VISUALISING THE FEMINIST IMAGINARY
ROOM TWO:
STORYING
ROOM THREE:
RUPTURING
TEAM
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Team
Darlene Clover
Suriani Dzulkifli
Nabila Kazmi
Kathy Sanford
Visualising the Feminist Imaginary is an initiative of the Gender Justice, Creative Pedagogies and Arts-Based Research Group, housed in the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, Canada.
Visualising the Feminist Imaginary is created on the lands of the Lekwungen peoples that today are known as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations, and the W̱SÁNEĆ peoples, all which have a historical and ongoing relationship with these lands. We are grateful to the communities of the local Peoples and Nations to be able to live, learn, play, and work on these lands including creating this virtual exhibition.
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Curatorial Statement
Central to feminist adult education is a belief in the subversive power of the imagination. We speak collectively of the need to encourage our abilities to imagine and to inspire an imagination of possibility. Without the ability and power to imagine the world for ourselves, we are subject to the problematic imaginings of others. Being able to imagine the world differently gives substance and form to our own experiences and enables us to visualise and speak to the world we want.
The imagination and the power and right to imagine was the starting point for a group of feminist adult educators, researchers, artists, curators and activists from Canada, Malaysia, England, Italy, Portugal and India who came together in an online forum in February 2021 to discuss how their diverse aesthetic engagements, studies and practices work to encourage a feminist imagination of possibility. A specific task was to articulate through an item, object, artefact or belonging what each of us meant or understood by the ‘feminist imaginary’.
Visualising the Feminist Imaginary is a virtual exhibition that captures the diversity and complexity of both our items and reflections.
REMEMBERING
Matriarchy
By Dorothea Harris (Coast Salish)
On my journey of higher education, I have had opportunities to share cultural knowledge and teachings that I have received from my Snuneymuxw family and the surrounding Coast Salish communities. I am always reticent, however, because I don’t want to share a teaching that I do not have permission to share, that do not belong to my family or are private and sacred. One day I asked my Dad, William Good, if I had permission to share something and he responded, “We are matriarchal, you know.” I asked him again and he said, “You’re an Elder now, you know.” This was his way of saying that as a woman in our family, and not a particularly young woman anymore, I had the authority to teach and share.
The object I am sharing is the headpiece of my regalia. It was made for me, with similar ones for my two sisters, to wear at a public event celebrating the raising of a totem pole carved by my Dad at Vancouver Island University in 2019. The headpiece was woven by my daughter in the traditional weaving style of the Coast Salish peoples and represents the aesthetic work of Indigenous women that had taken place in this territory for centuries, was disrupted by colonisation, and is now being revitalised. The frontlet, a split-headed eagle, is our family crest and was carved my Dad, a hereditary Chief. It signifies the matriarchal role and responsibility held by his three daughters.
This headpiece, while a beautiful piece of aesthetic work on its own, activates the feminist imaginary for me. It symbolises thousands of years of Indigenous knowledge and wisdom that has been passed down through matrilineal lines, and my responsibility to not only access and revitalise those teachings in my own life, but to share them with future generations.
Corners around the world
By Nabila Kazmi (India)
There is a corner in my home
There are so many such corners in different parts of this planet I call home
It’s a place women hang these pieces of clothing they often cover themselves with
It’s the place my mother runs to at the knock on the door, a ring of the bell or before she steps out
“Cover up”, they demand
“It’s a sign of respect”, they justify
Such corners meet at the intersections of the walls of patriarchy
Collectively uprooting these corners is what to me is feminist activism
The Ragged Elastic
By Lauren Spring (Canada)
This is a hair elastic I have worn every day for more than three years... either on my wrist or in my hair. It's both ragged and resistant. I grabbed it at the last minute while hobbling out the door to give birth at the hospital on 27 February 2018 and it held my sweat-drenched hair out of my eyes during the most agonising and powerful hours of my life as I laboured my daughter earth-side. It is the only ‘accessory’ I have worn since her birth as I no longer have the time or the energy to think about earrings or necklaces that she would tug at anyway.
