Strangeland.

Alexandra Kokoli reviews Tracy Emin's Strangeland, which contains autobiographical writings touching on rape, abortion and marginalization

Crossing borders and other dividers in Western Europe and the British Isles

The task of charting artistic practices informed and motivated by feminism in a designated geographical area may be approached in two seemingly opposed but actually interconnected ways: as a flawed premise that would be in need of dismantling were it not already deconstructed; or as a provocation to entertain its (im)possibilities by attempting to trace rhizomes of shared questions, perspectives and practices. Taking the latter, more positive option surprisingly leads back to the former: the search for common ground reveals vital links and dialogues beyond the European border in a centrifugal spin. This chapter begins with an instance of the fundamental dialogue between European and North American feminisms, proceeds through a consideration of the decentering of gender in feminist art practices, and ends with a multi-lingual performance by a Greek artist on Turkish soil, in which both boundaries and their watery dissolution are put into play

Introduction: looking on, bouncing back.

Feminism Reframed: Reflections on Art and Difference addresses the ongoing dialogue between feminism, art history and visual culture from contemporary scholarly perspectives. Over the past thirty years, the critical interventions of feminist art historians in the academy, the press and the art world have not only politicised and transformed the themes, methods and conceptual tools of art history, but have also contributed to the emergence of new interdisciplinary areas of investigation, including notably that of visual culture. Although the impact of such fruitful transformations is indisputable, their exact contribution to contemporary scholarship and their changing function within the academy remains a matter for debate, not least because feminism itself has changed significantly since the Womens Liberation Movement. Side-stepping facile, vague and/or ideologically suspect formulations like postfeminism, this collection targets the relationships between past and present as well as among different strands of thought; it aims to offer a complex re-evaluation of different strands in feminist thought and practice around art and visual culture since the 1970s, highlighting continuities as well as points of disjunction. The essays in this volume, all previously unpublished, engage with the interpretative and conceptual models fashioned by feminist art history and visual cultural criticism from both historical and theoretical perspectives. The authors, most of whom are early career academics and emergent practising artists, explore the gaps and omissions of established methodologies and prevalent art historical narratives, while also recovering valuable tools and insights that may be redeployed in contemporary contexts and put to new uses. Inspired by the one-day conference Difference Reframed: Reflections on the Legacies of Feminist Art History and Visual Culture (16 September 2006, University of Sussex),1 this is a purposeful selection of considered responses to what the authors view as timely and pressing questions, including: What is the relevance of feminist art history to contemporary scholarship, curating, and art practice? If feminism itself works through/as revision, should second-wave strategies and concerns be further (or newly) revised? What has been the influence of feminist theory”and practice”on key notions like spectatorship, subjectivity, and performativity? Does theory have a history (and vice versa)? What forms do/can feminist politics and practice take

Fetishism and the stories of feminist art.

Feminism in art history finds itself at an interesting intersection. Having long lost its links to activism, and with much of poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory (on which it drew, and which it irreversibly transformed) now seemingly depleted of their radical potential, feminism in art history—and art— takes stock and looks to the future. If the mostly justifiably maligned prefix “post-” before feminism is to be redeemed for the present, it would have to be redefined as an internal break within feminist thinking that allows feminism itself to become the object of historical and theoretical investigations, even revisions

What a girl's gotta do: the labor of the biopolitical celebrity in austerity Britain

This article debunks the widespread view that young female celebrities, especially those who rise to fame through reality shows and other forms of media-orchestrated self-exposure, dodge “real” work out of laziness, fatalism, and a misguided sense of entitlement. Instead, the authors argue that becoming a celebrity in a neoliberal economy such as that of the United Kingdom, where austerity measures disproportionately disadvantage the young, women, and the poor, is not as irregular or exceptional a choice as previously thought, especially since the precariousness of celebrity earning power adheres to the current demands of the neoliberal economy on its workforce. What is more, becoming a celebrity involves different forms of labor that are best described as biopolitical, since such labor fully involves and consumes the human body and its capacities as a living organism. Weight gain and weight loss, pregnancy, physical transformation through plastic surgery, physical symptoms of emotional distress, and even illness and death are all photographically documented and supplemented by extended textual commentary, usually with direct input from the celebrity, reinforcing and expanding on the visual content. As well as casting celebrity work as labor, the authors also maintain that the workings of celebrity should always be examined in the context of wider cultural, social and real economies

Susan Hiller's paraconceptualism.

Exploring the margins of representability, pushing beyond the limits and limitations of retinality, lending a voice to the dead or incorporating oral accounts of anonymous strangers, all conjure the ghostly quality that is typical of both the subject matter and the means and materials of Hiller’s art. Her oeuvre is engaged in an on-going dialogue with psychoanalysis, whose archaeological investigations into the unconscious it mimics in its attempt to unearth censored strata of cultural signification