academic
book:
From Sappho’s Fragments to Viral Hashtags
Public Feminism in Times of Crisis, cowritten with Dr. Jennifer Stager, is a book of essays in classical receptions and feminist criticism developed in connection to ongoing political and epidemiological crises and the significant intersectional feminist response to this moment. The book examines the public practice of feminism in the age of social media and analyzes the deep histories threaded through this new(er) enactment. Six chapters explore the Venus tradition and the archive; feminist biography and #MeToo as map; feminist translation; the collective lyric I and citational justice; virality and new materialism; and decentralized monuments and memorializing. The book’s methodology weaves together traditional academic research and public-facing media, practicing the very tools that it analyzes.
We are grateful to Judith Lakämper, our editor at Lexington Books, for permission to release this excerpt from our introduction open access:
Introduction (open access excerpts)
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“In academia we often speak approvingly of the advantages of interdisciplinarity and the benefits of collaborative projects. Only rarely, however, do scholars and researchers put their money where their mouth is. For this reason Public Feminism in Times of Crisis is a rara avis, in the most positive sense of the term; it is a collaborative work written by two authors, without any noticeable differences in style or approach. What is more, the case studies cover a surprisingly wide chronology starting 30,000 years ago with the Venus of Willendorf (pp. 29-36), and reaching our days with an analysis of the #MeToo Movement and its aftermath (pp. 77-80). Needless to say, to analyse such a wide range of examples, an interdisciplinary approach is not a choice, but a prerequisite. Therefore, one might think that the authors have made a virtue of necessity; from the very beginning of the book, however, it is clear this was a conscious decision, since for them “the barriers of disciplinarity pose a threat to feminism” (p. 7). And in fact, from the point of view of interdisciplinarity, the work is a great success. The authors are to be congratulated on a collection of essays which is out of the ordinary, and which offers readers considerable food for thought.”
-excerpt from Agnès Garcia-Ventura’s review at BMCR
“Easa and Stager use an interdisciplinary lens to explore how contemporary feminist interventions in both physical and virtual spaces are rooted in earlier moments of feminist activism. Their work makes past efforts visible while encouraging evolving practices that leverage digital spaces for progressive action. Easa and Stager offer wide-ranging analyses of literary texts, works of art, performances, monuments, viral hashtags, and other cultural artifacts to trace the vexed ways women write and rewrite, with much attention paid to the body, trauma, material conditions, and the interconnection of individual and collective identities. The analyses are complex and thoughtful, and the writing is clear and impassioned. The power of each chapter’s final paragraph alone makes the book worth reading. Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.”
essays:
An essay from Public Feminism that explores historical and contemporary list-monuments as feminist practice, “Overwriting the Monument Tradition: lists, loss, and scale” appears in RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 75/76 (Fall 2021).
Abstract: While our contemporary moment invites necessary engagement with fallism (the practice of toppling monuments of symbols of oppressive power), we wish to instead identify and narrate a parallel heritage to that of the traditional figural monument critiqued by such practices. We suggest that this parallel tradition, which runs from ancient Greece to contemporary times, can itself offer new forms of possibility to engage and include a more diverse set of voices while also remaining grounded in historical precedent. Building on Athena Kirk’s theory of apodeixis, a practice of making a list visual, “Overwriting the Monument Tradition” traces this history of apodeictic monuments from the ancient Greek casualty lists set up in Athens in the fifth century BCE to Maya Lin’s Washington, DC Vietnam memorial to the epigraphs for one thousand of the first one hundred thousand deaths from Covid-19 in the United States on the cover of the New York Times on May 24, 2020 CE to contemporary poetry, protest, and performance. Ultimately, we argue that this tradition mobilizes naming and the poetic power of the list to elevate not singular hegemony but instead a plurality of raised voices.
A short-form version of our in-progress essay on abortion (itself an extension of our work on Public Feminism), “Subjects and Verbs: The Past, Present, and Future Tenses of Abortion Rhetoric” appears in Post45’s Abortion Now, Abortion Forever cluster (June 2023).
Abstract: U.S. activist abortion rhetoric can be viewed as a collective abortion story that shaped both policy and epistemology around reproduction in the United States and participated in the work of nationalism. Specifically, the framework of “choice” activated by many interest groups—itself a hedge against conservative “life” rhetoric—connected abortion access to Americanness itself. Yet in contemporary discourse, new frameworks have emerged that question the capitalist and individualist underpinnings of choice, instead emphasizing relationality and continuity between the human and nonhuman. We trace the history of this shift in the context of Lena Chen’s participatory art installation, “We Lived in the Gaps Between the Stories,” which presents abortifacients and emmenagogues to (re)imagine reproductive management through an alignment with plant life. Chen’s project brings attention to ancient herbs in the present while also engaging the history of private and nonarchival practices of reproductive management that precede the nation state in modernity —the sharing of methods, materials, and treatments in networks that exist outside of legally sanctioned frameworks. Exploring such histories, practices, and materials allows us to consider an abortion story that moves beyond choice to foreground interdependence.
Black granite, 3.23 x 150.4 m. Photo: Jennifer Stager.
“Memorializing as Fallism’s Feminist Alternative,” cowritten with Dr. Jennifer Sager, appears on the West of England and South Wales Women’s History Network Blog (December 20, 2021).
While the past few years have brought deep international engagement with the idea and practice of fallism–the practice of toppling monuments that symbolize patriarchal power and often white supremacy–we identify and narrate a parallel heritage to that of the traditional masculine figural monument critiqued by such practices. We understand this list-based tradition to represent a feminist approach to mourning and memorializing, especially in its focus on individuals over the emblematic. We suggest that this parallel feminist tradition, stretching from ancient Greece to contemporary times, can help us contextualize both the history of such memorialization and its current practice.
editing:
| LOCATING A COLLECTIVE LYRIC “I,” a special folio (print and open-access digital) coedited with Jennifer Stager in The Hopkins Review 17.1, brings together essays, poetry, visual arts, audio, and genre-defying fusions. Many contributions draw on the deep past, yet this work feels urgent and timely as it grapples with the subjectivity of poet, scholar, and artist; with racialization, gender and sexuality; with the climate crisis; with war; with mourning; with craft and handwork; and with the pleasures and frictions of being in the world together. List of contributors: Sarah Beckmann, William Camponovo, Bethany Dixon, Sasha-Mae Eccleston, Ella Gonzalez, Sean Gordon, Pia Hargrove, Briony Hughes, Christine Hume, Virginia Jackson, Les James, Jennifer Keohane, Laura Larson, Michael Leong, Steven Levya, Naomi Shihab Nye, David Ishaya Osu, Related Tactics, Margaret Ronda, Yuki Tanka, Eleni Theodoropoulos, Kandis Williams introduction * digital folio * print folio (Project Muse) * index-as art |