star-shaped table and eight simplifed block chairs—are inscribed with text both open and allusive, and historical and specifc. The main text of the table and chairs is scattered with words connected to labour and

Figure 15.4 Sheila Levrant de Bretteville with Henk vanEssen, Workers Constellation: Take a Break . . . Out to Lunch . . . Back to Work, 2000, Cranston, RI Source: Courtesy of the artist

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a series of interspersed pronouns. This text is mobile, as the words on the table-top rotate through the use of a ‘lazy Susan’, creating multiple permutations of meaning and disrupting the sheer permanence of the work’s materiality. Parallel to this spinning vocabulary is a chronology of dates excised on the rim of the table, marking a history of Rhode Island labour activism.14 The presence of this historical marking, a device of traditional monuments, frames the work as a memorial (to an idea—of labour, activism, rights and state responsibility) even as it is both functional and ambiguous. The use of granite blocks and inscribed lettering recalls the invocation of death inherent in gravestones and memorials, but in their functional form as seats and tables there is a direct relationship to the living workers on site. Like the afective memorials of Jenny Holzer, such as the Black Garden (Nordham, Germany, 1994), the use of seating implies a work to be touched and felt as much as read, a point of contact between an allusive poetic text and public.15 Where Holzer deploys the grief of granite as weighty material to refect her subject matter, de Bretteville’s work is more playful; these are not tombstones but seats for contemplation and sociality, where the scale and grandeur of monuments is redeployed as conviviality. Linguistically, the meaning of the work is fractured; without a linear construction or fxed viewing positions, each word can be formed into a range of shifting permutations. Meaning is formed through the changing position of the viewer/reader, moving through and around the fragments and space, and the shifting form of the table work, where metal handles shift the textual panels remaking the inscriptions. The work is thus formed through individual embodied engagement with the collective notion of labour. The location of the work, in the grounds of the former state asylum, shifts the use of the site as a space of state power over the bodies of its citizens to a space of leisure and non-directed use. Of all de Bretteville’s work, the ellipsis is most direct here as a textual and spatial device. On the table’s mobile text, the elliptical mark is used consistently through the typography as an aposiopesis, breaking of the end of each fragment. Here the glyph of the ellipses facilitates the fexible arrangement of the syntax and renders the incomplete phrases as speculative statements on labour relations. The text on the top of the table is separate, but also in dialogue with, the fxed chronology of labour activism that runs around the edge of the table.16 The gaps between the stone seats acts as a spatial ellipses; reading across these blocks constitutes a modular set of phrasings: can . . . we . . . I . . . work. . . can . . . we. . . I . . . work. . . can . . . we . . . work . . . I. . . can . . . I . . . we . . . work we . . . want . . . will . . . work. . . we . . . want. . . will . . . work. . . we . . . want . . . work . . . will. . . we . . . will . . . want . . . work. . . The use of shifting pronouns when read across the work moves from the individual to the collective, a polyphonic rendering of the past and present of labour, between the personal and the collective across time.

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The balance, of community and social engagement, afective response and spatial practice, is what de Bretteville describes as a ‘productive tension’ (in Sfigiotti 2016). Her un-monuments create a point of contact with memories and with the bodies of others today and into the future, not at the level of understanding but a feeling of something more—unsaid. To draw on Sara Ahmed’s (2004: 6) writing on emotion, in the encounter with de Bretteville’s public artworks there is an ‘impression’, an emotive mark left by others: ‘they impress on me, and impress upon me’. Monuments mark space, but they can be marked in turn by their publics. These spatial ellipses become a political and ethical space, both an absence and a presence, to draw out gaps as well as draw together. The absences of these works make visual those whose visibility has been denied (women, people of colour, the displaced and the efaced) not only in ofcial memorials but also in the public space of the city. These are un-monuments, monuments as visual activism, that act not only to make visible but to question the hegemony of visibility within the urban environment. De Bretteville’s work, with its open and elliptical form, resists the potential for visual activism to be ‘objectifed’— transformed into an aesthetic spectacle for easy consumption (Demos 2016: 90). The tactic of the ellipsis is an approach to considering the translation of social and collective feminist principles in open forms and public sites, un-monuments to absence and omission. The open syntax of de Bretteville’s un-monumental memorials allows for distinct and diferentiated encounters without eliding the meaning making function of a memorial. Instead, their form and function allow for the bringing together of bodies that retain their distinctness. These works provide a pause in the urbanscape, a suggestion of something more, still coming and with more to be said. . .

Notes 1. Recent incidents of monument activism are too numerous to list, but include the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement that began in South Africa in 2015, originally directed at a statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town but extended as part of a broader push to decolonise universities, including a campaign at Oxford University in 2016; grafti on statues of Captain Cook at various sites across Australia, including Sydney’s Hyde Park in Sydney in 2017 where the Cook statue was targeted with a slogan of ‘No Pride in Genocide’ and a call to ‘change the date’ (of Australia Day—a memorial to the arrival of British settlers and dispossession of First Nations People); and 2019 anti-rape messaging on the Monumento a la Independencia (El Ángel) in Mexico City, as part of protests against the inaction of law enforcement on cases of rape and murder against women. 2. This excess within the ellipsis is stylistically gendered—associated (negatively in modernist literary critique) with the ‘feminine’ writing of nineteenth-century novels. Virginia Woolf’s adoption of this legacy of the ellipsis, deployed as a key device in resisting patriarchal modes of representation (Toner 2015), established a feminist literary trope that marks the work of writers like Hélène Cixous and de Bretteville’s Woman’s Building contemporaries Deena Metzger and Adrienne Rich. 3. The feminist fold as visual/tactile/embodied is given form, for example, in the work of Hannah Wilke, as clitoral and sculptural, spatial and bodily. 4. De Bretteville’s Women’s Design Program at Cal Arts School of Design ran parallel to Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s Feminist Art Program. With Chicago and Ruth Iskin, de Bretteville started the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles in 1973 and was active as both founder and educator in the Feminist Studio Workshop and the Women’s Graphic Center. 5. As defned by Edward Soja, spatial justice (an adaptation of Iris Marion Young’s ‘social justice’) is, ‘the fair and equitable distribution in space of socially valued resources and opportunities to use them’ (Soja 2009).

