From a mimetic to a holographic paradigm in fiction: Toward a definition of feminist writing

This paper outlines a theory of fiction by examining the shift from the basically mimetic nineteenth century to be essentially non‐mimetic twentieth century. It further argues that the contemporary novel, as herein interpreted, constitutes a bona fide expression of feminist writing.

The paper contends thatthe transformation undergone by the novel as it moved from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century bears witness to the wide ranging transformation affecting the western world today. A number of inter‐related shifts have occurred ostensibly leading the western mind into a radically new world view, or new paradigm. Indeed, our culture is steadily moving from the absolutes of traditional physics to the relativity of the new physics and quantum theory; from a “logocentric”¹ to a “deconstructive”² universe; from a fragmentary (basically static and non‐creative) to a holistic (essentially dynamic and creative) realm; from representation to holography. Inasmuch as “representation” relates to “mimesis”, this paper ultimately redefines its aim by proposing to explore a shift from a mimetic to a holographic paradigm in fiction.

The notion of the holograph is therefore essential to the paper. As herein interpreted, holography not only challenges representation, but it also devalues the linear view of time (which is central to western culture) by focusing on the “now” and thereby delving into the depths of reality — the realm of the underlying, creative forces which the western world is presently releasing. It is precisely the release of long‐repressed forces that is drastically transforming western culture. This sheds new light on the problematics of western alienation which can now be reassessed in terms of “alienation from the creative source”.

In the final analysis, the paper contends that the emerging forces are essentially feminine. This posits an ultimate, all‐encompassing shift which may be said to be leading us from a male‐oriented to a holistically‐oriented culture: a culture that celebrates the essential oneness and fundamental dynamics of Life. Since the twentieth century novel has superbly explored and expressed the emergence of these forces, the paper regards it as the epitome of feminist writing. This writing is to be viewed as practice in the sense that it expresses the very process of change it has helped foster and in which it participates: the process of integration of the creative depths of being.     

From “Non-governmental Organizing” to “Outer-system”—Feminism and Feminist Resistance in Post-2000 China

ABSTRACT

In post-2000 China, both the frontiers and the landscape of feminism and feminist resistance have changed, and this change embodies a move away from the “non-governmental organizing” path that characterized the development of feminism during the 1980s and 1990s. This article addresses this “paradigm shift” in Chinese feminism by examining the “outer-system” political stand of post-2000 feminism and their domains of action through performance art, philanthropic volunteerism, and cyberfeminist articulations. These novel modes of feminist protest in the absence of a formal organizational structure challenge our understanding of feminism as a process of “non-governmental organizing” in public space and warrant a cultural analysis to shed light on how feminism engages in cultural contestation and subversion, often in semiprivate and semipublic spaces, in order to develop new and alternative cultural patterns and interpretive frames.

Abbreviations CPPCC The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference WF The All-China Women’s Federation     

Leash

“Leash” is a performance text about power, vulnerability, and cultural constructions of girlishness. The monologue was written to be performed in an art gallery.     

The Feminist Art of Self-Education

Abstract

Sociologist Elizabeth Long has charted the emergence of women’s reading groups in nineteenth-century America. ‘The women who founded literary clubs’, Long (2004, 337) tells us, ‘were aflame with the then revolutionary desire for education and self-development, which they called “self-culture”.’ Comparable aspirations continued to fuel a drive amongst women to organize together within reading and publishing groups, usually outside of official institutions, well into the twentieth century. This ‘revolutionary desire’ for self-education has also been evident in the UK women’s art and art history movement, although it has not been addressed in thorough detail. This article therefore seeks to situate an overlooked history of artistic reading and publishing communities in relation to an established body of theory in literary and cultural studies. These theoretical materials will illuminate the importance that reading and self-education (either in person or as part of a periodical network) had in establishing solidarity, and generating debate, within a flourishing art and art history movement. The second half of this article focuses on a specific case study. FAN: Feminist Art News (1980–1993) was an independent, grassroots publication that grew out of the Women Artists’ Newsletter in London. Temporary editorial collectives published themed issues on a quarterly basis. This article contends that it is no coincidence the subject of art education formed the focus of the periodical’s first issue, as well as a subsequent issue four years later. This indicates the significance of a reflexive auto-didacticism to second-wave feminism, as well as gesturing towards the long history of ‘education and self-improvement’ that has fuelled women’s reading and study groups since the nineteenth century.     