Her birth re-ordered my universe and sent me searching for new definitions and examples of beauty that we don't see on billboards. For me, this is a key part of the feminist imaginary--turning away from clichéd and consumer-driven ideas of what we ought to look like, wear, care about, or spend time and money ‘perfecting’. This simple scruffy hair elastic is also covered in my hair that fell out in clumps post-partum and turns increasingly gray each day. Perhaps I do not need to search for these new definitions of beauty, but surrender into them instead?
It is an elastic and when pulled, it returns to some semblance of its former self. But parts of it are stretched in irreparable ways. It ‘bounces back’ into a much more interesting shape than it held three years ago. This elastic also serves as a belt for stuffed animals, a magnifying glass when we play explorers, or as in my image, a fire pit for my daughter’s ‘playmobils’. This is part of the feminist imaginary for me too - heightening and exploring what we have on hand; using creativity to transform something concrete, every day, and seemingly unremarkable into countless other things.
REMEMBERING
Donne è bello
By Gaia Del Negro (Italy)
The magazine in this image was printed in Milan in 1972 by the feminist collective Anabasi. My mother gave it to me although I cannot remember the exact circumstances. For many years I lived anaesthetised, disconnected from perception and emotion. I was the good girl without desire. At some point after completing my PhD, I felt angry that I had thrown away so many objects that evoked sad memories.
I put this magazine in a frame to celebrate women’s struggle to live and thrive in a disenchanted, disembodied, anaesthetised and patriarchal society. Another reason was to salvage it from my own rage. I come from a fragmented family with a migratory background that did not belong in the big city because we had other dialects and other ways of knowing.
My mum was the only person in the extended family who held a degree… and in Philosophy! I had an idyllic but in fact very competitive relationship with her. It took me a long time to begin to change this narrative. My mother made her way in a difficult city and became a teacher of Italian for foreigners and a journalist writing about relationships and children’s books in ways that disrupted clichés about mother and womanhood. She was also one of only a few divorcees in the early 1990s, how tough was her struggle?
The feminist imaginary to me means learning more versions of the stories and the discourses we live by, as well as practising hope. Since I started teaching Italian from home (I recently took up mum’s professional legacy), foreign students ask me about Donne è bello. She comes from “Black is Beautiful” motto of the 1960s Black American movement. Donne è bello means learning my own story in relation to all circumstances that shape our lives and our struggles for beauty and freedom.
Actually, Pearls Are a Girl’s Best Friend
By Tracey Murphy (Canada)
I have a habit of reaching up, and holding the strands around my neck. Dreaming.
My grandmothers made things up.
Of course, they made up gorgeous dishes of food, made up hand knitted sweaters and
stretched out mittens for my small hands.
But best were their stories, made up or not, only a woman knows her own stories.
One, a leftover from the colonial empire. Japan was her first home.
Daughter of an ex-pat-scotch-importing-theatre loving man.
The hunger of internment never ceased to haunt her,
The minute a bomb laid bare the black earth of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
They fled, as she tucked strands of pearls into the lining of her coat.
She arrived to Seattle, held over in a jail packed with prostitutes,
As a suspect terrorist, with babes tucked under her arms.
Told to me through bubbles of laughter, and laments of affection for the women.
When the table filled again, white creamy sauces and Remy Martin,
she pulled apart the threads of her coat,
frayed from uncertainty, and found her pearls.
My other, born into Irish poverty, brought over on boats to Montreal,
ground down her nails and hands into gnarled trees.
I would run my hands along the crevices, then travel up her arms in soft caresses,
Listening to her stories: humid creaky stoops, small crowded rooms, hand pulled washing machines, insistent chimes of a Catholic priests,
These sounds would crowd up my thoughts as she talked.
Back then, she would pinch her children,
To stay away from the rapids of the St. Lawrence.
While my grandfather climbed up and down buses, day by day, lunch box in hand,
Then the day he climbed past the confines of class,
From the pay of an honest day work and shadowy dealings in backstreet bars,
My grandmother received pearls.
I keep those pearls warmed, by my skin.
My neck covered by strands of stories.
Broken workings
By Laura Formenti (Italy)
A cogwheel in the ruins of a windmill, broken mechanisms still there, scattered on the ground, chewed by insects, mute witnesses of my grand-grandmother’s life. A broken life. For so long, Cati has been a mystery to me. The centrpiece of a family legend, half-true, half-made up, rusted by shame and sorrow. The symbol of what a mother should NOT be. She left her unwanted child to another woman, far from home. He was illegitimate and she was a sinner: a woman should not have children out of marriage. A woman should not have sex with a Catholic priest. Was it love? Was Cati abused? Mystified? He was very powerful and rich. Not a country priest.
