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, cultural activity and political practice inspired by, and in alliance with, Italian feminist practices, including the tactics of Human Strike articulated by Claire Fontaine.
- Broadening and contesting historic feminist understanding of gender binaries.
- Reorienting feminist critical, artistic and activist genealogies away from those rooted into practices dominated by, or implicitly, white or Anglo-American.
Describing the group's operations, Reckitt described its emphasis on reading texts out loud, rather than expecting participants to read texts in advance, as a way of breaking down the difference between ‘experts’ and ‘novices.’
She outlined the group’s commitment to the durational work of maintaining queer feminist histories which, in the words of art historian Amelia Jones, “reactivates them by returning them to process and embodiment — linking the interpreting body of the present with the bodies referenced or performed in the past [...].”
She also noted how the group nonetheless attempts to heed the cautionary advice of Gayatri Spivak in The Politics of Translation (1996), resisting too easy a notion of translation; trying not to iron out differences in context across time, place, culture, and language; and not being overly constrained or pre-determined by earlier positions and perspectives.
Reckitt noted that she had some concerns about how the current emphasis on discursive and ephemeral arts programming can result in non-production of lasting documents, like exhibition catalogues, which enable feminisms to be transmitted to subsequent generations.
Nonetheless, she emphasised the valuable role that the Group plays in putting time and space aside for feminism, and giving time for feminists to work together in a spirit of exchange. The emphasis on temporality, she noted, extends to the latent potential of earlier feminisms that were overlooked, under-valued, or stereotyped when they first emerged