Museums and Feminist Matters: Considerations of a Feminist Museology

This article speaks to a post-human feminist museology. It argues that considerations of a feminist museology would benefit from engaging with post-human feminist dialogues currently unfolding within academia. Dynamic political landscapes and global circumstances challenge dualist paradigms. Theorizations of museums are not exempt from these challenges. Critiques of androcentricity indicate that feminist theorizations have never fully centred on “the human”, but always already contextualized how we affect the world, and how the world affects us. Discussions in this article follow Barad’s agential-realist theorization of the material-discursive practices that shape our understandings in and of the world, and Haraway’s notion of diffraction that engages the material and re-tools recordings of object histories as entangled human and non-human processes that can be taken apart and reassembled, making different possibilities possible. The article demonstrates that museological alternatives that emerge from conversations about entanglements not only aim to move beyond the paradigms they have been circling within for so long, but towards a re-thinking of museology and cultural heritage museums. Thus, considerations of a feminist post-human museology re-imagine museums as entangled becomings that make different possibilities possible.     

Judith Scott’s What is Property?: an inquiry into principles of dependency,propriety, and self-possession of an “outsider” artist

The essay addresses the politics of biography in the interpretation and reception of “outsider artist” Judith Scott’s work. Drawing from feminism, disability studies, and Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt’s History and Obstinacy (1981) and its political economy of labor power, the essay proposes a new method of analysis which would foreground Scott’s work as a mode of institutional critique. Kluge and Negt ask “Can capital say ‘I’?.” The essay argues that Scott’s work compels a concomitant questioning of this “I” and the very terms of biography, authorship, and ownership that undergird the myths – and the institutions – of the “outsider” and her “art.”     

Marianne Moore and the Arcadian Pleasures of Shopping

When R. P. Blackmur declared in 1935 of Marianne Moore that 'no poet has ever been so chaste',he was deploying a gendered critical language describing Moore's work as ideologically pure, untainted by the commercialism of capital; at the same time, he was carefully demarcating the boundaries between high culture and mass culture (Blackmur 1935:206). However, while Moore's status as an exemplary modernist has secured her a place in the modernist canon, this has inevitably led to readings that marginalize aspects of the poet's work that declare an interest and textual investment in mass culture. Moreover, interpreted within these narrow critical parameters, Moore's verse has been effectively transformed into what Randall Jarrell called one of the 'nicer animals': it has been declawed and tamed, divested of its more radical properties in order to reinforce a self-sufficient and autonomous modernist aesthetic. While it is undoubtedly important to recognize the ways in which modernist women writers have contributed to forms of avant-garde culture, those forms should be identified, in Rita Felski's words, as 'only one of a continuum of cultural practices' rather than as the dominant model for critical investigation (Felski 1994:191-208). Tracing the relation between Moore's poetry and the discourses of fashion, advertising and consumerism is an attempt to resist reproducing what Andreas Huyssens has referred to as 'the great divide' reinforcing modernism's cultural hegemony. The philosophical frames of modernity, particularly as it has been theorized by Walter Benjamin, provide the discursive context for making visible and valuable Moore's preoccupation with aspects of her own contemporary popular culture. Furthermore, by gendering this modernity, by recognizing the ways in which the formations of capital produce and consume 'woman' as discursive subject, Moore's poetic shopping sprees reveal the difference gender makes to our understanding of modernity and its relation to modernism. Moore's work, as illustrated by archival material based at the Rosenbach Museum and Library as well as her poems and her critical essays, is as much constructed out of the arcadian pleasures of modernity as it is the expression of the poetics of high art. With its investment in the aesthetics of display, the discourses of advertising and the pleasures of consumption, Moore's poetry offers a model for reading a gendered modernism in the context of modernity. The poem, 'When I Buy Pictures' (1921) will provide the focus for this discussion as it suggests not only how the aesthetic is related to consumer culture but it also reveals the textual traces of a debate taking place in the visual arts in the United States concerning the nature, value and function of 'pictures' as cultural signs. However, before looking more closely at the poem, it might be worth reconceptualizing Moore's writing in relation to some of the recurrent 'motifs' of modernity.     