But she loved the child. Cati refused to leave him to the orphanage, next to the hospital where unfit mothers gave birth in solitude. She found a good mother to raise him and followed his life path at a distance. And yet, he and his family created the negative myth of the abandoning mother. She was to be blamed and the secret of his birth protected at all costs.
I started my pilgrimage into family memories realising that my interest in ‘neglecting’ mothers had deep roots in my unconscious, in my own struggles to be a mother. Doing an autoethnographic study, I went to the village and I was introduced to an old man who had been a child there. He told me: “Cati always had a candy in her pocket and a caress for me, she was kind to all children, as she was longing for her own. Your grandad came here, once, a young man, to take her away but she did not want to go. She belonged here”. I cried. We cried together.
STORYING
Small thing of unquantifiable value
By Silvia Luraschi (Italy)
My chosen evocative object is a picture that I made while one of my walks. The photograph shows a snail touched by my index finger.
I always had an interest in photography because taking a photograph helps me to stop and observe/listen to what's around me. At the same time, I use walking in my research as a sensitive method for considering the walking body immersed in a sensory experience of a place.
During the pandemic I felt the need to get closer to nature, so every day I have gone out to walk in the meadows near home, in a suburb of Milan. Here, out of the bustle of business and fashion city, I contacted the agricultural origin of this place. Step by step, day by day, I have recognized how pressing in me the demands of the capitalist and performance society. In fact, touching the snail with the finger of my hand with extreme delicacy, I realized that, for so long, I haven’t had the chance to go slowly and take a rest. In that moment, I perceived my whole life situated in a disrupted unsustainable ecology. It was an epiphany! A small thing as a snail reminded me of something of unquantifiable value, i.e., the possibility to take me time and go slowly.
In conclusion, I would like to be part of a community of researchers that encourage all in the group to take time to feel and listen from Nature, otherness, as well as self, for illuminating interconnections and interdependencies between Nature and living beings.
Extended visions
By Suriani Dzulkifli (Malaysia/Canada)
I look but don’t ‘see’
Photography unveils things
“Click!” New sights revealed
Painted rocks
By Susie Brigham (Canada)
One of these painted rocks was a gift, one I painted, and two I bought. They represent comfort and community in the time of COVID-19. The past 12 months have been a challenge in more ways than one. It’s been lonely, demanding, strange, confusing, upsetting, full of uncertainty (about when I’d resume my work in a face-to-face environment), and apprehension about my family’s health and wellbeing – especially my dad who is in a long-term care home and my daughter in her last year at high school - and my students’ health. One activity that kept me sane was long walks on paths through the woods around my house and when it was permitted to do so on marked nature trails beyond my neighbourhood. These numerous walks through the wooded trails and pathways in Halifax, Bedford, Sackville, Musquodoboit, and Porter’s Lake gave me a sense of quietude, hopefulness and a feeling that even in the most far-flung remote deserted paths someone cared enough to leave a sign to be found hidden in the crook of a tree branch, under a tree root, propped on a fence post, on a park bench, or tucked beside large stones by a stream or lakeside. While I did not touch the rocks I took a photo of every one and the surroundings where I found it.
Each painted rock was unique, some with messages, some with creative designs, some with children in mind, and most with vivid colours. Finding each one was a like a gift, a spark of delight, and an unexpected jolt of hope. Documenting the rocks with my cellphone camera became a meditative moment. I stopped in my tracks, paused, took a photo by either crouching down under branches or stretching high to get a good angle, and inevitably smiled imagining the person/s who left it, where were they now and when did they leave the rock?
The painted rocks represent the feminist imaginary because I am fairly sure the rocks were painted by women and some by children and I imagine they were painted with love and perhaps as a family activity just as I did with my children when they were younger. While the artistry skillfulness varied, the canvas – the rock – was consistent (although they varied in size and shape) and as part of nature it belonged in the environment and will last for eternity even after the painting on the rock fades. Life is fleeting but rocks have permanency. The humble gesture of art is filled with meaning, inspires courage in me for the future, and connects me to other women in my community. Women I have not met but whose energy, creativity and sisterhood is there in community now and no doubt after the pandemic.
