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In Possession of Weapons: Guns and Violences in the Work of Contemporary Women Artists
Get PDFHow does one position oneself in a world that threatens constantly to destroy one’s ability to live peaceably? To explore this and related issues, the current essay focuses on works by women artists in which guns are pivotal or prominently featured. Yet it is not so much the guns themselves that are of interest here, but the way that in the hands of women artists, they allow us to perceive the frequently unacknowledged multiplicity, obscurity and aleatory workings of violence. Why, when one is in a position to pull the trigger, one would not do so? In tackling these questions, the essay considers how the artists Milica Tomić, Olivia Plender, Maria Kulikovska and Rita Duffy use guns to raise questions about the radically conflicting modalities of violence that are routinely folded into a single term. In such art, the gun – that which so often is used to situate women as passive possessions in need of defence – is now paradoxically positioned. Itself less the focus of analysis, these artists’ guns re, on the one hand, symbolic of the delegation to some and not to others of the right to self-preservation. On the other, they are the very means by which political, sexual and bodily integrity and agency can be restored; the means by which art can strike out at violence with violences of their own.
Drawing in particular on Elsa Dorlin’s work, as well as on classical philosophies of violence, the essay thus considers the question of violent self-defence as an aesthetic, political and somatic counteroffensive. It shows how in the hands of women artists, art emerges not as a routine, representational response to (gun) violence, but as that which has the capacity to generate, to act within and upon a variety of violence(s) in ways that reveal and transform their conditions
How Practising Social Workers Benefit from Teaching Social Work Students in University Classrooms
Get PDFThis paper explores the impact on practising social workers who engage in teaching social work students in a university classroom setting. Using a narrative inquiry approach, focus group interviews were conducted with social workers from three London local authorities to understand how teaching opportunities influence their professional development and practice. The findings reveal that classroom interactions, characterized by dialogical engagement and student curiosity, prompt social workers to reflect on and reconsider established social work knowledge and practices. Teaching in a university environment invites practitioners to develop a revised understanding of their professional identity by enhancing self-reflexive opportunities and by freeing up new ways to think about social work. These insights, often cultivated by students asking unanticipated questions, are taken back to the practitioners’ workplace, potentially leading to shifts in their practice with colleagues and service users. The paper concludes that teaching not only benefits students, but also offers practising social workers unique opportunities for continuous professional development, as university classrooms can foster a dynamic, social constructivist approach to learning
Extracting Witness Evidence in “Cold Case” Investigations: What we Know and What we Need to Learn
Get PDFDespite advances in forensic sciences, there is a significant increase in the number of cases that remain unsolved – cold cases. Cold case investigations present numerous unique challenges above and beyond those of typical (i.e., timely) investigations. In cold cases, witness memory is likely to be weakened substantially due to the historical nature of the incident (e.g., victim of historical sexual abuse), and subject to interference from different sources (e.g., conversations with others, previous interviews). Despite the numerous and challenging barriers present within cold case investigations, researchers have not systematically explored the barriers faced by cold case investigators or the best ways of obtaining detailed and accurate information from witnesses and victims of cold cases. Solving cold cases can prevent perpetrators from committing further crimes, help bring peace to the loved ones of deceased victims, and communicate to living victims that they are not forgotten. Our goal is to generate interest in a program of rigorous experimental and applied work in this neglected field. We also aim to provide preliminary resources and practical considerations for cold case investigators based on current best practices
Remembering the Anthropocene in the Literature of War: Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried
No full textRoundtable Discussion
No full textFor over three decades now Rosalind Gill has played a critical role in steering the direction of feminist media studies. Her scholarship provides a powerful overview of what it has been like for women (and others) to engage with, work in and be represented by media during this time. Her latest book ‘Perfect: Feeling Judged on Social Media’ (Polity, 2023) continues this important work. Drawing on interviews and surveys with over 200 participants, Perfect shows the excruciating pressure that a diverse range of young female and non-binary people feel to live up to the images of perfection they see posted across their social media. Moving beyond the binaries which too often dominate academic discussions of social media use, Gill argues that her participants were quite aware of how social media functioned but felt they could not always escape their insistent demands. In making this argument, the book performs that rare feat of being both theoretically rigorous, ethnographically rich and lucidly accessible beyond academic audiences.
