Heresies’ Heresies: Collaboration and Dispute in a Feminist Publication on Art and Politics

Abstract

In the 1970s magazines, journals and periodicals constituted an alternative public sphere for second wave feminism. These publications provide an index—and at times the only documentation—of the activities of the women’s art movement as well as its many iterations and divisions. This article addresses this imbalance, arguing that Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics (1977–1992) was exemplar of the radical political challenge feminism posed to the art world and culture more broadly. Launched in 1977 by the Heresies mother collective, which included Joan Braderman, Mary Beth Edelson, Lucy R. Lippard, Harmony Hammond and May Stevens among others, the magazine had thematic issues edited by different collectives and was comprised of material from an open call. Content ranged from poetry, to academic essays, to artworks both original and reproduced. This article considers the collaborative process of producing the magazine, which attempted to be inclusive, but in fact came to mirror the divisions—as well as political investments—of the broader women’s movement, alongside the dissensus the publication provoked and attempted to confront.     

The autobiographical you: letters in the gendered politics of the labour movement

In this article, I consider the importance of epistolary narratives in the interface of autobiography and politics. In doing this, I read the letters of Fannia Mary Cohn, a Jewish immigrant worker, trade union activist and ardent labour organizer in the garment industry in the USA in the first half of the twentieth century. Cohn was a prolific writer and political activist and left a rich body of labour literature, but never wrote an autobiography or a diary or journal. It is in her letters to her comrades and friends in the labour movement that short autobiographical stories erupt and it is on such stories across her correspondence that this article focuses. The analysis is informed by Hannah Arendt's theorization of narratives in their interrelation with politics and history. Drawing on a rich body of feminist literature around the relational self, what I argue is that an Arendtian reading of epistolary narratives is a useful analytical tool in understanding gendered politics in the diverse histories of the labour movement.     

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.     

Aesthetic self-medication: Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose's structures of breathing

This essay tracks adaptations to corporeal transformations in breathing in the performance art and life writing of Bob Flanagan (1952–1996) and Sheree Rose (b. 1941). It chronicles how breathing as an aesthetic strategy gets entangled with breathing as an exceptional or ordinary effect of disability over the course—and, in Rose's case, in the aftermath—of Flanagan's cystic fibrosis. The term “aesthetic self-medication” describes the process through which breathing is induced as an aesthetic form, and its patterns and rhythms transcribed and dramatized, in order to stage minimally coherent self-encounters amidst crisis. As Flanagan's chronic illness worsens and the couple's sadomasochistic dynamic no longer manages chronic pain, aesthetic self-medication structures laboured breathing into new genres of, or affective and libidinal relations to, pain, including boredom and musical humour.     

Peasants and the redshirt movement in Thailand: some dissenting voices

The ‘redshirt’ movement in Thailand is commonly portrayed in media and scholarly accounts as a class-based, pro-Thaksin social movement that draws fervent support from the poor rural-born masses, especially peasants, in the north and northeast. The movement leaders, including Thaksin, have supposedly won these people's support by framing urban-based political elites as ammart (aristocrats) who have stakes in suppressing the needs of phrai (serfs) – a contrasting label for the rural-born poor. I question this analysis that highlights the polarisation of Thai society along class lines. Combining data from election results and fieldwork in Chiang Mai Province – Thaksin's birthplace and the putative redshirt heartland – I show that despite their relative poverty, some peasants remain cynical opponents of the redshirt movement. They have autonomy to penetrate and reinterpret the redshirts' class-centric collective action frame – a fact that cautions us against linking rural poverty causally to rural support for redshirts. Peasants are a more diverse, politically divided lot than we are led to believe.     