STORYING
Popular fictions and Feminism
By Christine Jarvis (England)
This is a picture of a novel I have by Georgette Heyer. My mother read all her books and I read them all too, as a teenager and I still have many of them. I was an avid and fairly undiscriminating reader of fiction from a very earlier age, but pretty much none of it could be characterised as progressive or obviously feminist. And yet I believe that reading was critical to my development as someone who could imagine other possibilities for myself – beyond the lives of the women who surrounded me.
My English teacher sneered at my reading and in doing so she sneered at my mother at me and at my social class. I continued to read popular fiction alongside the canon and radical texts. Much later, as a researcher and teacher I developed a more academic interest in these texts, becoming interested, alongside critics like Janice Radway and Jan Cohn, in their subversive potential and the capacity we all have to ‘read against the grain.’ It helped me to understand that popular texts can both support and resist oppressive discourses and that women are not stupid for reading them. Reading novels has been considered a dangerous activity for young women throughout history. However conservative a text might appear, reading it can be a declaration of a desire for worlds and experiences beyond those that have been offered to us. It is very important to me that as educators we do not sneer at ‘women’s books’ and use dismissive phrases like ‘chick lit’ to characterise fiction that deals with relationships; rather we need to engage with the popular with an open mind.
RUPTURING
Disruption
By Claudia Mitchell
I have this West African colonial carving of a woman film-maker. She occupies a space in my living room, but she also has a sister in the Participatory Cultures Lab at McGill University in Montreal, and there are two more ‘in the family’ in the Centre for Visual Methodologies for Social Change at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The four, produced by an artist in Bamako, Mali have a story and it goes like this.
Close to where my partner lived in Johannesburg in 2002 is a rooftop craft market. I have long been fascinated by the Bamako figures that sell there and was delighted that one of the designs was a film-maker. But they were male and in keeping with my interests in the feminist research and the visual, I of course wanted to buy a female film-maker. Week after week I would check out what figures there might be and would regularly ask the seller ‘do you have a female film-maker this time?’ Week after week, the seller, always the same man, would say no. I am not sure what pushed him to finally say this but one day he said “Look women don’t make films and they don’t take pictures. That’s why I don’t have any. The carver doesn’t make them.” At that point, I headed onto the path of disruption. We struck a deal: I offered to buy four and to pay twice what a male film-maker would cost. Although I am not so proud of what this might say about the re-colonisation of art, I nonetheless feel that just maybe this started something hopeful for girls and women. That’s me.
Sister Catherine Donnelly
By Darlene Clover (Canada)
My puppet is a representation of the feminist imaginary through the image of Sister Catherine Donnelly. Catherine was born in Canada in the late 18th century. While a very devout woman, she chose to become a nun to escape the traditional ‘marriage, children and domestic life’ formula all too frequently the only option open to women of her time. She also avoided the more normative vocation of schoolteacher by becoming an adult educator.
Within the traditional Catholic order, however, Sister Donnelly too railed against the patriarchal order of things - the cloistering, the constrictive habit, and the need to walk in pairs in public. Her dream was to engage in active public service and as a result she founded the Sisters of Service, a new order made up of educated professional nuns who shared her passion for a different gendered order and world. Catherine also really wanted to ride horses, not side saddle as compulsory for women but rather, astride, like men so I have dressed her in a pair of denims.
Sister Donnelly was a woman who walked in complex worlds. My puppet speaks to her as part of the deeply problematic Canadian archetype of colonisation as well as an advocate for radical change, a woman who dared to throw off many of the shackles of both gender and Catholicism. My puppet is as much a recognition of complicity and compliance in a problematic world structure as it is a representation of courage, disobedience and rebellion.
The feminist imaginary is centred in opposites that cannot simply be dissolved or reconciled. Equally, however, it is politically committed, attends to relations of power and enables us to envision and enact what can and should be.