Misogyny,Dionysianism and a new model of Greek tragedy

The subject of misogyny in Greek culture is widely recognized as of capital importance in understanding our attitude towards women as well as the general culture context within which that attitude is framed. Yet despite the obvious importance of this subject there has been little attention given to the way misogyny in fifth‐centry Athens was an integral part of its greatest art form, the tragic drama. Only when a model of tragedy is developed which accounts for the typological opposition between the male “tragic hero” and Dionysus will it be possible to understand how women function within this particular literary genre as the essential “other” of repressive male consciousness.     

The Threat or Promise of Popular Therapy? A Feminist Reading of Narratives of “the Good Couple”

Popular therapeutic culture—such as self-help books, TV programmes, and Internet resources—is growing rapidly and posing important questions for feminist research and politics. On the one hand, it can be seen as a challenge to the public sphere in terms of what can be shown and said and by whom, with the emancipatory potential of giving political credentials to the personal. On the other, it can be seen as exploiting, and thereby reproducing, stereotypes and inequalities, such as those related to gender. In this article, the discussion is advanced by the use of Swedish popular therapy for couples as a point of departure. It is argued that a cultural narrative of the “good couple” is constructed in self-help books and TV programmes on relationship issues, a narrative that seems to keep the unequal nature of this heterosexual institution from being challenged. However, in the individual narratives of consumers of this culture, apparent on web discussion boards, the cultural narrative of the “good couple” is being challenged, not least with reference to gender and gender inequality.     

Counterpublic and counterprivate: Zoe Leonard,David Wojnarowicz,and the political aesthetics of intimacy

In this paper we explore the space that dyadic intimacy plays within the counterpublic world-building of political activism. We reflect on a particular encounter between the artists and ACT UP activists Zoe Leonard and David Wojnarowicz by offering two readings of what we call the “counterprivate” relation between the two. In the first part of our argument, we contend that the counterprivate couple form (found in our case study of Leonard and Wojnarowicz) occasions a space of provisional leave from the normative affective, aesthetic, and identity-based impulses which tend to emerge in social movement group formation. Despite established critiques of the private, dyadic intimacy of the couple within social movement theory and queer and feminist cultural studies, we highlight the value of counterprivate couples – not in place of the collective world-building that is made possible by political organizing and collective identity, but as a necessary aesthetic complement to collective, participatory politics. In the second part of our argument, we read the intimacy between Leonard and Wojnarowicz as a private moment of expressed doubt that has subsequently been institutionalized into a public discourse through the context of art. Here the counterprivate couple form in turn becomes a counterpublic mode of collective world-making once more. This transformation from counterprivate relation to public discourse occasions a practice of collective subject formation (in the institutional terrain of art) that affirms doubt, curiosity, and poetic beauty as part of the reproductive labor involved in political participation.     

Psychosocial and Symbolic Dimensions of the Breast Explored through a Visual Matrix

This article explores knowledge about the breast in lived experience, addressing a gap in empirical research on a highly gendered cultural trope and embodied organ. We present findings from a study that used a free-associative psychosocial method—the Visual Matrix—in order to stimulate expressions of tacit aspects of the breast, aiming to generate an understanding of relations between embodied and enculturated experiences. Our data revealed how an aesthetic of the grotesque in one matrix allowed the mainly female group to use humour as a “creative psychic defence” against culturally normative and idealized aspects of the breast. This was expressed through symbolizations, affectively delivered in an exuberant mode, emphasizing the breast‘s potency and its potential for nurturance and “weaponization”. Through this feminine poetic, life and death became inseparable yet ambiguous dimensions of breasts. The breast’s life-affirming qualities included the sensual, the visceral, and the joyful—a material-semiotic knowing. This was incontrast to a second matrix, which expressed a more ambivalent and troubled response, and in which associations were weighted towards the spectacular breast of an ocular-centric culture that privileges hetero-masculine looking. We discuss differences between the two matrices in terms of psychosocial tensions between embodied and enculturated experiences.     

