Co-Authoring Values

2017

As part of ‘Never the Same: what (else) can art writing do?’ at Calgary Contemporary, Helena Reckitt discussed the Feminist Duration Reading Group which has gathered in London since March 2015 to discover and discuss under-known and under-valued texts, ideas and struggles from outside the Anglo-American feminist canon. Explaining how the group emerged from an interest in the collective exploration of recently-published texts from the Italian feminist movement of the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s – in a reading group that originally took place at Goldsmiths, University of London, before moving to SPACE gallery and studio complex in East London – Reckitt described the group’s key areas of focus. These include: - Italian feminist practices and modes of thinking such as autocoscienza (consciousness raising); emotional and professional withdrawal; non-assimilation; rejection of equal rights rhetoric; relational politics; and practices of affidamento (entrustment). - Legacies of thought, c...

Feminist Review, 2008

Contributions to Political Economy

Political Theory, 2007

This special issue opens with an article by Ellen Mortensen assessing Rita Felski’s (2015) account of critique and her alternative postcritical position. Mortensen focuses on the question of mood and does this from the viewpoint of affirmative affective thinking, paying attention especially to the notion of mood within Deleuzian affect theory. The next two articles give historical interpretations on the formation of feminist epistemologies. With a personal and autobiographical account, Nina Lykke’s article concentrates on dis/identification, ‘cruel optimism’ and everyday utopianism as instances of feminist epistemic habits, but also as structuring themes for feminist thought. Elina Vuola also on her part engages in a re-reading of academic feminism, but from a very different point of view compared to Lykke: Vuola discusses the epistemic habit of exclusion within academic feminism focusing on religious feminisms. In Vuola’s text the critique becomes ‘cure’, ‘correcting’ or reconstructing versions of a particular theoretical development. Three articles deal with feminist epistemic habits of de/constructing dualisms. In order to problematise the binary between poststructuralist and new materialist feminist work, Sari Irni examines as her case study the history of steroid hormones, rethinking the relations between natural sciences and politics. She pays special attention to Helga Satzinger’s (2012) ‘politics of gender concepts’ and suggests that in particular in relation to steroids a feminist critique is required which does not reproduce, but bridge the binary mentioned. Monika Rogowska-Stangret and Malou Juelskjær investigate temporalities and possibilities of thinking through new materialist theorising and concepts in order to examine conditions of the im/possibility of living live-able (learn-able, teach-able, and response-able) academic lives in current political climates. Addressing the temporal ontologies that drive and haunt university life, they deal with the notion of ‘slowing down’ as a response to the ‘fast neoliberal university’. They make visible epistemic habits from the context of our everyday lives and practices and show the challenge in engaging in critique, proposing an ethics of a pace of our own. The third text in the cluster of articles all engaging with the question of dualisms, is written by Liu Xin and deals with another set of binaries, namely both specificity and universality, and unity and plurality discussing especially the question of origin. Based on the (Irigarayan) idea of the impossibility of counting zero, Liu Xin suggests a form of feminist critique similar to what Trinh T. Minh-ha (2016) has named ‘lovecidal’. The last group of articles close in quite different ways around the question of feminist politics and knowledge production. Katariina Kyrölä investigates the knowledge of Black feminist thought in the music videos of Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé through the notion of disidentification, Kyrölä takes feminist criticism as her object in asking what kind of racialised, sexualised and gendered power relations and affects are articulated in the habit of asking: ‘whether the videos and artists are – or are not – feminist or empowering’? In their article about Valerie Solanas’ controversial SCUM Manifesto, Salla Peltonen Mio Lindman and Sara Nyman and read the politics of philosophy as the grammar of patriarchy, claiming that the SCUM Manifesto text has critical, philosophical and political significance they also point to certain difficulties of judgement that characterise feminist and queer critique. Like Kyrölä also the authors of this article highlight the importance of asking ‘non-habitual’ questions, refusing to apply a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ in reading Solanas, but considering the Manifesto as a highly relevant, queer philosophical text. In addition to the articles the special issue contains two separate interviews with Robyn Wiegman and Heather Love on current debates about critique and postcritique, addressing especially the question of epistemic habits. Assessing the state and status of critique in feminist, gender and queer studies Wiegman and Love both historicise and contextualise the ongoing debates. They address the impact of neoliberalism, and the changing academic practices, linking it to personal investments. Furthermore, they also reflect on the psychoanalytical and affective aspects of critique. Considering habitual gestures and habits of feminist academic knowledge production, and the questions, reflections, viewpoints and thoughts expressed and discussed in the published texts, that we think are particularly important within current feminist analysis, we hope that this special issue contribute to the surely intensifying debate about contemporary critique/postcritique.

Journal of American Folklore, 1992

Studies in Social Justice, 2024

In this paper we reflect upon our multi-year reading group as a site of decolonial feminist praxis that motivates reading in a different register from how we were trained to read as academics in the humanities. In collaborative study we willingly open ourselves to change, to being worked on by one another and by the texts we read. Our reading together has initiated the undoing of settler colonial academic subjectivity and the co-creation of new forms of scholarly subjectivity grounded in relations of care, openness to transformation, and a growing commitment to epistemic justice. In giving an account of our group history and process we reflect on our complicities with settlercolonialism in the university and consider the ways that reading together has cultivated our capacities to listen to counter-narratives, formulate institutional and self critique, and engage in epistemic reparations.

2009

This dissertation offers a comprehensive study of the fiction of bestselling Chilean writer Marcela Serrano, in order to interrogate her discursive feminist praxis, and to analyze its efficacy in terms of its reception among a sample of women readers by means of a reader-response survey. It is my contention that Serrano's texts may be described and analyzed as a praxis of consciousnessraising sought through the articulation of a bond of reading between writer and women readers, and among women readers themselves.