Inscrutably,actually: hospitality,parasitism, and the silent work of Yoko Ono and Laurel Nakadate†

With interest in queer socialities, the author considers Jacques Derrida’s provocation in Of Hospitality to “say yes” as hospitable gesture in order to challenge the gendered and racialized demands of this charge. If Orientalist conflations of the East with femininity have in turn sexualized Asian women as simultaneously hypersexual and submissive, then how can we as viewers and readers performatively read Asian femininity in a different, and not anti-relational, orientation to hospitality? Building upon Anna Watkins Fisher’s concept of parasitic performance, this article posits inscrutability as a feminist methodology by considering Yoko Ono’s performances of Cut Piece and Laurel Nakadate’s video Happy Birthday for their interesting solicitations to audience-participants, costars, and viewers.     

Bad Feelings

While the importance of negativity and negative affects to queer history and theory has been the subject of much recent critical discussion, bad feelings are equally prevalent in contemporary feminist theory. The aim of this article is not to provide a summary overview of a recent negative turn in feminist theory, however, nor to identify the early twenty-first century socio-political causes of this welling up of bad feeling. Rather, its purpose is to consider the way the increasing centrality of studies of affect to feminist histories and politics allows us to reconceptualise these as ‘affective genealogies'. The article examines this by focusing on three representative texts, which it takes as representative of three key moments in the recent affective genealogy of feminism: Rosi Braidotti's Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (2002); Sara Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness (2010); and Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011).     

Performing the Filipina “mail-order bride”: Queer neoliberalism,affective labor,and homonationalism

The 2005 video/performance art piece, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride, by the Filipina American performance-art ensemble, the Mail Order Brides, examines the role of affective labor in constituting gay marriage as a form of US homonational belonging. In a contemporary context of capitalist globalization, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride critiques the subjugation of the third-world woman worker within a queer neoliberal logic, highlighting the inability of the mainstream US LGBT movement to address issues of race, migration, and labor. The Mail Order Brides enact forms of feminist camp and ethnic drag to denaturalize the affective labor that is embodied within the figure of the Filipina “mail-order bride.” In doing so, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride links an analysis of transnational Filipina labor with a critique of queer cultural politics in the US In its critique of queer neoliberalism, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride builds on and contributes to queer of color social movements committed to racial and economic justice.     

The Subversive Stitch: Female craft,culture, and ecriture

By making an embroiderer her central narrative voice and embroidery both the structural and the thematic focus of her most recent novel (Le Passé empiété [The Back Stitch]), Marie Cardinal complements Rozsika Parker's efforts (The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine) to trace the parallel histories of embroidery and femininity through the novel. For both Parker and Cardinal, embroidery figures the creative tension between conformity and subversion that Cardinal posits as common to all women and that results in Le Passe empiete in a complex reevaluation not only of the female artist herself but of both the traditional and the feminist critical context within which she currently creates. In particular, Cardinal explores the relationship between women's traditional domestic tasks and their artistic production, and she uses the specific qualities of embroidery to rethink common assumptions about literary influence and authority, the writing process, and the mythic tradition.     

Miss Reading

Against the backdrop of western culture's strong investment in gendered clothes, Stockton looks at clothing's intricate relations to shame and, for some queer women and men, the surprising value of these humiliations, especially in the service of sexual attraction. The word 'martyrdom', with its associations to bodily wounding and psychic pain, is not too strong for the acts of clothing and sartorial preference she discusses. Working through concepts that emerge from Sigmund Freud on femininity, Georges Bataille on sacrifice and Leo Bersani on debasement, along with debates among feminist thinkers about the New Woman, Stockton takes up 'martyrs' from three distinct histories, martyrs as diverse as the mannish lesbian of Great Britain's 1920s, American butches and femmes of the 1960s, and even the sailors of post-war France. How public self-betrayal and self-debasement in terms of clothes can offer creative social formations is the focus of this article. The highly famous novels of three queer authors provide the means for this surprising look: Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues and Jean Genet's Querelle.     

