Talk at the conference “Global 68,” Paris, May 3, 2018.
Gay posted this comment to social media on July 27, 2018 in response to an act of civil disobedience carried out by the young Swedish activist Elin Ersson on July 23. Ersson refused to sit down on a flight from Gothenburg to Istanbul because another passenger on the plane was being deported to Afghanistan via Turkey.
Gloria Wekker, lecture at Kaaitheater, Brussels, March 7, 2018 →. See also Gloria Wekker, White Innocence (Duke University Press, 2017).
Rivke Jaffe, “Reflections: A Conversation with Gloria Wekker,” Development and Change, Forum 2018 49, no. 2 (2018) →.
The notion of the coloniality of power is used by Aníbal Quijano, and is, as described by Françoise Vergès, “a category that includes relations between the dominating and the dominated, sexism and patriarchy, … relations between public and private, and above all between civil society and political institutions. ” Françoise Vergès, Le Ventre des femmes: Capitalisme, racialisation, féminisme (The Bellies of Women: Capitalism, Racialization, Feminism) (Albin Michel, 2017), 21.
Important writing has called for the necessity of decolonizing art institutions and for anti-racist curatorial practices. Two recent publications on these topics include Kuratieren als antirassistische Praxis (Curating as an Anti-Racist Practice), eds. Natalie Bayer, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, and Nora Sternfeld (De Gruyter, 2017); and Décolonisons les arts! (Let’s Decolonize the Arts!), eds. Leïla Cukierman, Gerty Dambury, and Françoise Vergès (L’Arche Éditeur, 2018).
Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, “For Slow Institutions,” e-flux journal 85 (October 2017) →.
“Indeed, it is by having organized in an industrial way a drain on African societies for several centuries that capitalism could be built. The invisible source of this drain was nothing other than the bellies of African women, whose children were captured to be deported … Later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the United States, the industry of the reproduction of enslaved bodies managed to impose itself on all the territories the were opposed to the politics of the import of slaves. The work of the female slaves-reproducers became essential for the expansion and enrichment of the United States … The bellies of female slaves were capital; their bodies served as machines and constituted thus an essential element of the global circuit of commodities, such as cotton and sugar.” Françoise Vergès, Le Ventre des femmes, 98. Translated by the author.
Sara R. Farris, In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism (Duke University Press, 2017).
In the field of contemporary art, the informal group We Are Not Surprised was formed in autumn 2017 and soon published an open letter with signatures from seven thousand art professionals from all over the world. The letter asserted that sexual violence was a pervasive problem at all levels of the art world. The publication of the letter led to the formation of many individual working groups in various cities, as well as actions and legal support for victims of harassment. See →.
Sandra E. Garcia, “The Woman Who Created #MeToo Long Before Hashtags,” New York Times, October 20, 2017 →.
On Crystal Feimster’s talk from earlier this year “The Longue Durée of the Anti-Rape Movement and Why it Matters,” see →.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, ” in University of Chicago Legal Forum, special issue: Feminism in the Law: Theory, Practice, and Criticism (University of Chicago Law School, 1989).
“Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later,” law.columbia.edu, June 8, 2017 →. Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge recently published a critical inquiry into the way intersectionality functions in the world, including within global movements. Examining concrete cases, they identify social equality and social justice as intersectionality’s central preoccupations. See Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Polity Press, 2016).
Cherríe Moraga, “Catching Fire: Preface to the Fourth Edition,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, fourth edition, eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (SUNY Press, 2015), xxii.
The introduction to this historic statement reads: “We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. During that time we have been involved in the process of defining and clarifying our politics, while at the same time doing political work within our own group and in coalition with other progressive organizations and movements. The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.” Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in This Bridge Called My Back, 210.
In the preface to the fourth edition Moraga writes: “Ana Mendieta … ‘fell’ from a window to her death in 1985 … There had been strong evidence in and out of court to convict Mendieta’s husband, a world-renown artist, of her murder, but he was exonerated. Of Mendieta’s ‘Body Tracks’ Celia Herrera Rodríguez writes ‘the bloodied hand and arm tracks descending to the ground (are) a reminder that this path is dangerous and many have fallen.’” This Bridge Called My Back, xxiii, including footnote 11.
Coordination des Femmes Noires, July 1978, author’s translation. For more information see →.
For the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, see →.
See →.
In Women, Art and Power and Other Essays (Westview Press, 1988). Arakistain specifically quotes Griselda Pollock in pointing out that “recognizing the hierarchies of power which rule the relationships between the sexes, lending visibility to the mechanisms on which male hegemony is founded, untangling the process of social construction of sexual difference and examining the role played by representation in that articulation of difference.” Vision and Difference (Routledge Classics, 1988).
See Xabier Arakistain, “Reflections on a Feminist Model for the Field of Art: Montehermoso, 2008–2011” →.
See →.
Lina Džuverović and Irene Revell, “‘We falter with feminist conviction’: Notes on Assumptions, Expectations, Confidence, and Doubt in the Feminist Art Organisation,” On Curating 29 (May 2016) →.
Helen Molesworth, “How to Install Art as a Feminist,” in Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art, eds. Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz (MoMA, 2014).
Andy Battaglia, “The ARTNews Accord: Aruna D’Souza and Laura Raicovich in Conversation,” ARTNews, May 14, 2018 →. In the same conversation Laura Raicovich says: “The idea that museums are neutral is an absurdity, because all ‘neutral’ means is that the museum is reinforcing the values of the dominant culture … The museum has never been neutral. It was designed to convey a lot, like colonial prowess by nations. Collect enough stuff and you look really powerful. When you start thinking in those terms, you have to contend with that. You have to ask yourself: do we dump it or do we deal with it?”
See Genevieve Flavelle, “‘We Can’t Keep up/We Won’t Keep Down: Feminist Praxis in Art Institutions,’” January 31, 2017 →.
According to one of the activists, “the aims and objectives of the campaign are fairly uncontroversial among staff and students because most people are naturally disgusted by the fact that the lowest paid staff, overwhelmingly BME (Black or minority ethnic) and/or migrant, and predominantly women, could be treated so poorly at Goldsmiths.” Quoted in Jasmine Weber, “Protesters at Goldsmiths University in London Demand Answers for ‘Who Keeps the Cube White?,’” Hyperallergic, September 6, 2018 →.
Decolonize this Place is a group of artists and activists in New York who organize around indigenous struggles, black and working-class liberation, and de-gentrification; see →. Gulf Labour Artist Coalition is a group of international artists and art professionals organizing to protect the rights of the migrant workers who are building the museums on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi; see →.
See →.
“Counter-hegemonic knowledge projects do not come with built-in guarantees against hegemonic recuperation; they can sustain hegemony’s operations through their incorporation … Knowledge capitalism under neoliberalism does not exclude or obliterate differences, but operates through them, while absorbing and neutralising them. Academia incorporates black women and intersectionality as material (bringing a new flavour to research projects, course material and publications), and as actors joining academic ranks, without altering its structure. This incorporation implies conformity, through pressures, incentives and sanctions, to disciplinary conventions both in a theoretical and embodied sense.” Sirma Bilge, “Whitening Intersectionality: Evanescence of Race in Intersectionality Scholarship,” The Du Bois Review 10, no. 2 (2013): 405–24.
An earlier version of this text, entitled “Practice Intersectionality,” was first published in the essay collection Feminisms (L’Internationale Books, 2018) →.