The Department at Tate Modern, 30th September 2016

The Department of Feminist Conversations gave a talk on the theme of ‘exchange’ as part of The Give & Take, a festival of talks, discussions and mini-panels curated by the artist Tim Etchells at Tate Modern, London, on Friday 30 September 2016. Below are the rough notes and collection of quotes to which we refered during our 45-minute session.

Introduction

• The Department of Feminist Conversations is the name that Maddy, Diana and Mary are giving to the work we’re doing together, which we hope will be a productive and collective way of continuing the work we each do alone.
• We are all writers who work in relation to the fields of art, performance, theatre and feminism.
• We are all interested in writing that challenges conventional forms of knowledge, and leads to questions like how we communicate & why.
• We’re aware of our limitations as a group: we are all white, middle-class, arts-educated mothers. We’re interested in having conversations across difference. And about how we can have those conversations well — how to have ‘articulate power’, in the words of Audre Lorde.

Structure:

1. What is the problem? (Specifically, with the exchange of knowledge between 2nd wave feminisms and contemporary feminisms?)

2. What has writing got to do with it? (how does writing function as language of exchange and what does it affect? why do we practice it?)

3. What next? (What kinds of exchange might come next, and how?)

Notes for further intro

• The Department of Feminist Conversations is an intervention into contemporary criticality that seeks to broaden conversations about life and art through the perspective of contemporary feminisms.
• As writers of and about performance, we’re interested in working from art as a symbolic and material terrain that both represents and influences cultural concerns; and work with criticality, as a plural, collective engagement.

Exchange (Diana)

Exchange is the act of giving one thing and receiving another

Giving up versus giving away

An occurrence in which people direct something at each

The act of giving something to someone and them giving something at each other

An exchange is public and private, singular and collective

An exchange is an action

An exchange is a process

This is about forms of exchange or rather

What is between exchange, or of exchange

Or rather,

Structures of exchange

From Tim Etchells, about his residency at Tate:

Bunched under the name The Give & Take my residency explores the idea of exchange in different spheres of life, work and society; the complex processes by which we teach and learn from each other, the systems we are caught in that both frustrate and make possible our connection. The work itself is constructed as an exchange — a framework of events that’s built to encourage conversations, meetings, arguments, encounters between members of the public, artists and thinkers.

Thoughts and questions:

1. What’s the problem?

• The tensions that underpin discussions between second and third wave feminism, and our own relationships to them
• Radical feminism at odds with second wave — which got housewife-mothers out of the house and into the workplace — that instead seeks to smash the family AND the workplace;
• Our own introductions to feminisms: our mother’ feminisms, riot grrrl, performance art…Idea that second wave fighting for equality — but whose equality? On whose terms? What framework? Leaving whom behind?
• Second wave made it possible for us to go to school — but becoming mothers/older women, also became aware of its limitations.
• Feeling caught between generations: our fight not the same as that of our elders, but also not the same as that of younger feminists. How to engage dialogue across those apparent divides?

2. What’s writing got to do with it?

• Writing is a way of communicating through language, and the languages that we use affect the things that we can say.
• For each of us, our interest in writing has led naturally to an interest in big questions like Why do we communicate? How do we communicate? Who do we communicate with?
• Writing as the hammer that will do that smashing of the family AND the workplace.
• Why is writing important, what permanency does it have? What potentials? What makes it possible to question the assumptions of authority in language?

3. What next?

• The structures/ideologies that underpin discourse and debate
• Jennifer Doyle’s brilliant work on emotion and feeling in contemporary art - dealing with difficulty as an acknowledgment of our responses that take the private into the public
• Rebecca Solnit — telling different stories about people/ bringing love into the public domain
• Jacqueline Rose — living with uncertainty
• Our own commitment to writing about performance, and through feminist lens.
• Amplification: Dolan specifically writing about overlooked women performance artists/playwrights, women writing on TV whose names might not be noticed in the credits// Obama staffers.
• Whose voices could we amplify? Who could be part of this conversation? Who is and isn’t coming into Tate Modern?

Mish Gregor, residency/ peformance in which groups of women invited to write speeches for the last night of patriarchy:

“A SPEECH TO THE SECOND WAVE OF FEMINISM:

RADICAL CHANGE CANNOT HAPPEN THROUGH ART. The radical is extreme. Profound. Constitutional. RADICAL change cannot happen through art.

Even if we speak our anger until we are blue in the face. Even if we give words to the unspoken. Even if we listen to the stories of the sick and the mistreated, the raped and the drowned. The ghosts of the murdered, the wronged, the spat on, the stupid. The expressions of those without voice or the speeches of them who were silenced.

Radical change cannot happen through art. And it never has. You thought radical change could happen. You wandered around with your subversive haircuts and your mildly impressive physical theatre skills. You waved some banners around. You yelled at the world and then others applauded.