Spaces of self-consciousness: Carla Accardi's environments and the rise of Italian feminism

“Spaces of self-consciousness” examines three environments created by the Italian artist Carla Accardi in light of an emerging feminist politics. Though better known as a painter, Accardi created these three-dimensional works during an era of political and social upheaval in which her own commitment to the Italian feminist movement began to take shape. Her environments were deeply imbricated both with her own experience of autocoscienza, or consciousness-raising, as well as with radical design proposals that rejected the current state of civilization. This article examines how these environments functioned as prototypes of the transient, anti-institutional spaces that she would later create as co-founder of Rivolta femminile, a historic Italian feminist collective, and examines a previously obscure moment in Carla Accardi's career.     

activist-mothers maybe,sisters surely? Black British feminism,absence and transformation

This article, drawing on selected feminist magazines of the 1980s, particularly Feminist Arts News (FAN) and GEN, offers a textual ‘braiding’ of narratives to re-present a history of Black British feminism. I attempt to chart a history of Black British feminist inheritance while proposing the politics of (other)mothering as a politics of potential, pluralistic and democratic community building, where Black thought and everyday living carry a primary and participant role. The personal—mothering our children—is the political, affording a nurturing of alterity through a politics of care that is fundamentally antiracist and antisexist. I attempt to show how Black feminist thought can significantly contribute to democracy in the present and how Black British history and thought, as fundamentally antiracist and anticolonial, can generate a reinvention much needed in the present of a shared British history. I argue for feminist intervention premised upon a politics of care, addressing through activist mothering the urgency of Black absence from prestigious institutions. Such debilitating absence in Britain inhibits the development of scholarship, distorts feminist history and seriously concerns potential Black feminists. From diverse texts, I develop a genealogical narrative supplemented through memory work. This ‘gathering and re-using’ privileges Black women’s theorising as a crucial component of the methodological métissage, which includes auto-theorising to develop ideas of resemblance in relation to Black British feminism and feminist kinship. The resultant ‘braiding’, I suggest after Lionnet, questions the absence of intersubjective spaces for reflection on Black British feminist praxis, indicating a direction for British feminists of all complexions. Attentive to the 1980s as historical context while invoking the maternal, I consider what is required to engage generationally, counterwrite the academy and pursue a dynamic process of transformation within a transnational feminism that challenges Black British absence from academic knowledge production, while nurturing its presence.     

Boarding School Fictions: schoolgirls' own communities of learning

This article explores the fictional world of the schoolgirl annual in the interwar period and the significance of the imagined girls'-only spaces for their intended readership. The article takes the year 1929, the year of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, and focuses on two annuals designed for the 12–15 market: School Friend and Schoolgirls' Own. The annual compendium of stories, a very British invention, drew on characters whose adventures were followed in the weekly schoolgirl comics and was published at Christmas, a time when there was little personal space available as families gathered together. The imaginary world of boarding schools such as Cliff House or Morcove offered readers an escape from the hierarchy of family life and expectations of girls' participation in the home. Using the background of Woolf's feminist polemic and a framework informed by the theoretical framing of space by feminist geographer Linda McDowell, the article teases out the meaning of the multilayered nature of stories created by men with no experience of single-sex girls' school, writing as women.     

North American field guide: Kenneth Pietrobono's queer landscape of US Empire

“North American field guide: Kenneth Pietrobono's queer landscape of US Empire” offers a meditation on the photographic and exhibition strategies of Queens-based artist Kenneth Pietrobono. Chambers-Letson argues that Pietrobono builds a critique of the imperial and exclusionary practices of the US state by appropriating and (re)deploying the state's appurtenances of power, resignifying the landscape on which US nationalism is constructed and over which US power is exercised. As a point of critical entry, Pietrobono builds upon feminist and queer representational strategies, refusing direct figuration of the body while emphasizing the body of the spectator in the art encounter. Inviting the spectator to project a range of bodies into the landscapes that Pietrobono offers up, the artist asks the spectator to make connections between embodied experiences of race, gender, and sexual difference and the exercise and expansion of US Empire.     