Cross way cross civil war chronicles,part iii

What possibilities might melancholia offer for a queer ethics, and what might it mean to perform such an ethics onstage? In this essay the author analyzes mobile figurations of U.S. nationalism, violence, and visuality as theorized in the work of contemporary queer chorographers Bill T. Jones and Keith Hennessy. The author suggests that Jones's 1989 Untitled and Hennessy's 2006 Sol Niger evidence shifts in racialized sexuality and empire from the 1980s to the War on Terror, even as they both mark convergences between geopolitics and biopolitics. Reading these works together – despite their markedly different aesthetics and tones – elucidates a queer ethics rooted in and capable of contending with our contemporary political moment of war and U.S. empire building. Further, these works model how dance and other embodied, collective practices can engender what Jill Dolan calls “utopian performances” or possibilities for critique and transformation rooted in moving social bodies.     

Inside the Home: Power and Negotiation in Filipina-Japanese Marriages

This essay examines the personal accounts of married Filipina-Japanese couples living in urban Japan to show how the women negotiate power and influence over their husbands. Centering on Filipino ideas about power and “America,” the article draws on various ethnographic vignettes that illuminate the Filipinas' cultural knowledge. By negotiating their relationships, Filipinas' marriages to Japanese emerge as ongoing processes rather than as a static institution in which the women are simply (oppressed) gender-role performers. While these women's struggles are not denied, their actions engender possibilities for the subversion of existing gender-national hierarchies. Belle faced Kawai. “I can't marry you.…I was raped by the son of a powerful man in my hometown. I'm no longer a virgin…” In tears, “Will you still marry me?” Kawai assured her firmly, “It doesn't matter.”     

Fashion culture: creative work,female individualization

This article explores some of the key dynamics of the UK fashion sector as an example of a post-industrial, urban based, cultural economy comprising of a largely youthful female workforce. It argues that the small scale, independent activities which formed the backbone of the success of British fashion design as an internationally recognized phenomenon from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s, represented a form of female self-generated work giving rise to collaborative possibilities and co-operation. However without an effective lobby or association (despite the expansion of the fashion media) and under conditions of rapid individualization and in an increasingly harsh climate of neo-liberalization, this creative economy has been overtaken and virtually demolished by the joint forces of a re-vitalized high street fashion culture and the aggressive presence of corporate fashion (‘Prada-ization’). While the UK government celebrates the growth of the cultural economy, it also overlooks the processes making the livelihoods of its predominantly female workforce either untenable or else requiring de-specialization and ‘multi-tasking’.     

Situational Analysis: Centerless Systems and Human Service Practices

Bronfenbrenner's ecological model is a conceptual framework that continues to contribute to human service practices. In the current article, the author describes the possibilities for practice made intelligible by drawing from this framework. She then explores White's “Web of Praxis” model as an important extension of this approach, and proceeds to offer Clarke's “Situational Analysis” as another fruitful tool for practitioners who seek relational ways of engaging with clients. With the example of a practice scenario, readers can consider the practical possibilities that open up with the shift in perspective invited by situational analysis.     

“Norwegian Women Got Gender Equality Through Their Mothers' Milk,But Anti-racism Is Another Story”—An Analysis of Power and Resistance in Norwegian Feminist Discourse

This article seeks to explore majority feminists' difficulties in addressing minority women activists' claims in contemporary Norway. The article identifies different representations of feminism in the Norwegian women's movement. Findings indicate that minority women are excluded in the hegemonic representation of feminism by being defined as “different” and not included in this understanding of “women”. Inspired by discourse analysis, intersectionality, and perspectives from black and post-colonial feminist theory, the article argues that the hegemonic representation of feminism is so persistent because it resonates with dominant representations of “Norwegianness”, racism, integration, and gender equality. Within the hegemonic representation of feminism, the asymmetrical relationship between “immigrant women” and “Norwegian women” is unreflected, and racial horizons of understanding (race thinking) are not acknowledged. Racism is not considered to be a relevant issue in the Norwegian context and is thus silenced. The article also identifies counter-hegemonic representations that challenge the hegemonic understanding; however, these understandings are still marginal within feminist discourse in Norway.     