People on the Path
By Hannah Gelderman (Canada)
In response to the invitation to share something that spoke to my understanding of the ‘feminist imaginary’ I chose a set of postcards that depict people from so-called Alberta, that were featured in a large-scale art installation titled People on the Path. People on the Path was a project of the grassroots group Climate Justice Edmonton, that I co-facilitated in 2018. The portraits featured on the postcards are all real people who had a vision for lands covered by Treaty 6, 7 and 8 that move far beyond the dominant patriarchal petro-state narratives. The people featured imagined what a climate just, gender just, racially just and sustainable future should include. To me their visions are absolutely part of a ‘feminist imaginary’ that expands ideas of what is possible.
For me personally, both the product and the processes of People on the Path were an opportunity for the ‘feminist imaginary’ to emerge. The portraits were created collaboratively with contributions from over 50 people. The time spent in outreach and creation strengthened relationships and was joyful. When the portraits were displayed, they were catalysts for conversation and an invitation for viewers to also imagine a different future for the province.
A second reason I chose to share these postcards is that soon after People on the Path was completed, I started the Master of Education program at the University of Victoria. This graduate experience deepened my understanding of feminist practices and theories, including that of the ‘feminist imaginary’. I had the opportunity to reflect on and share People on the Path with my peers and professors, as well as build my MEd project around ideas that were sparked by the project. All of these things are a foundation that I will build upon as I continue my work in this world!
Cleo's Elephant
By Nic Dickson (Scotland)
My artefact is a double-sided, A1 board, which features the artworks and words from the women who contributed to my PhD research. This board is from a set of ten which were displayed in the Glasgow Women’s Library as a celebration of the women in the research and recognition of their multiple identities, as adult learners, visual artists and survivors of sexual abuse. My study was shaped by the feminist research goals of enabling self-determination, emancipation, and personal and social transformation. It took place at a Glasgow-based charity that supports young women who are survivors of abuse, sexual violence and homelessness. The illustration featured on this poster board was created by one of these young women who had experienced sexual abuse.
For over six-months I ran a weekly group and introduced basic visual art techniques, using a range of 2D and 3D materials. The project was framed as an exploration of engagement in arts-informed adult learning, rather than a therapeutic offering of the arts. Throughout the delivery, numerous challenges affected the women’s ability to participate in the project; there were complex barriers to learning and engagement in the activities. However, as this artefact shows, we worked together to create some wonderful art and to form an exhibition. Together, we documented the women’s experience of adult learning and utilised the visual artworks to privilege and platform their voices and perspectives. For me, this poster board is a reminder of what can be achieved through the creation, and celebration, of the feminist imagery.
ArtActivistBarbie
By Sarah Williamson (England)
ArtActivistBarbie is Barbie re-imagined and re-created as a fearless and feminist art activist. Wearing hand sewn couture, her modus operandi is ‘small signs, big questions, fabulous wardrobe!’. Positioned in art galleries and museums, she playfully draws attention (with tiny placards) to issues of gender representation, gender inequality and injustice. Staging ArtActivistBarbie in various scenarios is an aesthetic and imaginative provocation, a public and performative critical practice that intervenes and disrupts gallery and museum spaces.
As ArtActivistBarbie, Barbie the cultural icon with an impossible figure has now become a creative subversive character who seeks to challenge, educate and activate a critical feminist consciousness. With an extensive international following on Twitter @BarbieReports, she calls for change. Not only photographed in galleries and museums, she also poses next to patriarchal public statuary and in specially created tableaux vivants. Here she is recreated to echo the famous Ophelia painting by the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais, to point out how the artist’s model Elizabeth Siddal was required to pose in a bath of water for months. She became severely ill, unsurprisingly, and her father even had to threaten Millais with legal action to have Siddal’s medical bills paid. Over many centuries, so many women and girls have been used and abused by male artists as their model, mistress and muse. ArtActivistBarbie says ‘refuse to be used’.
Wasteland Climate Anxiety Haunted House
By Kathy Sanford (Canada)
This collage captures an arts-based feminist activist installation, of which this collection of images represents but a very small sampling of the richness contained within the pre-demolition Wasteland Climate Anxiety Haunted House (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lQ8_QcqR0s ) . The installation was conceived by Kay Gallivan and Kate Brooks-Heinemann, two Victoria-based artists who were also completing a teacher education program. The central image in the collage shows the exterior of the house, complete with murals created by community artists who came together, along with high school students, to transform this house that was scheduled for demolition. Kay and Kate actively engaged with over 50 community artists and with community Indigenous elders, as depicted in the collage.
