Description
Focussing on See Red Women’s Workshop, a feminist printmaker cooperative established in 1974 as part of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the United Kingdom, this paper explores feminist archives as repositories of contrasting affects. The mobilising potential of “‘bad,’ unsettling affects (anger, rage, despair, shame)” (Zarzycka & Olivieri 528) for political activism has widely been acknowledged. Drawing on the foundational work of Ahmed, Cvetkovich, Pedwell and Whitehead in feminist and queer affect studies, the paper investigates SRRW’s artistic translations of ‘seeing red’, i.e. an angry outburst, into the visual realm through striking imagery and powerful slogans as “acts of translation that are moving” (Ahmed 174). At the same time, it complements dominant readings of the cooperative’s activism as a radical ventriloquising of shared anger by foregrounding its “affective practices” (Wetherell et al. 5) whose mobilising potential is connected to intersectional solidarity (for example, for the “Armagh women” in Northern Ireland), community-building, and skill-sharing, which are traceable through archival material such as meeting minutes and correspondence. These seemingly less radical and visible, yet fundamental and sustainable practices, I propose, are indicative of “networked feminism” in a more literal sense than its current use in the context of digital media (Clark-Parsons). Investigating the contrasting affects contained in feminist archives and considering individual collectives within their web of interconnections is, I argue, a crucial component in painting a more accurate picture of the cultural and affective history of 1970s feminism in the United Kingdom.| Period | 23 Nov 2024 |
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| Event title | Annual Conference of the German Association for the Study of British Cultures: BritCult 2024: Politics of Emotion / Emotion of Politics |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Innsbruck, AustriaShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |