Accelerated Academy 2019
This post is part of the Accelerated Academy series, you can find all the posts in the series here.
In what ways should graduate students engage in scholarly research and publication, administration, and service during their programs? What might motivate their choices to do so? In this post Anicca Cox presents a video intervention depicting the inherent tensions between the advice given to graduate students and the internalised structures of work in the accelerated academy for early career academics.
Women Work Exhibition 2020
This project was a collaborative one, in which I wrote the catalogue essay for a feminist art show curated by a colleague in the visual arts. Together we presented two panel discussions at two universities and spoke at the opening of the show.
All image rights are property of Allison Beaudry, MFA. Her work can be found here: https://www.allisonbeaudry.com/
Women Work: What Does Feminism Mean to You?
Anicca Cox
Perhaps this question has never been more important, the answers never more contested. Yet, in global-political contexts, in contexts of climate crisis and change, in the contexts of migration and immigration, and in the larger ecologies of late-stage capitalism, critical feminist praxis remains a potent location from which to answer the epistemic and ontological questions of a changing world and a place from which to vision new shared futures for us all.
To do this very work, the artists here push back, and rightly so, against current notions of capitalism and popular feminism which too often distract us with visions of individual liberation, privileging the power of personal identity, branding and career competitiveness over structural change at the expense of our investment in collective liberation movements. The pieces in Women Work call up a wide array of contemporary feminist concerns from the cooptation and exploitation of bodies, identities, histories, and spaces, to the violence of hegemonic borders and boundaries, to embodied relationships to environment and culture, to culturally over-determined notions of womanhood.
By exploring feminist artwork on a continuum from the biological to the embodied, this exhibition moves past solely gender-bound notions of feminism and shares imagery that engages the broadest conceptions of bodily autonomy. Eshrat Efranian’s work conceptualizes and critiques ongoing colonial desires and the violence of physical erasure, considering feminist notions of citizenship. Faith Wilding’s work emerges from her long years of practice regarding the body, reproduction and power, toward environmental grief, loss and memory. Allison Beaudry’s work engages in a struggle against the violence of restrictive and ongoing notions of female intellectual liberation, self-determination and beauty. Griselda Rosa’s pieces take up the concepts of geopolitical borders, bi-nationalism and embodiment through a feminist and cultural lens. Finally, Anna Cain’s archival and organic work accesses the bidirectional axes of the personal and private, in the examination of feminine experience.
Art has long been the territory of feminist work and activism and exists as an especially powerful arena in which to create intersectional, contextualized notions of power, culture, gender, and liberation. As Angela Davis and others demonstrate in their own critical feminist work, much feminist discourse has been focused on white, middle-class notions of womanhood and is therefore, woefully incomplete. Further, as bell hooks and the Combahee River collective assert, much contemporary feminist consciousness has been coopted by capitalism, distorting notions of class, gender and race struggle and their overlapping concerns, preventing coalition amongst feminists.
Therefore, this exhibition makes a powerful visual argument about our collective struggles: we cannot achieve liberation, feminist or otherwise, without considering deeply, a heterogeneity of experience. We cannot have true liberatory action without considering racial equity, environmental preservation, the dismantling of the violence of nations and borders, without considering class and gender struggle, and without looking toward how we might decolonize, how we might grasp self-determination, how we might push back against racist, gendered and nationalistic oppression in all its forms. These are feminist issues. In order to be true to the principles of feminist praxis, this struggle must include us all, make room for each of us, and build from our common desires for liberation.