The work of these artists offered a way to acknowledge and address the overwhelming fear felt by people today around the fate of our planet; it was through this installation that artists were able to respond to climate change – through representation of, for example, a post-apocalyptic family around the kitchen table, a graveyard, and an installation showing the devastation of salmon due to fish farms. Images of these installations are depicted in the collage.
The Wasteland Climate Anxiety Haunted House, now demolished, represents ways in which the feminist imaginary can mobilize and create a work that is community-centred, far-reaching but also local, demonstrating the power of the arts to raise awareness and speak back to the forces that choose to ignore – the voices of these feminist activist artists cannot be silenced.
Arte da Guerra
By Emilia Ferreira (Portugal)
I have always had an interest in the story of Judith. I found that interest through the paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi. Stronger and more impressive than Caravaggio's version of Judith, Artemisia's Judith has a determination that really captured my imagination.
I admire Judith's ability to rise to the challenge, to step in and do something — even if it is murder — when everyone else simply prays for a miracle. I admired her capacity to come back from the dead, as a young widow who had buried herself in her grief, and to use her power of mind and beauty to deceive a powerful general and win the war.
In 2009 I began to write her story. Sometimes my novels take many forms before they become clear to me, before they make sense and do justice to the characters. I wanted to write Judith right. Because a hero is as big as her nemesis, I devoted myself to creating (or trying to) multilayered enemies -- the king, his general -- and to show what was happening inside the mind of an ordinary woman who decided at one point that she would not surrender, that they would not have the power to decide her life and death. There is still a great deal I do not know about Judith as a character but what I do know, I admire. For her determination and ability to deal with fear head on.
RUPTURING
Bear Hunter
By Kerry Harman (England)
I created this image in 1983 when I was working as a practising artist in Australia. It was one of a series of mixed media collages using photocopied images from early 1960s ‘girly’ magazines.
This girl is called ‘bear hunter’. I used humour and playful materials including fake fur, sequins, vinyl and tulle to subvert the original ‘soft porn’ purpose of the images. This image always makes me laugh because I imagine ‘bear hunter’ riding through the skies on her bear rug creating mischievous feminist mayhem in her quest for gender justice. The Buddhist mythical character Monkey was a source of inspiration.
When I moved from Australia to the UK in 2006 I could not leave ‘bear hunter’ behind and she is one of the very few pieces of art I brought over with me. Including her in this exhibition enables me to connect my feminist aesthetic past with my feminist aesthetic present, which is a powerful feeling. I haven’t worked as a practising artist for a number of decades but the feminist imaginary that underpinned my artwork also underpins my current research interests and practices. The connecting thread is the notion of aesthetic rupture and the appearance of what wasn’t able to previously exist. That is how I understand the feminist imaginary. In the ‘Some Girls’ series (the name I gave to the series using ‘girly’ magazine images), I hoped to create aesthetic rupture by re-presenting images that had been produced for the male gaze in ways that disrupted their original purpose. Almost 40 years later I’m still trying to produce aesthetic rupture, this time for the purpose of disrupting the privileging of the white, male gaze in the academy in terms of how ‘knowing’ can be understood and who can be understood as ‘knowers’.
Tarot cards
By Victoria Foster (England)
I have chosen to show you two tarot cards from the DruidCraft deck by Philip and Stephanie Carr Gomm, illustrated by Will Worthington. I have a long-held fascination with tarot – the history and the symbolism rather than the fortune telling – and these two images come some ways to summing up feminist creative practices for me.
They are both court cards, and both queens. The Queen of Cups is nurturing, caring and emotional whereas the Queen of Swords is incisive and analytic. This combination of characteristics is important in my arts-based practice. It is a practice that is very much about care and embraces emotional knowing, yet it’s not soft and fluffy. There’s an element of clear and critical thinking and analysis that cuts through it all like the Queen of Sword’s knife blade.
I think it is interesting to see what happens when the positioning of the cards change. Here the Queens are looking away from each other. They each have their own agendas. But put them the other way and there is a sense of dialogue, of sharing. And I think that is a crucial element of feminist arts-based practice: an attentive listening and being with the other, even if we are coming from different perspectives, different positions in life.