Journal of Gender Studies associate editor, Jamie Hakim chairs a roundtable discussion of the book with four leading media and cultural studies scholars – Akane Kanai, Sean Redmond, Alison Winch and Rachel Wood – on how Perfect has impacted their thinking and research
In the Ruins of Tragedy: Action, Inactivity and Ecology in the Césaires’ Theatre and Thought
No full textLiars, scammers and cheats: con(fident) women and post-authentic femininities on television
No full textIn this paper, we analyze the conjuncture framing the recent rise of media representations of female con artists, looking at two recent examples of the trope on television: Inventing Anna (a fictionalized account of con artist Anna Delvey) and The Dropout (a fictionalized account of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes). We situate the new visibility of women who lie, scam and cheat on television within a set of distinct yet interlocking cultural anxieties: about the “believability” of women’s speech in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement; about the capacities for inauthenticity, artifice, and deception inherent to digital media culture; about the con logics of contemporary global capitalism; and about the pernicious role that white women’s believability plays within everyday operations of white supremacy in the United States. Read through this lens, the “post-authentic” con woman becomes legible as an ambivalent backlash text: a parable that warns about what happens when (white) women are taken at face value and allocated the benefit of the doubt. In a contemporary popular feminist context where women have been implored to be confident, self-assured, and self-possessed “girlbosses”, shows like Inventing Anna and The Dropout reposition the con(fident) woman as a figure of necessary cultural suspicion
Reconsidering sport diplomacy: The 2020/1 Tokyo Olympics and ‘soft-power’
Get PDFThe paper seeks to examine how sport mega-events can be utilized as a form of soft-power to further national unification, nation branding and international relations in the arena of sport diplomacy. Focusing on the 1964 and 2020/1 Tokyo Olympics, the paper critically analyses how the idea of soft power in the 2020/1 Games has become controversial. The paper explores how business oriented top-down Olympic diplomacy creates tensions, and value conflicts about the political, economic, and human life priorities between the organizers and Japanese citizens under the exigencies of the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper also compares the gender discourses employed in the Olympics, since women’s performance in the Olympics can be seen as a vehicle of soft-power. The different gender politics are explored along with the impact of contemporary new media environments which created intensive public engagement about anti-gender inequality. These concerns indicate that the Olympics which are driven by the government and the IOC, no longer function as simple forms of soft-power designed to unify people, rather ‘soft-power’ is mobilized to unite multilateral profit-oriented business stakeholders and enhance the over-commercialized Olympics as well. Hence the question of what the general virtue of the Olympics should be, remains
Φαντασματικές μορφές που σχηματίζονται μέσω σκηνικών οδηγιών και ο κίνδυνος αφανισμού τους εκτός του έντυπου κειμένου [Spectral figures shaped through stage directions and the danger of their elimination beyond the print text]
Get PDFThat Sparkly Feeling: Collective Learning and Exchange in the Feminist Duration Reading Group
Get PDFThis essay considers the Feminist Duration Reading Group (FDRG) as an example of long-term research and engagement within a collective context. Originally written in 2022, and submitted for publication in 2023, the essay considers the first seven years of the FDRG's development. It discusses group’s process, both in terms of the content of meetings and the methodology for sustaining participation. Providing a support structure for research and enquiry, it explores how sessions foster a mood of informality, curiosity and intimacy. It considers how the FDRG seeks both to revitalise movements and ideas that have been excluded from dominant accounts, and to restore texture to feminisms that have reduced to stereotype through retrospective simplification.
Reckitt discusses the importance of reading out loud together in the FDRG as a form of embodied citation, which challenges the citational privilege accorded to politically and culturally dominant voices. Receiving life through the bodies of participants, the process of group reading builds a repertoire of shared citations and references. FDRG collaborator Lucia Farinati characterises this process as “returning text into speech and speech into action [...] which values voice as much as relationality.”
Reviewing public events and behind the scenes organisation from 2015-2022, Reckitt discusses the initial reading groups she convened on Italian feminisms, the 2015 Goldsmiths Art Department research symposium ‘Feminist Duration in Art and Curating,’ and the two week collectively-organised event that culminated the first year, ‘Now You Can Go.’
She reflects on developments with the group’s organising structure and public engagement, including its move from the university to the East London art gallery and studio programme, SPACE - the first of several residencies at non-profit art galleries and centres - in an effort to connect with publics outside the university. She discusses the development of a Working Group and Support Group as a means to formalise means of co-organising, through which individual contributors draw from their strengths, and follow their curiosities, within a long-term, relational structure.
The FDRG’s modest budget and scale, and its emphasis on group exploration, counter prevalent approaches to public programming in the UK, Reckitt suggests, which tend to perpetuate hierarchies between “expert” presenters and “passive” spectators, alongside targeting audiences along pre-existing demographic lines. In contrast, the FDRG supports the emergence of discursive communities, connected by shared commitments and values. The potential for collective learning to stimulate political coappearance and political transformation is beautifully evoked by Paola Melchiori in an article about the feminist pedagogic programme led by Lea Melandri, 150 Hours School, which provided the focus for a 2016 FDRG meeting. “The first striking event is the reawakening of desire, a ‘sparkly feeling’ as one woman defined it, like an awakening.”
Reckitt looks at attempts the group has made to make space for contrary, dissenting voices. “The FDRG’s durational approach entails staying with the trouble, listening to contrary voices and attending to friction and frustration, rather than suppressing them in a search for consensus, however difficult it can be to witness and express conflict.” While acknowledging generational fault lines in feminism, including those concerning race and institutional privilege, she draws on Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s 2019 essay, “Reflections of a Real-Life Feminist Killjoy: Ball-Busters and the Recurring Trauma of Intergenerational Queer-Feminist Life,” which aims to balance critiques of the white dominated women’s movement’s limitations and biases with a recognition of the movement’s historical importance. She cites Wazana Tompkins’ reflection that the women’s liberation established the foundations for feminist and queer futures, even as many of those potentials remain unfulfilled, and her question: “Is it possible to hold all of those things at the same time?”
Touching on other contemporary long-term durational feminist projects, including And Others: The Gendered Politics and Practices of Art Collectives, Women of Colour Index Reading Group, and EMILIA-AMALIA Feminist Working Group, Reckitt aligns the FDRG with their commitment to shared learning and public coappearance. These initiatives, she asserts, hold the potential to counter the pressurised cycle of growth and production that haunts institutional curatorial work. Attesting to the value of durational modes of research and engagement, commissioning and programming, such approaches offer valuable methodologies for ways of reevaluating and activating overlooked ideas and movements. They also counter the academic prestige and value placed on individual authorship and research, versus long-term collective efforts. Recognising and attempting to make space for difference as well as antagonism, the FDRG nurtures the slow process of building mutual recognition and support