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6. The politics of visibility in feminist public artworks is a tricky terrain. In her examination of VALIE EXPORT’s public artwork Transparent Space (Vienna, 2011), Elke Krasny (2017) unpacks the ambivalent transparency and complicated (‘entangled’) implication of visibility in the practices of labour, capital and gender in the neoliberal city and art world. 7. Other artists involved in the Public Announcements/Private Conversations projects included Jerri Allyn (1981), Betye Saar (1983), Patssi Valdez (1983) and Carrie Mae Weems (1983). 8. Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles was the centre of the city’s Japanese community from the late nineteenth century. With the internment of Japanese Americans in 1942, the area was resettled as ‘Bronzeville’, an African American working-class neighbourhood, and post-war both returning Japanese-American citizens and the new black community were subject to several waves of displacement. In the 1970s, under the auspices of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, the area was largely redeveloped, marketing the Japanese heritage of the area. Community groups such as the Little Tokyo People’s Rights Organization resisted the displacement of working-class and older Japanese Americans from the area as part of this redevelopment, and advocated for cultural self-representation. Yamashita’s work also served an activist and community function, with fundraising editions given to the National Coalition for Redress and Reparation (Wye 1988: 44). 9. Chinatown in Los Angeles is the second in the city’s history; the frst was displaced by development of Union Station in the 1930s, and ‘New’ Chinatown was built north of the original site, marketed as a site for tourism and ‘American’ visitors. By 1981, Chinatown was in the midst of a globalised capital expansion, and its population had grown to include more diverse Chinese and Asian communities. Ly’s work was thus situated in the midst of a complex polyphony of languages and capitalist branding, in a site of both local community and the consumption of Chinese identity by non-Chinese Americans. 10. In its collaborative mode of working and direct use of marking on site, this project folds back to Three Weeks in May, the loose grouping of works interrogating sexual violence and the city of Los Angeles produced by Suzanne Lacy in 1977—a memorial and nonmonumental marking of events usually deliberately efaced rather than memorialised. Lacy directly credits de Bretteville with the shift into public space and ‘populist’ language in her own poster work for Three Weeks (Lacy, 1990). 11. Hayden’s feminist urban activism (community projects investigating histories of Los Angeles rendered invisible through ofcial accounts and redevelopment, particularly those of women and communities of colour) was directly related to her pioneering work on feminist urban history. The larger Biddy Mason project included Hayden, Donna Graves (curator), Susan E. King (artist) and Betye Saar alongside de Bretteville. Saar created an installation of Mason’s home in the building’s elevator lobby (Biddy Mason’s House of the Open Hand, 1989) and King produced a large letterpress book HOME/stead, following the narrative of site and architecture. Along with Biddy Mason: Time & Place, de Bretteville also produced a poster with text by Hayden, Grandma Mason’s Place: A Midwife’s Homestead. Hayden published an article (Hayden, 1989) and later a book on the larger project The Power of Place (Hayden, 1995). 12. Widrich provides a compelling framework (performativity) for reconsidering the return of monuments since the 1980s, and the ‘shift  from seeing the monument as authoritarian colossus to harnessing its concrete social  force’ ( 2014: 10). De Bretteville’s career and involvement with Californian feminist performance art before her move into public projects mirrors Wildrich’s examples of Eastern and Central European performance artists developing social models for site-based engagement both ‘live’ and through documentation. 13. Boyle Heights (a low income, primarily Latinx neighbour in East Los Angeles) has, since 2016, been the subject of heated battles around the role of galleries and artists in gentrifcation (‘artwashing’). Community activist groups Defend Boyle Heights and the Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement (BHAAAD) targeted galleries such as 356 Mission, PSSST and Venus Over Los Angeles, as the vanguard for developers and as agents of displacement. The recent exodus of galleries from the area is indicative of the impact of this sustained campaign. 14. This chronology dates back to the eighteenth century and covers the founding of unions and fellowships as well as movements for labour rights. Rather than dramatic historical events, it marks small gestures of collective action.

Fragmented Traces. . . .

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15. Holzer, like de Bretteville, has moved from co-opting the language of capitalist commodities (in her posters and LED signs) to the materials of urban development, also shifting from ephemerality to the literally weighty permanence of granite and marble. For Holzer this has been accompanied by a literally ‘weighty’ subject matter, as in her Holocaust memorial works. 16. This simultaneity of texts is a spatial and mobile development of de Bretteville’s earlier experiments in parallel textuality as a feminist strategy as in a c.1976 collage of text by de Bretteville and Woman’s Building writer Deena Metzger.

References Ahmed, S. 2004. The cultural politics of emotion, New York, Routledge. Berlant, L. 2014. ‘Interview With Lauren Berlant as Told to Andy Campbell’ [Online]. Artforum. Available at: www.artforum.com/interviews/lauren-berlant-discusses-reading-with-andher-recent-work-45109 [accessed 5 December 2019]. Brody, J. D. 2005. ‘The Blackness of Blackness . . . Reading the Typography of Invisible Man’. Theatre Journal, 57, 679–698. Casey, E. S. 1987. Remembering: a phenomenological study, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press. Casey, E. S. 2004. ‘Public Memory in Place and Time’. In: Phillips, K. R. (ed.) Framing public memory, Tuscaloosa, AL, University of Alabama Press. Certeau, M. D. 1984. The practice of everyday life, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press. Chamarette, J. 2007. ‘Flesh, Folds and Texturality: Thinking Visual Ellipsis via Merleau-Ponty, Hélène Cixous and Robert Frank’. Paragraph, 30(2), 34–49. De Bretteville, S. L. 1974. ‘Some Aspects of Design From the Perspective of a Woman Designer’. Arts in Society: Women and the Arts, 11, 114–123. De Bretteville, S. L. 1975. ‘Public announcements/private conversations’, course description. Woman’s Building records, 1970–1992, Washington, DC, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. De Bretteville, S. L. 2018. Sheila Studio [Online]. Available at: http://sheilastudio.us/ [accessed 10 December 2019]. Demos, T. 2016. ‘Between Rebel Creativity and Reifcation: For and Against Visual Activism’. Journal of Visual Culture, 15(1), 85–102. Derrida, J. 1978. ‘Ellipsis’. In: Writing and diference, London, Routledge. Deutsche, R. 1996. Evictions art and spatial politics, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Doss, E. 2010. Memorial mania: public feeling in America, Chicago, IL, The University of Chicago Press. Grosz, E. 2001. Architecture from the outside: essays on virtual and real space, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Hayden, D. 1989. ‘Biddy Mason’s Los Angeles 1856–1891’. California History, 68(3), 86–99. Hayden, D. 1995. The power of place urban landscapes as public history, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Huyssen, A. 1996. ‘Monumental Seduction’. New German Critique, 69, 181–200. Krauss, R. 1979, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’. October, 8, 30–44. Krasny, E. 2017. ‘Exposed: The Politics of Infrastructure in VALIE EXPORT’s Transparent Space’. Third Text, 31(1), 133–146. Lacy, S. 1990. ‘Oral history interview with Suzanne Lacy’, 1990 Mar. 16-Sept. 27. Washington, DC, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Lefebvre, H. 1991. The production of space, Oxford and Cambridge, MA, Blackwell. Massey, D. B. 2005. For space, London and Thousand Oaks, CA, SAGE. Meskimmon, M. 2017. ‘From the Cosmos to the Polis: On Denizens, Art and Postmigration Worldmaking’. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 9, 25–35.