The production of a woman in Andrei Tarkovsky's the sacrifice

In this essay, I explore the semiotics of the terno, the Philippine national dress, creatively interpreted by diasporic artists as a dense metaphor for the proper and improper Filipina. These artistic deployments of the terno lay bare unquestioned notions of Filipina femininity and nationalism to be fabrications of colonialism, militarization and globalization. The reconfigurations of the infamous “butterfly dress” by multimedia artist groups Barrionics and Mail Order Brides (M.O.B.) take center stage in my discussion. The genealogy of the terno I focus on in this article emphasizes alteration and transformation, to resist facile binaries of the nation as traditional and the diaspora as the site of modern and innovative modifications. My historicization of the terno underscores it as an emergent form in which to situate the uses of the terno in Filipino American performance projects within the history of the terno itself. Specifically, the essay focuses on the defamiliarization of feminine constructs that operate both in the nation and the diaspora, as well as to foreground the imbrications of colonial histories and our neocolonial present in the current global circulation of Filipina bodies. I highlight how these artists in the Filipino diaspora spectacularize the inchoateness of categories of gender, race and sexuality. Their performance works delink the dressee from the dress, the terno from the Filipina, the dress from the girl and the boy, the dress from the straight and from the queer, the dress from the diasporic and from the national. Within such figurations, the terno emerges as an overprivileged icon – of ideal womanhood and of the mother nation – whose iconicity is re-routed through bodies that do not belong.     

“Walls made out of paper”: Witnessing wit and how I learned to drive

The article proposes an alternative performative methodology for displaying sexuality in public spaces called queer curatorship. Specifically, it examines Isaac Julien's film The Attendant and a Chicago leathersex museum (The Leather Archives &; Museum) wherein histories of sadomasochistic sex practices and slavery dangerously crisscross on the surface of objects. Tyburczy posits that sites that feature materials such as real Antebellum slave whips alongside objects used as instruments of consensual pleasure and pain offer unique opportunities to reconfigure, recode, and reanimate epistemological frameworks for understanding the history of sexual equipment, the perversion and eroticization of power exchange, and the mutually constitutive relationship between histories of eroticism and histories of discipline. Cultivating the visual lessons learned from The Attendant into new curatorial models enacted during her tenure as a museum curator at the Leather Archives &; Museum, Tyburczy ultimately proposes queer curatorship as an experimental museum practice that stages alternative configurations between objects and bodies in space to alter the historical relationship of race, sex, and power as they relate to particular objects and acts, in this instance the use of whips in interracial scenes of sex and violence.     

Dancing across difference: Experience and identity in the classroom

This article uses Liquid Sky to consider the possibilities of feminist reorientations outside of formal and political orthodoxies and suggests that such disengagements from the dominant are alienated from the utopian rather than re-imagined as transgressive modes of utopian resistance. These disengagements are theorized as a postpunk feminist dystopia: that is, a de-emancipatory system of gendered and aesthetic practices that spatio-sonically shapes queer female sexuality as extrinsic to social and sexual ideals. This dystopia specifically frames the lesbian subject as a bodily terrain of self-estrangement, and names the film's network of alienated corporeal, subcultural, and sonic space. Feminist dystopia ultimately describes female empowerment's precarious position in a sexual and sonic landscape of non-normativity and offers a way to visualize oppositional practices that do not readily correspond to liberation.     

Sisters in a Fashion: Martha Ansara and Elaine Welteroth

ABSTRACT

This article discusses Martha Ansara and Elaine Welteroth, two US born feminists who came to Australia during two key moments in feminist history, as a way of thinking about the relationship between feminists and fashion. Ansara arrived in Sydney in 1969 carrying women’s liberation literature in her suitcase; she became an important generative figure in the Australia’s women’s liberation movement, particularly as an independent filmmaker and proponent of consciousness raising. Welteroth arrived in 2017 to speak at the Sydney Writers’ Festival during a period of international resurgence of feminist activism. She brought with her images of women of colour she had featured in Teen Vogue and she invoked second wave consciousness raising, albeit in a remodelled, corporate-led form when she talked about the title’s plans to bring young girls around kitchen tables to ‘solve’ political problems. The article uses comments both women have made in relation to fashion and beauty, close readings of their works, and a discussion of their respective feminist milieus to suggest a trajectory of feminism’s relationship to the fashion industry that appears to have changed from a position of opposition to one of open embrace. It also complicates this reading by pointing to the resonances between these women of different feminist eras.     

