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In the late 1960s and 1970s, women artists in the United States and Britain began to make texts and images of writing central to their visual compositions. This book explores the feminist stakes of that choice. It analyses how Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly worked with the visual dimensions of language to transform how women are perceived. To illuminate the specific ways in which these artists and writers contribute to the production of a feminist imaginary, Part I charts the correspondences between the artwork of Piper and the writings of Davis. It analyses the artwork she created in the late 1960s and 1970s, when she began using text to create artwork that moves between what Piper identifies as 'the singular reality of the "other."' Davis's writing exposes the fictions animating projections that the black female body is perceived to be a malleable ground upon which fears and fantasies can take visual form. Part II focuses on aggression and traces how its repression plays out across Spero's Codex Artaud and Solanas's SCUM Manifesto. It argues that in Post-Partum Document, texts and pieces of writing become fetish objects that Kelly arranges into visual and linguistic 'poems' that forestall a confrontation with loss. Part III demonstrates that the maternal femininity thought to naturally inhere in woman is also restricted and muffled, quite efficiently repressing the possibility that women could address each other across maternal femininity's contested terrain.
the texts of aggression collectivities that put anger at the forefront of their interventions.9 In her film I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), director Mary Harron portrays Solanas (played by Lili Taylor) as a lone symbol of the lesbian feminist with a coarse appearance and an unruly revolutionary passion that denizens in Warhol’s Factory dismissed with disgust. Harron’s film is drawn on extensively here, deployed as a cinematic argument that asserts Solanas’s place in the feminist imaginary.10 Harron creates a counterpoint to Solanas’s status as a visual and sexual
the frame of appearance. At the same 268 Conclusion time, they demonstrate that the sign woman cannot be completely dismantled or imagined anew. Its histories mediating relations among masculine subjects are too long and entrenched, for one thing, and its internalisation has been too pervasive and thorough. It is through the spaces between visibility and invisibility that these artists address viewers and ask them to become readers of the visual histories they have inherited and thereby contribute a feminist imaginary in which other definitions of woman can come
Bordering intimacy is a study of how borders and dominant forms of intimacy, such as family, are central to the governance of postcolonial states such as Britain. The book explores the connected history between contemporary border regimes and the policing of family with the role of borders under European and British empires. Building upon postcolonial, decolonial and black feminist theory, the investigation centres on how colonial bordering is remade in contemporary Britain through appeals to protect, sustain and make family life. Not only was family central to the making of colonial racism but claims to family continue to remake, shore up but also hide the organisation of racialised violence in liberal states. Drawing on historical investigations, the book investigates the continuity of colonial rule in numerous areas of contemporary government – family visa regimes, the policing of sham marriages, counterterror strategies, deprivation of citizenship, policing tactics, integration policy. In doing this, the book re-theorises how we think of the connection between liberal government, race, family, borders and empire. In using Britain as a case, this opens up further insights into the international/global circulations of liberal empire and its relationship to violence.
. It adds another textual layering Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, dir. Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. The Sphinx and Oedipus. to the film and contributes to the destabilisation of the image. Across the arc of Riddles, the voice becomes part of the film’s efforts to reimagine maternal femininity as it moves from the enclosed world of maternal domesticity, to the public worlds of work, and the possibility of writing a feminist imaginary. After this depiction of the Sphinx questioning the order of
identify, feminists had to intervene at the level of the imaginary and expand the forms of recognition offered to women by writing a woman other than the patriarchal sign of woman. This is precisely what the artwork of Piper, Spero, and Kelly began to make possible. While Lacan’s work identifies what the artists and writers of this book worked to undo, Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) – which I understand as the writing of a feminist mirror stage – illuminates what they wanted to create: a feminist imaginary, a virtual site in which women can recognise
into a malleable but clear tool that can defend against such racist and sexist distortions, Davis wrote a radical new text of female empowerment, one that makes black feminist collectivities central to the feminist imaginary. While Davis’s work documents the particular challenges black women faced exposing and rewriting the sign woman and its heavily policed Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis connection to white femininity, it also resonates with the work of Spero and Solanas, two white women who defied accusations of monstrosity by writing against the
femininity to become a part of a feminist discourse in which women can participate in the project of displacing fixed images of women’s subordination and draw upon the aesthetic imagination to write images that would allow women to recognise themselves differently. Every section in PPD is an address to viewers to rewrite the vision of maternal femininity they inherit and question the sense of fullness maternal femininity is expected to give. Through this address, which Kelly’s collaboration with Mulvey exemplifies, PPD begins to direct women to create feminist imaginaries