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Nancy, J. L. 1988. ‘Elliptical Sense’ (P. Connor, trans.). Research in Phenomenology, 18, 175–190. Nelson, R. S. & Olin, M. R. 2003 Monuments and memory, made and unmade, Chicago, IL, The University of Chicago Press. Nora, P.  1989. ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’. Representations, 26, 7–24. Otis College. 2011. ‘Woman’s Building History: Helene Ly (Otis College)’ [Online]. YouTube. Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=utpY5ai26hE [accessed 1 December 2019]. Roberts, L. A. & de Bretteville, S. L. 2006. ‘Graphic Design/Public Art/Interview’. In: Roberts, L. (ed.) Good: an introduction to ethics in graphic design, Lausanne, AVA Publishing. Sfigiotti, S. 2016. ‘Being Otherwise: A Conversation With Sheila Levrant de Bretteville on Feminism, Public Art, Education, and the Gentle Art of Activism’. Progetto Grafco, 14, 144–153. Soja, E. 2009. ‘The City and Spatial Justice’. Spatial Justice, 1, 31–38. Stevens, Q., Karen A. Franck & Ruth Fazakerley. 2012. ‘Countermonuments: The Anti-Monumental and the Dialogic’. The Journal of Architecture, 17, 951–972. Sturken, M. 1991. ‘The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial’. Representations, 35, 118–142. Sturken, M. 2007. Tourists of history: memory, kitsch, and consumerism from Oklahoma City to ground zero, Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Toner, A. 2015. Ellipsis in English literature: signs of omission, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Widrich, M. 2014. Performative monuments: the rematerialisation of public art, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Wye, D. 1988. Committed to Print: Social and Political Themes in Recent American Printed Art, New York, N.Y: Museum of Modern Art. Young, J. E. 1992. ‘The Counter-Monument: Memory Against Itself in Germany Today’. Critical Inquiry, 18, 267–299.

Index

abjection 127, 129–130, 155, 158–159, 162; see also nationalism, national abject abortion 2–3, 12, 47, 55, 59–60, 185, 194; anti-abortion bill 2 aboriginal: dispossession 113; knowledge 98 Aboriginal Country 104–106, 108–110, 113, 116, 118 Aboriginal Land Rights movement 116, 118 absent image 10, 62, 66–70 action 3–7, 9, 33, 38, 47–48, 53, 55–58, 69, 75, 90, 92, 95, 98, 100, 110, 114, 122, 125–126, 128, 133, 144, 167, 169, 177, 182–184, 189–190, 192–195, 206, 213, 222; bodily 6, 57; collective 6–7, 12, 58, 169, 177, 222; inaction 118, 237; military 64; plural 6–7; political 6, 12, 122, 170– 171, 177, 206; social 5, 57, 184; see also artistic practice activism 3–11, 14–16, 31–33, 36–38, 41–43, 46, 48–50, 53–56, 58, 62–66, 68–72, 75–76, 79, 81, 85, 88, 90, 95, 97–100, 104–106, 116, 122–124, 126, 131–134, 136, 150, 152–153, 155, 157, 159, 161, 165–169, 170–172, 175–177, 179, 182, 184–185, 188, 191–196, 205, 208–209, 212–214, 222, 226–227, 229–231, 234, 236–238; activist artmaking 5, 104; antinuclear 90, 98; Australian Aboriginal 105; black radical feminism 12, 212, 214–215, 222; budding and emergent 8, 9, 46, 48–49, 53, 56, 58; embodied 3–4, 7, 10–11, 32, 34, 37–40, 43, 48–49, 56–58, 67, 85, 107, 132, 136, 177, 198, 207, 214, 226; feminist activist gesture 122–124, 133–134; feminist art 7, 9–10, 14–15, 48, 50, 53, 58, 88, 93, 116, 131, 148, 150, 182, 184–185, 189–193, 196; housing 98; intentional 8, 9–10, 33, 36, 42–43, 122– 124; intimate 6, 8, 76, 85; labour 236; LGBTQIA+ 48, 222; material 8, 10, 95, 97, 100, 123–124, 131–132; monument 221, 226–228, 235–237; mothers’ activist movements 175, 177, 182, 185, 188, 191;

of afect 5, 8, 11; political 3, 10, 55, 95, 97, 99, 122, 124, 176, 194; practice-based 10, 106, 116; representational 31; social 3, 7; Syrian visual activism 8, 10, 62–66, 68–69, 71; textile 8, 104, 106, 110, 117; womxn 11, 98, 165–167, 169–172, 175, 177, 212–219, 220–223; see also absent image; decolonial creative revolution; pedagogy, feminist activist; feminist urban activism; protest; survival ‘aesthetics of survival’ 92–93 afect (afective) 5, 8, 11–12, 40, 57, 85, 124, 129, 185, 193–195, 198–203, 205–210, 222, 231, 236–237; see also anxiety; corpomateriality agency 3, 8, 10–11, 28, 31, 32, 38, 42–43, 49, 52, 54–55, 57, 59, 76, 94, 95, 123– 124, 128, 130–131, 133–134, 142, 147, 155, 160, 166–167, 169–171, 175–177, 179, 198, 206, 209, 217, 226, 234; political 130, 175–176, 198, 206, 209; women’s 11, 49, 52, 54, 142, 147, 155, 166–167, 171, 175–177, 179, 217 Ahmed, S. 3, 10, 81–82, 85, 123, 151, 160– 161, 200, 202, 208, 237 Allahyari, M. 9, 31–32, 38–42, 44; Material Speculation: ISIS 40–41; She Who Sees the Unknown 38–39; The Laughing Snake 38–42 ‘alternative imaginaries’ 48 ‘alter-ontological organizing’ 48 #AmINext 212 ancestral: bodies 78–79, 118; gestures 110; inheritance 79, 107; knowledge 107 Anthropocene 8, 10, 75–79, 81–86; Black Anthropocene 78; ‘patchy Anthropocene’ 77, 82 anxiety 12, 151, 154–155, 189, 198–210, 227; anxious living 198, 200, 202, 205– 207; see also breathing apartheid 11, 98, 136–140, 144–146, 148, 214–215, 221; anti- 176, 214; post- 98, 138, 144, 146, 214–215, 221