Theorising the Women's Liberation Movement as Cultural Heritage

ABSTRACT

Recent interest in documenting and re-evaluating histories of the UK Women's Liberation Movement has produced varied appraisals of the movement. These have emerged from feminist communities wishing to preserve, organise and collect their histories. Such recovery and dissemination, I argue, is cultural heritage rather than ‘history’, as heritage offers different tools for re-presentation as well as creating alternative socio-cultural relationships with the legacies of the WLM. This article draws upon my practice as a curator of feminist histories, and argues for the articulation of a politics of transmission, essential for the longevity and sustainability of feminist cultural heritage and histories.     

Sex Positive: Feminism,Queer Theory,and the Politics of Transgression

From the feminist ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s to the queer theory and politics of the 1990s, debates about the politics of sexuality have been at the forefront of contemporary theoretical, social, and political demands. This article seeks to intervene in these debates by challenging the terms through which they have been defined. Investigating the importance of ‘sex positivity’ and transgression as conceptual features of feminist and queer discourses, this essay calls for a new focus on the political and material effects of pro-sexuality.     

Wanting Pictures After Feminism: Re-reading On Our Backs

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between photography and feminism that emerges through the pages of the lesbian sex magazine On Our Backs (1984–2006). The San Francisco-based magazine represents an exceptional archive of images made in the context of lesbian community. Returning to the photographs that were published in early issues of the magazine, the article argues that On Our Backs, whilst explicitly addressed to a paucity of available images of lesbian culture, reflects a complex engagement with the meaning of the photographic image in dialogue with contemporaneous feminist debates. Through the work of Tee Corinne, Morgan Gwenwald and Honey Lee Cottrell, a desire for pictures renders the image a site of fantasy in which different ways of inhabiting lesbian identity form in dialogue with a community of readers.     

Onlining queer acts: Digital research ethics and caring for risky archives

This essay considers how the current compulsion to digital reproduction – the urge to digitize, network, and online previously not-online materials – offers researchers of and within queer circuits the opportunity to defamiliarize and denaturalize our participation in academic systems of exploitation and to reorient our work towards decolonizing research economies, habits, protocols, and relationships. It takes the Cabaret Commons, the authors’ speculative digital archive of and for trans- feminist and queer (TFQ) grassroots performance scenes in Canada, Mexico, and the United States, as its point of departure. The authors frame TFQ performance and party scenes as negotiated intimacies, cultivating ethics of vulnerability and risk, which operate within and as networked intimate publics. Reading across decolonial, queer, feminist, and trans- ethics and methods, this essay revisits the value of ephemerality, of strategic evaporation, non-storage, and forgetting in online research contexts.     

Etchings from the Attic: looking back at feminist print-making from the 1980s

ABSTRACT

Drawing on autobiographical memories of the influence of the Women's Liberation Movement, this article discusses feminist etchings made for my final undergraduate show. Etching, historically related to satire, was deliberately chosen to mock the disparaging treatment of the female artist. The article offers both an experiential and a contextual discussion of the atmosphere of social activism, political activity and consciousness-raising of the WLM as well as the journalism and feminist art history scholarship which informed my practice. Further, the article evaluates the potential naivety of my feminist strategy of ‘body art', as it risked being misunderstood as conventional sexually explicit imagery of female sexuality.     

Shocking Thoughts: A Reply to Anne Bottomley

This is a response to an article published in an earlier issue of this journal (Bottomley, A., Feminist Legal Studies 12/1 (2004), 29–65) in which an article by this author was cited as a prime example of a dangerous emerging 'orthodoxy' in feminist legal theory and subjected to a sustained and critical analysis. The purpose of this response is to reflect briefly on the rhetorical style and the theoretical orientation of that article, and to consider their worrying implications for the practice of feminist legal theory as a whole. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Between

Thinking with this special issue's group of feminist thinkers – some artists and others scholars – this introduction makes a strong case for co-authorship and a more collaborative humanities, while also insisting that the couple form – that stalwart object of queer and feminist theory – is neither a known quantity nor an exhausted entity, but rather, a field ripe for analysis. Situated squarely within performance studies, this introduction pivots away from questions of ontology and toward method and performativity, in order to ask: what modes of intellectual practice, erotic exchange, political work, and aesthetic experimentation happen uniquely within couple forms, in their most capacious and non-self-same iterations? What queer and feminist work can they do? What, in other words, is possible in the infinity, if indeed it is an infinity, between one and two?