Women Rally for Action 1976: Politically Engaged Feminism in British Columbia

This article situates a 1976 feminist rally in Victoria, British Columbia, Women Rally for Action, within the context of Canada’s national feminist movement. The rally was a legislative lobbying event aimed at the newly elected Social Credit government and their cuts to the social services that supported gender equality in the province. By tracing the development of the second wave feminist movement in Canada and in BC, this article explores how the organizers of the BC rally employed a national feminist strategy of organized political pressure. In doing so, they worked towards the politicization of the women’s movement on a national and provincial level, and developed an invaluable framework for future women’s organizing in BC.

Tergiversar, citar, tropezar: el comisariado como práctica feminista = Shifting, citing, stumbling: curating as a feminist practice

Este artículo explora las características de la intervención curatorial feminista a partir del análisis de un caso de estudio: la exposición Yo, la peor de todas, comisariada por su autora. Se articula en torno a una reflexión crítica sobre las distintas estrategias que se pusieron en marcha en este proyecto. Primero, tergiversar un encargo inicial de la institución, que pedía una exposición de mujeres artistas para cumplir con la cuota de lo políticamente correcto. Segundo, profundizar en la cita, entendida como encuentro afectivo y como práctica de reconocimiento, pero también como estrategia artística y curatorial feminista. Finalmente, se interroga sobre las propias condiciones de existencia de la práctica curatorial feminista en el contexto del arte contemporáneo, donde predominan formas de trabajo precarizadas y modos neoliberales de entender los afectos que invisibilizan y denostan los trabajos de cuidado. AbstractThis article explores the characteristics of feminist curatorial intervention based on the analysis of a case study: the exhibition Yo, la peor de todas, curated by myself. It begins with a critical reflection on the different strategies that were implemented in this project. First, to shift an initial commission from the institution that asked for an exhibition of women artists to meet the quota of political correctness. Second, to deepen in the notion of cite, understood as an affective encounter and as a practice of recognition and as an artistic and curatorial feminist strategy. Finally, it questions the very conditions of existence of feminist curatorial practice in the context of contemporary art, where precarious forms of work and neoliberal modes of understanding affects predominate, denigrating care work and rendering it invisible.

Campaigning and Coming of Age in the 1970s

The chapter deploys feminist oral histories to explore the WLM’s key demands and campaigns in the 1970s, including the Miss World beauty pageant protest and the Nightcleaners’ campaign. After unpicking romanticised ideas about feminist consciousness-raising, it suggests that established narratives that gloomily recount the collapse of the post-war consensus overlook an exciting time for a WLM energised by campaigns around women’s domestic labour and reproductive rights, epitomised by the National Abortion Campaign. But the NAC’s successes also involved difficult emotions and ambivalence about feminist strategy and identity, analysed especially through the memories of black campaigners Jan McKenley and Gail Lewis, and Kirsten Hearn from Sisters Against Disablement. The chapter concludes with the story of Karen McMinn, coordinator of Women’s Aid Northern Ireland, using her S&A oral history to recall campaigns against domestic violence in the context of civil strife, and the personal challenges involved in keeping the feminist flame alive. 150 words

The Hassle of Housework: Digitalisation and the Commodification of Domestic Labour

This article revisits materialist second-wave feminist debates about domestic labour in the context of digitalisation. Using a differentiated typology of labour, it looks at how the tasks involved in housework have undergone dramatic changes through commodification, decommodification and recommodification without fundamentally altering the gender division of labour in social reproduction, drawing on recent research on the use of online platforms to deliver social reproductive labour via the market in a context in which reproductive labour sits at the centre of an intense time squeeze. It reflects on the implications of the commodification of domestic labour for feminist strategy. The author points to the inadequacy in this context of traditional feminist strategies—for the socialisation of domestic labour through public services, wages for housework or labour-saving through technological solutions—concluding that new strategies are needed that address the underlying social relations that perpetuate unequal divisions of labour in contemporary capitalism.

Mythmaking as a feminist strategy: Rosi Braidotti’s political myth

This article makes visible some of the premises that underlie Rosi Braidotti’s use of (political) myth. Focusing on some well-known characteristics of postmodernity, as well as the development of a new philosophy of subjectivity, I account for the divergence between Simone de Beauvoir, who thought of myth as a severe hindrance to the subject-becoming of women, and postmodern feminists, such as Donna Haraway and Braidotti, who represent a more affirmative stance. Through pinning down both similarities and differences between Haraway and Braidotti, I demonstrate that postmodern feminists might still promote mythmaking for dissimilar reasons. I argue that Braidotti, in contrast to Haraway, approaches myth from a horizon partly shaped by an anti-rationalist or ‘demonic’ philosophical tradition, whose chief representative is Friedrich Nietzsche. By studying the argument delivered by the latter in defence of myth, I extract a conceptual distinction between the ‘Apolline’ and the ‘Dionysiac’ aspects of mythmaking, by which it becomes possible to further qualify Braidotti’s philosophy of political myth.