242

Index

appearance 5–9, 11, 32–33, 40, 52–53, 55, 58, 67, 72, 147, 170–171, 173, 179–180, 194, 203, 204; see also Mirzoef, N.; ‘right to appear’; space of appearance archive 36, 40, 53, 88, 97, 100, 105–107, 110, 183, 185, 192–194, 197, 208, 228, 231; feminist 53, 100, 192–194 Arendt, H. 3, 5–6, 55, 151 Ariadne (A Social Art Network) 184, 196 artistic practice 5, 7, 9–11, 23, 32, 46, 48, 50, 55–58, 76, 88, 92–93, 100, 150–153, 159, 161, 166, 186, 188–190, 195–197, 200, 205, 222; ‘disoeuvre’ 23; living process 92; para-artistic 7, 46, 57–58; participatory 32, 58, 76, 184, 192–193, 229; performative 9, 17, 32, 39, 42, 46, 49, 52, 56–58, 90, 122–124, 132, 134, 144, 182, 186, 188–189, 194, 234; political 124, 195; re-enactment 32, 35, 152–153; see also activism, feminist art; embodiment Assad dictatorship 9, 62, 66, 70 Assadist propaganda campaign 8, 64–66, 69; disinformation campaign 9, 62, 67, 71; see also absent image; Assad dictatorship Assemblage 18–20, 23, 80 assembly 2–4, 7, 15–20, 23, 28, 32, 38, 41, 43, 56–58, 166, 169, 171; ‘assembling’ 8, 15–16, 28; see also Butler, J.; Hall, S. August Wilson African-American Cultural Center Pittsburgh 24 banner 2, 22, 55, 90, 117, 222 Barad, K. 37, 131, 199, 210; ‘agential cut’ 11, 37; ‘intra-action’ 37, 210; see also new materialism Baumgart, A. 9, 46–59; Sprawa kobieca w Polsce. Łódz 2018 46–49; Symfonia Syren 56 becoming 10–11, 19, 34, 37–39, 52, 56–57, 78, 127, 129, 133, 145, 177, 200, 209, 226, 234–235; co-becoming 37, 209 Bell, V. 53 belonging 7, 9, 11, 31, 33, 43, 57, 155, 161, 215, 232 bender 88–90, 99 binary 43, 71, 90, 127, 171 Bishop, C. 32, 37, 56 Black Arts Movement 15–16 Black Audio Film Collective 43 black queer visibility 5, 23 black radical feminism 12, 212, 214–215, 222 body 1–12, 15–17, 22–24, 27–29, 31–43, 48–49, 52–54, 56–59, 62, 65, 67, 75–76, 78–79, 81, 85, 88, 91, 93–94, 97, 104, 106–107, 109–111, 118, 123, 130–131,

138, 144–145, 148, 150, 155–161, 165– 166, 169–171, 173, 175, 177, 182, 185, 188, 195–196, 198, 200–202, 205–209, 219–220, 222, 226–229, 231–232, 234– 237; ancestral 79; corporate 220; gendered 144; lived body 8, 11; not male 9, 15, 27; not New York 15; not white 9, 15, 27, 31; of water 79; performative 43; women’s 9, 38, 41, 52, 56, 155, 166, 173, 175, 182, 219; see also Butler, J.; Haraway, D.; marginalisation; vulnerability bomb shelter 153, 155 border 31, 33, 37, 40, 42–43, 113, 127–129 Boscagli, M. 123–124, 127–130 boundary 1–2, 5–6, 10, 35, 42, 53, 75, 90, 95, 99, 113–114, 123–124, 127, 130–131, 230, 234 Braidotti, R. 52, 234 breathing 12, 36, 37–38, 198–204, 206–209; combat 207; politics of breathability 200; see also afect; anxiety British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 98 Bustamante, M. 189; see also Polvo de Gallina Negra Butler, J. 3–4, 6, 10, 31–35, 38–39, 42, 50, 52, 54, 56–59, 79, 81, 85, 91, 144, 166– 167, 169–171, 177, 206; ‘bodies acting in concert’ 1, 3–4, 6–7, 54, 56–57, 79, 89, 168, 171, 212; ‘corporeal vulnerability’; ‘grievability’ 31, 33, 36; ‘livability’ 10, 31, 171; ‘orchestrated collectivity’ 3, 56; ‘plural performativity’ 32, 43, 54 camp: artifce 11, 136, 145 camp: peace 88–90, 92, 97–99, 101, 122; protest 78 CANAN 94 capitalism 32, 40, 75–78, 80–83, 85, 93, 98, 220; Capitalocene 78; extractive 75–80, 83, 85, 98; neoliberal 1, 16, 31, 33, 40, 75–76, 82, 104, 157, 169, 200, 205, 208 care 1, 8–10, 17, 22, 27, 40, 43–44, 53, 57, 88, 92, 95, 97–100, 104, 107, 109, 112– 113, 116–118, 138, 141, 151–153, 155, 157, 159, 161, 166, 170, 175–176, 182, 199, 220; ethics of care 104, 110; ‘violent care’ 40, 44; ‘virtual form of care’ 157; see also ‘care-full re-membering’ ‘care-full re-membering’ 8, 10, 104 Christianity 2, 49, 81, 84, 185; Catholic Church 49, 58, 81; Concordat 49; religious representations 11, 166, 185, 189 Chambers, P. 8, 10, 88, 94–97, 121; Domestic Front 94–95; Feminist Clutter 94; Folding Chair for the Feminist Resistance 121–134; Kitchen Shanks 94

