“If your institution refuses to provide what you need, create it yourself”: Feminist praxis on #AcademicTwitter

Previous research has demonstrated the impact that Twitter can have for promoting and discussing a feminist agenda. Given the gendered neoliberalism that exists within academia, tweets under the hashtag “#AcademicTwitter” may also be an important space for feminist praxis. Yet, to our knowledge, there is no empirical work analysing the function of “Academic Twitter” from a distinctly feminist perspective. Thus, we asked “How is Academic Twitter used for feminist praxis?”. We conducted a reflexive thematic analysis of 596 tweets containing the hashtag #AcademicTwitter. This generated four themes showing how Academic Twitter can be a valuable site for feminist praxis, by enabling academics to “give testimony to academia”, “access the hidden curriculum”, and engage in both “academic kindness” and “resistance and advocacy”. Despite these benefits, we also observed a tension between Academic Twitter as a site for feminist practice yet also as potentially complicit in promoting the competitiveness and overwork that pervades academia. We recommend that future feminist research interrogates the ways in which more diverse forms of feminist praxis, including more negative experiences, are negotiated on Academic Twitter.

Graphic Trauma

In this essay, I explore examples of what I call graphic trauma and the processof drawing as a form of working through the experience and event of sexual violence. I contend that comics and graphic narratives are a medium well-suited for rendering trauma, and the trauma of sexual violence in particular, as I show in an analysis of Una’s graphic narrative Becoming Unbecoming and Chanel Miller’s animated short film I Am With You. I argue that for both artists, drawing becomes a form of consciousness-raising, a collaborative feminist practice of memory work that attempts to create conditions – formal, therapeutic, and political – for women to say #MeToo and “we.” In my readings of Una’s and Miller’s draw-ing as working through sexual violence, I also demonstrate close verbal/visual description as a practice of care that keeps the testimony moving, drawing out the feminist practice of memory work in time and space and across modalities. A brief coda at the end of the essay offers an image of a hybrid figure from Miller’s graphic iconography and a concept and practice she calls “the third element.” I argue that this third element functions as a formal provocation for counter- modalities that change the story of sexual assault, creating a portal to resistance and healing.

Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism, Lauren Fournier

Review of: Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism, Lauren FournierCambridge, MA and London: MIT Press (2021), 320 pp., h/bk,ISBN: 978-0-26204-556-8, US $35.00

Feminist collective memory and nostalgia in gynaecological self-help in contemporary Europe

Gynaecological self-help, a well-known and historical feminist practice from the Second Wave movements which aims at embodying a radical alternative to traditional reproductive politics, is resurging today in France, Switzerland and Belgium. Drawing on empirical observations and interviews, this article questions the links between feminist memory of self-help, the shaping of nostalgia and the production of a political feminist ‘we’. Born at the end of the 1960s in the United States, feminist self-help travelled internationally and was appropriated differently depending on national contexts. This ‘glorious’ history of self-help and, more importantly, its narrated memory, is central to contemporary European self-help activism, as observed in the three national contexts. Drawing on this insight, this article reveals the active memory-oriented emotional work of self-help activists. It examines the ways in which nostalgia for an imagined and lost past is actively and practically produced and encouraged in social movement practices, and highlights the specificity of the kind of collective feminist identity that it shapes and promotes in contemporary self-help politics.

Making Space: Key Popular Women Writers Then and Now

Reclaiming lost or forgotten (Victorian) popular women writers and their works is still an important, ongoing aim of literary and gender studies. In this article, we take the Key Popular Women Writers series, published by Edward Everett Root Publishers and edited by Janine Hatter and Helena Ifill, as one example of a current series that continues and develops this feminist practice. By drawing upon the research, writing and publishing practice of current women academics, as well as related issues concerning literary value, canonicity and the popularity of the Victorian writers themselves, we showcase the methodological and pedagogical practice of finding motivation and inspiration beyond that which is established as the norm. Furthermore, through examining the current political, academic and publishing fields’ impact on researching and teaching (Victorian) popular fiction, we discuss breakthroughs, challenges and potential ways for the study of this area to move forward. Popular women’s writing continues to offer readers, students and academics, ways to challenge conventions, embrace the multi-faceted nature of our field and take our place on the landscape.

Reciprocal narratives in Que bom te ver viva (Lúcia Murat, 1989)

Directed by Brazilian filmmaker Lúcia Murat, Que bom te ver viva [How nice to see you alive] (1989) interlaces the testimonies of eight female political prisoners with a monologue voiced by an anonymous female fictional character. All allude to the experience of torture under the military dictatorial regime in Brazil. Given that Murat was a militant student imprisoned and tortured during the dictatorship, the film appears to have an autobiographical motivation. I argue, however, that the interlacing of fictional monologue and ‘real’ testimonies effaces this motivation. Rather, the intersection between fictional and testimonial accounts offers a reciprocal recognition between interviewees and filmmaker, allowing for the inscription of these individual stories into the historical narrative. I also argue that this reciprocal recognition is anchored in the feminist practice of storytelling, practised in consciousness-raising feminist groups in the 1960s and 1970s. Adriana Cavarero’s philosophy of narration underpins my analysis.