公安院校大学生人文素质状况的调查与思考

建设和谐警营对构建和谐社会、推进公安队伍正规化建设具有十分重要的意义。深入调查公安院校大学生人文素质状况,其目的是寻求公安院校大学生人文素质能力建构模式,开发大学生人文素质教育潜力,丰富和谐警营的文化活动内涵,以提升人民警察的综合素质。     

规范性文件的程序规范——以《广西壮族自治区规范性文件制定程序规定》为例

加强规范性文件的规范具有十分重要的意义,但从《广西壮族自治区规范性文件制定程序规定》来看,目前规范性文件的制定程序中存在着缺乏立项规划、社会公众参与的程度不够、立法听证程序不完善、责任条款过于简化等问题。可通过确立规范性文件规划与立项制度、拓宽社会公众提出法案动议的渠道、建立草案公告评议制度、完善听证程序和强化责任条款等形式来强化规范性文件的制定程序。     

广西利用中国-东盟博览会加快开放发展的战略构想及对策建议

在当今经济全球化和区域经济一体化潮流中,建立中国—东盟自由贸易区使广西的区位优势凸显,而作为推进自贸区建设重要措施的中国—东盟博览会落户南宁,不仅确立了广西在国家对外开放格局中的重要地位,同时也为广西加快开放发展创造了前所未有的重大机遇。在当前和今后一个较长时期内,紧密围绕中国—东盟博览会来扩大对外开放,更多的聚集外部资源,是广西对外开放工作的重点,对广西经济社会发展具有十分重要的战略意义。     

广西地区壮族人群17个STR基因座遗传多态性研究

目的调查广西地区壮族人群17个STR基因座遗传多态性,为法医物证鉴定和群体遗传研究提供基础数据。方法收集2624份广西地区壮族人群无关个体样本采用Chelex-100提取样本DNA,用PowerPlex■18D System试剂盒进行PCR扩增及检测,计算群体遗传学参数。结果17个常染色体STR基因型分布均符合Hardy-Weinberg平衡定律(P>0.05),共检测出235个等位基因,971种基因型,累积个体识别率(TDP)为0.999999999999999,累积非父排除率(CPE)为0.999999772。结论17个STR基因座在广西地区壮族人群中具有较好的遗传多态性,可以用于法医学中个体识别和亲权鉴定,也可用于群体遗传学及法医学研究。     

Cindy Sherman in a New Millennium: Fashion,Feminism, Art and Ageing

ABSTRACT

If feminism and the fashion industry were once seen as adversaries, given how the strictures of Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) permeated so much of second wave feminism, a consideration of ‘fashion’ is now central to contemporary feminist scholarship. But just as the earlier critique of fashion seemed finally to have been supplanted, certain basic arguments around dress and makeup nevertheless resurfaced within contemporary feminism. The current neoliberal climate has led to the ever-increasing consumption of ‘fashionable’ goods, provoking unease and encouraging the contested ‘protectionist discourse’ within feminism to shield young women from just such excesses. Meanwhile, the fashion world itself, arguably more powerful than ever, has across the last twenty years continued a process of legitimising itself through its various modes of alliance with the art world; it has even hijacked elements of feminist practice in the pursuit of publicity. This article suggests that the fashion industry and contemporary feminism are nonetheless alike in one significant respect: neither have properly engaged with the needs of an ageing population. It is an omission that this article will seek to examine through a discussion of the recent ‘portraits‘ of Cindy Sherman, an artist of great interest to feminist scholars, in whose earlier work there was a discernible ‘anti-fashion’ element. Now ‘fashionable’ herself, a leading figure in the global art world, she has collaborated with the fashion industry in rather different ways. Her ‘portraits’ of 2012, in which she reconfigured herself as imaginary Manhattan socialites in or beyond middle age, and a later series, exhibited in 2016, where she appears as a series of ageing, anonymous ‘movie stars’, reveal more general ideological tensions surrounding the representation of women, the ageing process and the fashionable ideal. It is the dissection of these tensions that underpin this article, for while Sherman’s work has been the subject of academic debate across a forty year period, her use and critique of the ‘fashionable ‘ image has not been examined alongside an exploration of the expanding activities of the fashion industry itself; nor have her recent images of ageing women been examined within this more general context.