Index Chicago, J. 50, 53, 184, 196, 237; Dinner Table 50, 53 Cine-Mujer collective 184 citizenship 3, 18, 31, 57, 66, 70–72, 150, 152, 156–157, 159, 165–166, 168, 219– 220, 232, 234, 236, 238; denizen 234 Cixous, H. 57, 237 collaboration 1, 7–9, 44, 48, 53, 58, 92–93, 100, 124, 182, 196, 218, 228, 231, 238 collage 18–19, 138, 145, 171, 185, 188, 239 collectivity 1–4, 6–8, 10–12, 16, 19, 25, 32, 35, 39, 40, 46, 48–49, 52–59, 64–65, 75–77, 82–85, 104–105, 107, 110, 156, 169, 177, 179, 182, 184–185, 188, 191–197, 206, 208, 210, 218, 222, 226–229, 232, 236–238; agential 7, 9, 11, 46, 52–53, 58, 198; see also assembly; plurality; solidarity colonialism 9, 10, 12, 39, 40, 75–76, 78, 79, 85, 98, 104–107, 109–110, 113–114, 116–118, 145, 165, 167–168, 204, 207–208, 212–215, 218, 220–223, 226; colonial trauma 10, 104–105, 109; digital 39–40; hypermasculine 9, 12, 213–214, 220–221; settler colonial gardens 10, 75, 78, 113–114, 117–118; settler colonialism 98, 104–107, 109, 113–114 community 2–3, 6, 8–9, 15–16, 23–29, 31, 33, 36–37, 48, 55–57, 59, 64, 69, 75, 78, 90, 98, 106–107, 109, 112, 118, 122, 143, 146–147, 150–152, 159–160, 189–190, 193, 212–213, 215, 226, 228–232, 234– 235, 238 corpomateriality 9, 11–12, 198–201, 209–210; ‘feminist corporeal materialism’ 9, 46, 49, 56–57, 133; see also Meskimmon, M. Covid-19 1–2, 12, 43, 98–99, 101 craft 92, 98, 100, 107, 110, 115 Crenshaw, K. 20, 162, 169, 215–216 cultural forgetting 110 Dakota Access Pipeline 78 Daxiong 173, 178 de Bretteville, S. L. 12, 196, 226–239; At the Start . . . At Long Last . . . 235; Biddy Mason: Time & Place 231–234, 238; installation at Hillhouse High School 234–235; Omoide noShotokyo 235; Pink 229–231; Public Announcements/ Private Conversations 23–31, 238; West End Echoes 232, 235; Workers Constellation: Take a Break . . . Out to Lunch . . . Back to Work 235; . . .所以. . . 235 ‘decolonial creative revolution’ 9, 12, 212, 215, 222

243

decolonisation 9, 12, 105, 212–215, 218, 222–223, 237; Fallism 12, 212–215, 222–223; see also ‘decolonial creative revolution’ Deepwell, K. 7, 48, 150, 153 ‘delegated performance’ 56 democracy 1, 46, 56, 65, 67–69, 166–167, 171, 173, 234 demonstration 6, 40, 47, 54–55, 62, 67, 121–122, 179, 182, 185, 187–188, 192– 196, 198, 206, 213, 222 diaspora 15–16, 19, 25; see also Hall, S. dirt 53, 77, 106, 112, 129–131; cast-out 53, 128; contamination 31, 36–37, 42–43, 92; garbage 105, 123, 128–130; junk 129, 131; see also domesticity; feral dispossession 32, 34–36, 57, 76, 78, 106, 113, 226, 231, 237; see also colonialism dissent 2, 10, 38, 56, 62, 122, 124, 159, 195–196, 198 Dolores, Ch. 14, 25 domesticity 8, 10, 16, 48, 84, 88, 90, 92–95, 97–100, 104, 106–107, 109–111, 113, 115–116, 118, 123–134, 142, 151, 155, 157, 161, 166–167, 169, 175–177, 183, 190, 216–217; domestic labour 8, 10, 93–95, 109, 113, 126, 151, 157, 161, 166–167, 175, 177, 183, 190; domestic materiality 104, 106, 123–124, 127–134; home 2, 10, 15, 17, 22–24, 37, 43–54, 67, 88, 90, 93–95, 98–99, 104–107, 109–110, 113–117, 123–125, 127, 129, 131–133, 138–139, 143, 151, 153, 157– 159, 161, 175, 179, 212, 227, 232, 238; maintenance 92–93; queer 99 Doshi, T. 46, 49 Douglas, M. 53, 106, 129–131, 162 ellipsis 9, 12, 188, 228–229, 234–237 embodiment 3–5, 7, 9–10, 12, 25, 31–35, 37–40, 42–43, 46, 48–49, 52, 54, 56–59, 67, 76, 83–85, 97, 106–107, 109, 123– 124, 129, 131–132, 157, 167, 175, 177, 188–189, 194, 198, 205–210, 212, 214, 221–222, 226, 229, 234–237; see also transnationalism embroidery 109–110, 113 environmental crisis 10, 75–80, 106 ethics 3–4, 9–10, 32, 34, 57, 91, 97, 104, 110, 229 event: imagined 64–65, 232 Famous Women Dinner Service 53 FeesMustFall 213–214, 223 femicide 93, 212, 216 femininity 11, 16, 38, 52, 57, 92, 94–95, 97, 101, 142, 144, 147, 157, 166, 168,

244

Index

171–172, 174–175, 177, 185, 194, 237 feminist politics 4, 48, 88, 96, 132, 200, 204, 206; horizontal 53, 55, 169, 196; micro48–49, 52–53; of solidarity 7–9, 39, 42, 48–49, 53–55, 58 Feminist Art Program 184, 196, 237; Womanhouse 196 Feministo 92–95, 100 Feminist Studio Workshop 184, 196, 237 feminist urban activism 230–231, 234, 238; see also de Bretteville, S. L. Fenix 94, 100 feral 10, 121–125, 127–134; ‘feral design’ 128; see also materiality, feral Five Black Women exhibition 16 ‘forensics’ 40 Fort Laramie Treaty 78 Free Syrian Army 69 Freire, P. 76, 82–83 gaze 16, 36–37, 67, 79, 145, 175; extractivist 79; institutionalised 36; see also surveillance ‘gender ideology’ 48 genealogy 53, 106–107 geometric discipline 113; cadastral grid 113 German, V. 9, 15, 17–24, 28–29; 21st Century Juju exhibition 17–18; ARThouse 22–23, 29; Love Front Porch 22–23, 29; Miracles and Glories Abound exhibition 19, 20 ghost 10, 97, 100, 104–106, 108–110, 112, 116, 118, 232 Goliath, G. 12, 212, 215–218, 222; Berenice 10–28 216; Elegy 217; Personal Accounts 217; This Song is For . . . 218 Grant, D. 53 Greenham Common 10, 88–92, 98–101, 122 Grosz, E. 4, 54, 132–133, 234 Gulf War 153 Haimbe, M. 12, 212, 215, 218–220, 222; Ananiya the Revolutionist 218 Hall, S. 15–17, 19, 24, 27, 28, 31; ‘Black’ 15, 17 Haraway, D. 32, 41, 79, 220; ‘cyborg’ 220 Harcourtromanticist 174 Hatoum, M. 9, 31–37, 42; Roadworks 33, 35–36; The Negotiating Table 33–34; Under Siege 33, 35 Hayden, D. 231–232, 238 history 6–7, 11, 14, 16–18, 24, 27–29, 39–41, 46–50, 52–55, 57, 75, 78, 81–82, 85, 92, 96, 98, 100, 104–107, 109–110, 113–114, 117–118, 128–129, 133, 136, 139, 145, 157, 166–168, 171, 179, 182,