Well thanks a lot, wom-yn. Not only did you fail, but you filled my generation with false dreams.”

Jacqueline Rose on masculinity (in the wake of the Brexit vote)

It is the curse of masculinity that men are expected to shed any sign of vulnerability, to hold themselves erect as they strut across the world’s stage, above all behave as if they have always, with no flicker of doubt, believed in themselves.

And it is a curse of male-dominated politics […] that it tends to be the kiss of death for a politician to suggest things are uncertain. It is rarely wise to say that what we most need to do in political life, indeed not only political life, is hesitate, slow down and pause for thought; to allow space for the complexity of who we are. As Edward Said pointed out, there is only a short distance between believing you can subdue the mind and believing you can subdue the world.

Glosswitch on the mother/ work divide

Care work is not oppression; it is life. An end to gender roles does not mean we get to be the people we always knew we could be, all the time. All of us should be carers, whether we want to or not.

It’s not a truth with which I am particularly comfortable. … Even so, I find that I, too, am one of “those” women. Female, a mother, a person, connected to other people. That is how it has to be.

Audre Lorde on being able to speak, in Learning From the 60s:

As a black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage, there was usually some part of me guaranteed to offend everybody’s comfortable prejudices of who I should be. That is how I learned that if I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive. My poetry, my life, my work, my energies for struggle were not acceptable unless I pretended to match someone else’s norm. We needed articulate power, not conformity.

Audre Lord on poetry:

For women, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. … As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualisation of any meaningful action.

Chris Kraus on writing:

To be female still means being trapped within the purely psychological. . . . Because emotion’s just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form. . . . If women have failed to make ‘universal’ art because we’re trapped within the ‘personal,’ why not universalize the ‘personal’ and make it the subject of our art?

Andrea O Reilly on Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born:

On that hot afternoon in July reading Of Woman Born I saw my life for the first time as it was and not as I wished or imagined it to be. … I had convinced myself and the world at large that I was a modernist, feminist mom who was content with and in control of her life. Reading Rich I was forced to see and name my oppression as a mother; as well, it gave me permission to feel angry. I also remember feeling a huge surge of relief — I was not the only woman who railed against motherhood and, at times, her children. […]

Jill Johnson on language/writing:

“Beginning 1959, I wrote serious dance and art criticism for the Village Voice. Gradually from the mid-1960s on, after cracking up and then somehow losing or misplacing my former life, I subverted my arts coverage, turning the space allotted me into a personal chronicle, adventure story, travelogue, confessional romance, anecdotal assemblage, bully pulpit or soapbox, and experimental writing outlet. … My whole mission was to mongrelize the language, deform and debase every convention, create a freak of culture, engender a misbegotten blot on the authorial landscape. In addition to lower casing and deparagraphing, thieving quotes, standardising the non-sequitur, decontextualising narrative and glorifying the neologism, I enjoyed writing unpunctuated run-on sentences, and habitually twisting grammatical norms and common usage. … A serious defection from society was involved.”

Context: Jill Johnston writing for Village Voice in 60s/up to mid-70s when became a more commercial operation. The “serious defection” she names was coming out as lesbian: shifted her relationship to the hetero unit, the marriage, and allowed her clearer sense of it as structure underpinning capitalist patriarchy.

Jill Dolan on feminist criticism:

“Culture is not an innocent preoccupation. Television, films, theatre productions and performances, and other representational expressive media both shape and reflect who we are to ourselves and to one another. We learn from seeing in performance how gender and race relations are embodied and enacted. … Feminist criticism, then, participates in an activist project of culture-making in which we’re collectively called to see what and who is stunningly, repeatedly evident and what and who is devastatingly, obviously invisible in the art and popular culture we regularly consume for edification and entertainment.”

Rebecca Solnit on the place of love in public life:

There are other loves. But we have little language for them.

[…]

What if a vision of a better world or just, say, a better transit system is a legitimate passion? What if your sense of self is so vast that your well-being includes these broad and idealistic engagements? Oscar Wilde asked for maps of the world with utopia on them. Where are the maps of the human psyche with altruism, idealism, and even ideas on them, the utopian part of the psyche, or just the soul at its most expansive? […]

The world is much larger, and these other loves lead you to its vastness.

Obama staffers & amplification — from article in Washington Post by Juliet Eilperin:

“When President Obama took office, two-thirds of his top aides were men. Women complained of having to elbow their way into important meetings. And when they got in, their voices were sometimes ignored.

So female staffers adopted a meeting strategy they called “amplification”: When a woman made a key point, other women would repeat it, giving credit to its author. This forced the men in the room to recognize the contribution — and denied them the chance to claim the idea as their own.”