Abstracts 2024

Panel 1: The Possibilities of Feminist Self-expression

Lizzie Merrill: Towards a collaborative analysis of artwork and metaphor

Through my paper, I would like to engage Sisterhood in a collaborative discussion around artmaking and metaphor. I will begin with an introduction to my PhD project, which analyses the ways in which visual images and visual narratives can express the embodied experiences of people who have had cancer. My research focuses on Jo Spence’s The Final Project (1991-2) and the visual outcomes of a workshop based on Spence’s methods, held with participants. Following a brief overview of my methodologies, I will outline some of the common symbols and metaphors that have been presented across the artworks. The collage maker as a kind of surgeon is a primary theory that I am developing from Sabine T. Kriebel’s writing on the artist John Heartfield. Additionally, the symbolisms of patient as plant and surgeon as gardener are recurring across the works and can be expanded on interestingly through engagement with the writings of Matthew Hall and Michel Foucault. 

Once I have introduced my project and its most current ideas, I will invite the room to reflect on their own memories of illness, hospitalization, artmaking, empowerment and bodily autonomy as well as how these thoughts might have been represented or triggered by the artworks in my project. 

Daisy McManaman: “I’m a Barbie Girl” Exploring the complications and contradictions of Barbie’s construction of femininity

As a cultural shorthand for femininity, Barbie represents the multitude of complicated, and, at times, contrasting ideas placed upon women (Lord, 1994). This paper considers feminist critique of Barbie as both a site for empowerment, as well as perpetuating damaging patriarchal beauty standards and hegemonic femininities, and how these are reflected and utilised within Barbie (2023). Through auto-ethnographic writing and art-making that explores my personal relationship to Barbie as a hyper-feminine queer collector of Barbie, as well as through feminist analysis of Barbie and her representations of femininity, this paper considers how Barbie can be utilised as a source of personal queer joy as well as serve as a reminder of the endless possibilities of femininity and gender play.

Alice Myers: The power of the personal in influencer culture: considering feminist scholarship on confession.

Confession has a longstanding history that spans religion, law, psychoanalysis, literature and culture. While confession is not exclusive to a specific genre or medium, it is often associated with autobiographical writing such as autobiography, diaries and letters. Women’s engagement with confession, which I understand to be a mode of expression or feeling, is complex. Sharing personal narratives has long been a means for women to produce alternative knowledge, build communities, and to generate collective political action. Confession can therefore be a site of collaboration, exchange and support. But, confession is also negatively associated with triviality and can entrap women’s work in the ‘merely personal’.

Developments in digital technologies, particularly social media, have facilitated the easy and instantaneous sharing of one's experiences, thoughts and opinions with a potentially global audience. In many ways, this has made confession ubiquitous in contemporary life. Yet, the things we share online are fundamentally part of an economy, in which ‘the personal’ is an incredibly valuable product. This means that those willing to share their personal lives and who have the requisite technical skills and know-how to manoeuvre social media environments may be able to craft lucrative careers from online self-representation. No figure has recognised and grasped this more so than ‘the influencer’. In this paper, I will briefly outline feminist debate regarding the value of personal confessional narratives for women, to foreground why the notion of confession warrants consideration in the context of contemporary influencer culture.

Panel 2: Feminist Adventures in 'World'-Travelling

Yang Wu: 'Wave' in feminist histories: narrative, time, space and ‘world’-travelling

Originally invented in the 1960s to make sense of feminist movements in the US, ‘wave’ metaphor has got large-scale circulation around the world since the late 1970s for its theorising of the shifting concerns of feminist movements in different periods (Valassopoulos, 2004). Keeping challenging the male-dominant historical writing tradition, ‘wave’ metaphor becomes a dominant narrative of feminist histories in various geographies. Using the case of Chinese feminism, this paper first maps out some incompatibilities between the mainstream ‘first-second-third’ wave discourse and Chinese feminist histories. (Arguably) successfully (re)constructing women as historical subjects and taking up space in historical narrative, nowadays the ‘waves’ metaphor is (1) used as a global historical narrative and (2) implies a linear model of time and (3) a territorial model of space which are in accordance with the colonial modernity project. I suggest considering the potential of spatial conceptualisation of feminist histories that sees feminist histories as co-existing, open-ended, and ever-changing worlds. Histories, the collection of these numerous waves/worlds, are connected by us, the playful world-travellers, recognising not only the plurality, complexity, and futurity of the histories and archives, but also those of our own time and efforts. 