193, 196, 213, 215, 220–221, 223, 226– 229, 231–232, 234–236, 238; counterhistory 52; her-story 9, 46, 48–50, 52–53; his-story 48, 52, 58; inherited past 105; nationalist 53; our-story 49, 59; see also ghost homeland 95, 106, 150; host society 151 homemaking 10, 88, 104, 106–107, 110, 113, 116–117; settler colonial 104–107, 109, 113–114, 117 Home Strike exhibition 94–95 Hong Kong Protest Movement 2019 11, 165–169, 171–172, 177, 179; Don’t Shoot Our Kids 166, 169, 175; #ProtestToo 165, 169; Silver Hair March 169, 175 Hong Kong Umbrella Movement 165–166, 168–169, 171, 179 Holzer, J. 236, 239 housing 10, 23, 33, 88, 98; dwelling 10, 88, 99, 110, 113, 128 human rights 1, 29, 48, 58, 66, 69, 71; Human Rights Watch 48 Hunter, A. 93 Husni-Bey, A. 10, 75–77, 80–85; After the Finish Line 76; Postcard From a Desert Island 76; The Reading/La Seduta 75–79, 81–85 imagination 38, 41, 48, 55, 65, 76, 101, 144, 146, 195, 200, 215, 220 Indigenous sovereignty 78, 80 interdependence 3, 7, 16, 31, 37, 42, 53–54, 56, 84 intersectionality 20, 98, 109, 136, 161–162, 169, 171, 198–199, 205–207, 209, 215– 216, 222–223; see also Crenshaw, K. intertextuality 199, 210 invisibility 7, 46, 48–49, 52–53, 55, 57, 179, 216; erasure of visible evidence 67 Irigaray, L. 56 isishweshwe 136, 138, 141–142, 145, 147 Istanbul Convention 48 Ivey, Ch. 15, 25, 27; Finding Beauty in the Raw 25 Kav LaOved 151 Kelly Strayhorn Theatre Pittsburgh 24 Klein, N.: ‘shock doctrine’ 2–3, 6 Kurz, I. 53–54, 58 Labowitz, L. 184, 189 Lacy, S. 184, 189, 196, 238 landscape: Australian 104, 114–116, 118 LGBTQIA+ 2, 48, 213, 215, 217, 222 liminality 31, 59, 123–124, 126–131; liminal objects 124, 128–131

Index Lin, M. 227 Little Thunder 172 liveability 6, 22, 27, 32, 36, 39, 54, 59, 77, 93, 202 lived experience 8–9, 11, 14, 136, 172, 183, 188, 198, 231 Lucido, L. 185, 196 Ly, H. 231, 238 Łódz: hunger demonstrations 55; Uprising 55 Madre 99; see also care magic 10, 75, 81–85; tarot 75–77, 79, 81–85 Makarrata 105, 118 Manifa 54, 59 Marasela, S. 11, 136, 138–148; Our Mother 140–141, 148; Theodorah and Gebane: Dolly Parton 136, 138, 142–143, 145– 147; Theodorah in Johannesburg 136, 138–139, 142, 145 marginalisation 4, 8, 11, 18, 31, 33, 35, 37, 42–43, 53, 75, 82–84, 143, 150–151, 161, 166, 172, 179, 206, 209, 212–213, 216, 226, 228, 230, 232; see also otherness Markiewicz, M. 10, 88, 94–97; Resistance Kitchen 95 masculinity 9, 14–16, 121, 212, 214 mask 38–39, 50, 52–53, 153, 165, 223; balaclava 46, 50, 122 Massey, D. 8, 17, 27, 231 materiality 4, 6, 8, 10, 36, 56, 88, 93, 104, 106, 121–125, 127–134, 210, 236; abject 129; agentic 8, 10, 128, 131–132; corporeal 9, 46, 49, 56–57, 131, 133; domestic 8, 10, 104, 106, 123–124, 129, 131; feral 10, 121–125, 127–134; vibrant 8, 123–124, 131; vital 57; see also new materialism Mayer, M. 11, 182–197; Concepción 188; De niñas y pesadillas 189; Diario de las violencias cotidianas 189; El tendedero 184, 193; Genealogías 185, 187; La Dolorosa 185, 196; Lo normal 184; Los naufragios del cuerpo 189; Maternidades secuestradas 191, 193–194; Mito #1 188– 189; No a las maternidades secuestradas 191, 194; Nuestra señora 185; Primero de diciembre 185; Separación 188; Protest of the Day After 191, 193–195; Taller de Arte y Activismo Feminista 192; Traducciones: un diálogo international de mujeres artistas 185; Tú 188; see also Polvo de Gallina Negra Meskimmon, M. 57, 122–123, 131, 133, 234 migrant 8, 11, 14, 16, 25, 31, 36, 39, 43, 109, 118, 150–153, 155–159, 161–162, 215, 222–223; Filipina migrant women 8, 11, 150–159, 161–162; labour migration