Attention under repair: asceticism from self-care to care of the self

This essay examines the contemporary mindfulness movement as a cultural response to a larger problem of attention in the United States. As raw material for both capital (re)production and subjectivity, attention is a zone of indeterminacy and struggle for workers in a so-called immaterial economy. This essay suggests that the rise of concern around “paying attention” from the 1950s onward is driven by post-Fordist labor requirements more than networked technologies. First, it examines mindfulness as a technique of attention management for businesses and gives a broad survey of its current popularity and prevalence in US culture. Second, it proposes viewing techniques of attention like mindfulness through a triple lens of repair: (1) as managerial tools to repair psychic labor capacity for capital; (2) as practices that subjects use to repair alienation; and (3) as sites for reparative reading. Third, the essay illuminates the ties between Eve Sedgwick’s repair and Michel Foucault’s care of the self in order to suggest that resistance to practicing the self is founded on a paranoid defense. Its central argument is that attention is a method in Foucault's care of the self, and, as such, a potential portal into pleasure and political change rather than a mere feedback loop into capital.     

Pliant and Compliant: Colonial Indian Art and Postcolonial Cinema

Walter Benjamin's signature hypothesis of 'dialectics at a standstill' rehearsed in his 'Theoretics of Knowledge, Theories of Progress' permits visual images to be elasticized from a then condition in history and culture to a now site of contemporary reality in order to be critiqued in their entirety. Putting this hypothesis to the test, Rajan juxtaposes two late eighteenth-century works of art by East India Company Painters with two late twentieth-century films by Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta to trace trajectories of orientalized desire and unspeakable pleasure as relayed along a woman's body. In all four instances, the central image of woman continues to be an insistent signifier that embodies social values, cultural prejudices and artistic ideals, which, in turn, provide critical, valuable insights into constructions of gendered, aestheticized and sexualized femininity. The image of woman , thus dialectically read, reveals that it is not simply the male colonizer who is always already the oppressor, as is the common assumption, but rather that woman as an abject signifier can be merchandised even by enlightened, postcolonial women. Such a ravaged image of woman remains, therefore, a fixed trope in the hands of male and female artists, traversing coloniality and postcoloniality, and crossing over from art to cinema, with little chance of emancipation. One strategy to grant woman full agency requires the contemporary, feminist viewer to take responsibility and couple aesthetics with an ethical tenor. According to Benjamin, ethics thus defined is a matter of personalized aesthetics. This means that each one of us is entrusted with the responsibility of demanding accountability in the creation of visual culture such that images that demean femininity, disembody female subjectivity, objectify female pleasure and delegitimize desire be judged inappropriate, as incorrect or unappealing visual images and as unavailable for appropriation.     

Now wash your hands: uncommissioned art and gender

Examining the urban arts in the UK, in their paint and fibre-based alternatives, this article aims to account for the differences in contemporary dealings with graffiti and yarn-bombing (kniffiti). The intersectional complications of gender, race, age and class, as they have come to bear on the visual arts, as well as the historical power structures that have determined the classification of crime, and of art, are offered as possible rationales for present-day handling of ‘deviance’ in the form of urban art. It seems that urban knitting has blind-sighted both social conventions and legal principles in a way that exposes the arbitrary nature of both.     

“I Want to be Able to Walk the Street Without Fear”: Transforming Justice for Street Harassment

The practices comprising the analytic category of street harassment are rarely responded to through either criminal or restorative justice approaches, and the possibilities for transformative justice have to date not been considered. In this article we advocate for a victim-centred justice response to street harassment, specifically examining the potential for transformative justice to function in this way. Drawing on data from a recent Australian study, we examine participants’ understandings of justice and desired justice responses to street harassment. Participants’ responses drew attention to a range of perceived shortcomings of the formal justice system as a mechanism for responding to street harassment. Instead, participants advocated for a justice response concerned with transforming cultural and structural norms, in particular gender norms. We end in an examination of the limitations of transformative justice, looking to recent work on “kaleidoscopic justice” as a way of transforming common conceptions of justice itself.