Alice Flinta: All the things we gain: Self-translation and Translingual. Empowerment in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Writings in Italian 

Offspring to the fields of comparative literature and postcolonial studies, the last 20 years of transnational literary research have given space and prominence to concepts such as “migrant literature”, “migrant writers”, “second-generation migrants”, “hybridity”, translation and “born translated”, “third space”. The emphasis on the losses, whether cultural or linguistic, that happen within these settings of mobility and transculturation remains nonetheless strong. Similarly, thinking binarily – in or out, belonging or non-belonging, integration or exclusion – still pervades academic discourses on the matter. In fact, transnational literary conversations heavily rely on, for example, discourses on the losses translation entails, or the relationships of pain and longing for their homelands migrant authors depict. On the contrary, it should be hoped that the concept of “third space” Indian scholar Homi Bhabha introduced in the early 2000s, take ontological and epistemological directions, through which transnational authors would be able to escape, and create escapes from, binary ways of thinking about and classifying of literature and its creators.

In this paper presentation, transnationalism is seen as a concept that enriches and expands our patterns of thinking instead of emphasising all the pieces that get lost through mobility. I illustrate this by analysing translingual Bengali-American author Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel In Other Words (2015), which is the first one she published in Italian after a series of successful publications in English. Lahiri’s relationship with the Italian and English languages opens up conversations about self-translation but also self-construction in foreign tongues and demonstrates that beyond the losses that are claimed to be ever present in any form of migration, in transnational settings the potential for empowerment and expansion of one’s sense of self prevails. 

Charlotte Oakes: ‘Frauen hört, hört das Hexengeflüster’*: The casting of sensory connections between the Neue Frauenbewegung and a transnational network of feminist witches.

In 1981 the witch Bellacastra invited women to join her Walpurgis Night celebration in Kassel, West Germany. The invitation is bordered with images typically associated with witchcraft: the black cat, pointy hat and broomstick, and promises a chance to

experience ‘witches’ cuisine’, spellcasting and music. Bellacastra’s celebration thus promised to be a feast for the senses.

Bellacastra was not the only witch to exist in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany). From the late 1970s onwards, the Neue Frauenbewegung (the FRG’s feminist movement) developed a strand of spiritualist feminism. These feminists viewed the witch as an emancipatory symbol; a woman free from the confines of patriarchal oppression. In fact, across the Western and Eastern hemispheres, several contemporary feminist movements similarly discovered the political potential of feminist witchcraft.

This paper connects the spiritualist strand of the Neue Frauenbewegung to a global network of feminist witches whose transnational ties successfully navigated the issue of linguistic divides. Contemporary witchcraft could tackle linguistic issues because, at its core, was the intersection between feminist politics and sensory experience. This paper will connect the five senses (sight, smell, sound, touch and taste) with alternate modes of cultural production utilised by West German feminist witches and their international counterparts. The sense of sight, for example, encourages analysis of how West German feminists used witch imagery to convey feminist politics. Similar images, easily transferable due to their lack of words, can be found in media produced by different national feminist movements. The categories of taste and smell allow an investigation into how herbal remedies were used by West German and North American feminists to respond to healthcare issues in their respective national political systems. By focusing on the products of West German feminist witchcraft, this paper aims to shed light on how sensory experience allowed a global feminist network to blossom across language barriers. 

*Women listen, listen to the witches’ whisperings’