245

151, 156, 161; migrant community 16, 36, 150 Miguel, S. 11, 150, 152–153, 157, 159 Minh-ha, T. T. 5 Mirzoef, N. 4–7, 9, 53, 55, 58, 67; see also ‘right to appear’; space of appearance; space of representation Mohanty, Ch. 161, 214–215 monument 9, 12, 37, 75, 109, 130, 139, 165, 183, 189, 195, 221–223, 226–232, 234– 238; afective 12; anti- 227–228; counter12, 109, 227–228, 235; performative 234; un- 9, 12, 226, 228, 235, 237; see also ellipsis Mosquera, M. 25 motherhood 11, 157, 159, 175–177, 180, 182–186, 188–195; militarised 176; see also Mayer, M. Mothers of the Disappeared 122 Mother’s Union 109, 118 Moufe, C. 150 Msezane, S. 12, 212, 215, 221–222; Chapungu: The Day Rhodes Fell 221–222; Love in the Time of Afrophobia 222; The Charter 221; The Public Holiday Series 221 Muholi, Z. 5 Mujeres en Acción Solidaria 183 Multi-Cultural Arts Initiative Pittsburgh 24 Nancy, J. L. 3, 229 narrative: local 4, 5, 22, 24, 27, 34, 46, 54–55, 58, 78, 82–83, 143, 151, 215, 227; micro 1, 48–49, 52–53, 64, 71; nationalism 43, 47–48, 53, 75, 81, 104, 138, 150–151, 156–157, 159, 215, 223; ethnonationalism 150–151, 156, 159; national abject 159 needlework 106, 113–114, 142 new materialism 10, 33, 37, 57, 106, 123– 124; feminist new materialism 10, 33 New Voices Pittsburgh/New Voices for Reproductive Justice 24 Nicholson, K. 93 normalisation 107, 113, 212, 216 #notwhite collective 14–15, 25 Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet 2, 12 otherness 4, 14–16, 18, 28, 31–33, 35, 37, 43, 56, 105–106, 150, 155, 159–161; othering 56, 159; stranger 151, 160, 61; subaltern 75; see also marginalisation; space, spatial exclusions Palestinian-Israeli confict 153, 155 Papadopoulos, D. 48, 53 Parton, D. 136, 143–147; see also Marasela, S.

246

Index

patriarchy 4, 15, 38, 40–41, 49, 52, 58, 76, 82, 88, 93–94, 97, 116, 142, 145, 147–148, 151, 159, 161, 171, 175, 182, 213–215, 218, 220–222, 237 pattern 79, 82, 107, 109–110, 112–113, 115–116, 151, 157, 209 pedagogy 10–11, 75–76, 79, 82, 85, 194 220, 229; anarcho-communist 10, 76; feminist activism 11, 194; therapeutic 75 performativity 3, 31–32, 43, 54, 56–57, 123, 131, 133, 185, 192–193, 238 plurality 1, 3–4, 6–7, 9, 32, 43, 54–57, 59, 69, 229; plural existence 32, 59; see also collectivity; presence Polvo de Gallina Negra 189–191, 194; ¡Madres! 182, 190, 194 Portrait of the Artist as a Housewife exhibition 92 postcolonial 118, 167–168, 215 post-humanism 1, 33, 41; see also Haraway, D. pragmatism 106 ‘praxial feminism’ 98 Prawo i Sprawiedliość 2, 47, 48, 55 precarity 1, 3, 6–7, 9–10, 12, 33, 37, 43, 48, 54, 59, 82, 150, 155, 159, 161, 171, 189, 212, 222 presence 1, 3, 5–6, 8, 11–12, 23, 32–33, 35–36, 38, 40, 43, 48, 52, 56, 58, 67, 69, 81, 83–84, 105, 129, 133, 144, 171, 188–189, 206, 218, 227–228, 232, 234, 236–237; collective 11, 48, 52, 206 productivity 83, 205, 237 protest 2–3, 7, 9–12, 39, 47–48, 50, 54–55, 58–59, 62–63, 71, 78–79, 88–92, 94–95, 98, 117, 121–124, 126–127, 131–132, 134, 148, 165–180, 183, 189, 191, 193–195, 198, 206, 212–216, 218–223, 226–227, 237; creative 212–215; Czarny Protest 47; darning 90, 92; hypermasculine 213; naked 213–214; nuclear disarmament campaign 98; Occupy Wall Street 39; Polish resistance movement 54; Protest Against the Myth of the Mother 183, 189, 194; public gathering 2–3, 22, 39, 54, 58, 193; Sacred Stone protest camp 78; sit-in 121–122, 126, 168, 179; Syrian revolution 9, 62, 67, 69; Tahrir Square 39; Umbrella Strike Poland 54; vulnerable 198; see also Dakota Access Pipeline; decolonisation, Fallism; FeesMustFall; Greenham Common; Hong Kong’s Protest Movement 2019; Hong Kong Umbrella Movement; RhodesMustFall; strike ProtestAtHome 3 Pussy Hats 122 Pussy Riot 50, 122

queer 4–5, 7, 19, 23, 31, 38, 81–83, 90, 98–99, 198, 200, 202, 204, 206, 209, 213–215, 218; see also Ahmed, S.; Butler, J. quilt 110–112, 117 recognition 11, 14–16, 28, 32, 43, 52, 96–97, 100, 105, 118, 143, 151, 171, 196, 199, 206–207, 209, 218, 223 reparative ethics 91, 110 representation 4, 6, 9, 11, 19–20, 28, 31–33, 35–37, 39–40, 43, 46, 48, 53, 55–58, 95, 101, 127, 133, 144, 150, 158, 166–167, 171–172, 175, 177, 179, 182, 185, 188, 195, 218, 222, 230, 237–238; see also protest; space of representation reproduction 2, 11, 24, 29, 47–48, 57–58, 97, 105, 132, 156, 160, 182, 219 resistance 3, 7–11, 18, 36–37, 40, 42–43, 48, 52–58, 67, 75–76, 78, 80, 85, 88, 94–97, 121–124, 126–128, 130–134, 142, 147–148, 167, 171, 177, 182, 198, 206, 208–209, 214, 219–220, 222, 226 responsibility 37–38, 41–42, 52, 54, 76, 90, 105, 110, 170, 176, 236 Reyes, M. 150, 157 RhodesMustFall 213, 223 Rich, A. 189, 237 Richardson, S. 94, 100 Robels, A. 11, 150, 153–155, 157 Rosler, M. 93–94 Round Table Talks Poland 1989 46, 49, 53, 56, 58 ‘right to appear’ 3, 6, 55 ‘right to look’ 6, 58; see also Butler, J.; Mirzoef, N. Rubin, J. 25, 27 sampler 112–113 seeing 4, 8, 19, 43, 216, 238; non-seeing 4; unseeing 4, 57, 79, 106, 113, 155, 171, 177; ways of 4, 19; -with 8, 43; see also invisibility; representation; visuality Schapiro, M. 184, 237 Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce 216 shame 76, 107, 109–110, 140, 151, 198, 208 Sia 12, 198–200, 205–208, 210; Big Girls Cry 198–199; Chandelier 199 silencing 5, 12, 27, 46, 56, 58, 105, 111, 156, 201–202, 213, 215–218, 222 Socalo, E. 11, 150, 156–157 social reproduction 92, 97 solidarity 1, 3, 7–9, 11, 31–33, 37, 39, 42–43, 46–49, 53–59, 161, 166, 177, 195, 220; politics of solidarity 9, 48–49, 53 Solidarność 49, 54, 59 South African Young Feminist 213

Index space 1–12, 15, 17, 22, 25, 27, 32–33, 35–43, 46, 49, 50, 53, 55–59, 67, 75, 77, 80–81, 94–95, 97, 104–105, 109–110, 113, 116, 123–128, 130–132, 145, 150, 157–158, 168–169, 171, 173, 184, 187– 189, 192–194, 196, 198, 200, 202–203, 206, 208, 212, 214, 221, 223, 226–232, 234–239; heterogeneity 8, 172, 198, 231; occupation 1, 6, 38, 95, 104, 167–169, 198, 206–207, 230; physical 1, 38–39, 188, 220; spatial exclusions 53; spatiality 1, 3, 5, 7–12, 53, 55, 75, 104–105, 109, 113, 128, 130–131, 145, 150, 189, 227–230, 234, 236–237, 239; spatial justice 230, 237; threshold 7, 123–124, 127, 130–131; urban 2, 27, 195, 226, 230–231, 234; virtual 36, 43, 194; see also decolonisation; domesticity; embodiment; feminist urban activism; Massey, D.; space of appearance space of appearance 5, 6, 9, 53, 55, 58, 67; see also Butler, J.; Mirzoef, N. space of representation 6, 46 Standing Rock 78–80; Indigenous Dakota Sioux tribe 78–79; Lakota 79; see also Dakota Access Pipeline sterilisation 219 strike 2, 16, 47, 54–55, 57, 90, 94–95, 97, 125; feminist strike movement 47 subjectivity 4, 8–11, 16, 18–19, 24, 28, 31–33, 37, 39–40, 43, 49, 52–56, 58–59, 88, 94–95, 97, 122–124, 127–131, 133–134, 142, 144, 151, 155, 171, 193, 196, 203–209, 212, 215, 218, 220, 226–230, 232, 234–239; biopolitical 205, 2019; dispossessed 32, 35, 57, 106; ‘female thinking subject’ 56; feminist 88, 123, 133–134; marginalised 8, 230; necropolitical 205, 205; subjectifcation 11; subjectivation 11; see also embodiment; intersectionality surveillance 33, 36–37, 42–43 survival 8, 10, 37, 43, 63–64, 68–69, 76, 81, 88, 90, 92–93, 96–99, 112, 205; ‘survival feminism’ 98; survivalism 8, 10, 97–98 Syrian Civil Defence 64, 71 textiles: domestic 107, 110–111, 113 There Are Black People in the Future Artwork-In-Residence project 27 togetherness 3, 9, 49, 53–54, 56–58, 76; see also solidarity touch 5, 9, 12, 42, 56–57, 63, 99, 111, 116, 152, 157, 186, 188, 194, 226–227, 229, 234, 236–237 traditions: domestic 97–98, 104, 106–107, 110, 113, 118

247

transnationalism 15–16, 31–32, 150–151, 157, 161; transnational feminism 161; see also solidarity truth-telling 10, 104–106, 110 Uluru Statement From the Heart 105, 118; see also Aboriginal Country United Nation’s frst World Conference on Women 184 United Nations Security Council Resolution 155 Victoria Mxenge Housing and Development Association 98 violence 9, 10, 12, 22, 33–36, 38, 40, 42, 48, 50, 52, 56–57, 62–63, 78–80, 93–94, 99, 155–157, 177, 182, 184, 189, 194, 207, 212–220, 222–223, 226, 238; domestic 48, 94, 99, 155, 157, 216–217; gendered 48, 50, 52, 96, 177, 182, 184, 212, 237; geopolitical 33; police 33, 67, 69, 158–159, 162, 165–166, 168–171, 173, 175, 179, 214; racialised 38; rape culture 151, 213; sexual 12, 38, 42, 151–152, 159, 169, 214–215, 217, 238; state 207, 214; xenophobic 222; see also colonialism; femicide; representation; sterilisation visibility 3, 5–9, 11–12, 16, 31–37, 39–40, 42, 46, 48–50, 52–54, 56, 58, 62, 65–66, 75, 79, 92, 106, 108–109, 124, 129, 144, 156, 165, 212, 216, 227, 230, 237–238; economy of 37; politics 11, 212, 238; see also invisibility; representation; seeing; space of appearance; space of representation visuality 6, 62, 65–68; counter-visuality 6; evidential 62; see also ‘absent image’; appearance; Assadist propaganda campaign; representation vulnerability 7–9, 11–12, 32–36, 40, 42, 54, 56, 59, 76–77, 84–85, 91, 97, 150, 155– 157, 159, 165–167, 179, 202, 205–206, 208–209, 216; vulnerable body 11, 32–33, 36, 42, 91, 157, 159, 166, 169–171, 175, 206; see also Butler, J. Waring, C. 150 Warren, A. 216 Waters, S. 88, 98, 104; Banner of Mine: Cultivation 117; Basking 108–109; Beloved I 107; Boundary Wreath 113– 114; Colonial Beacons 114, 116; Falling: Line by Line 116; Leaky Sleep of the Sullied 111–112; Sampler for a colonised land 113; Survivalist Sampler 98; White (bread) Winner 112–113 ‘we’ 3, 42, 55, 57, 59, 78

248

Index

White Australia Policy 108, 118 whiteness 5–6, 9, 14–16, 18, 20, 22, 24–25, 27–28, 31, 43, 57, 95, 100, 106, 108–109, 112–114, 117–118, 136, 143–146, 205, 207, 210, 213–214, 216, 218–220, 223; white supremacy 15, 20, 95, 100, 214 witchcraft 81, 83, 95, 100; see also magic witnessing 1–2, 5, 22, 25, 33–34, 40, 67–68, 121–122 Woman’s Building 184–185, 189, 229–230, 237, 239 womanhood 8–9, 11, 136, 138, 142–145, 147, 185, 218–219; see also Marasela, S.

Women and War project 155 Women’s Design Program 237 women’s rights 2, 48–49, 54, 58–59, 170 womxn 212–223 Wormsley, A. 15, 25, 27 ‘wujoud’ 66–69; see also absent image Wujoud Collective 9–10, 62, 66, 72; Testimony of a Former Detainee 10, 63, 66 Xaba, W. 213–214 Yamashita, Q. 231, 238