SPAH Seminar Series Week 16: Dr Catherine Grant

Part of the SPAH Seminar Series, Dr Catherine Grant gives a talk on 'A Feminist Chorus'

This paper explores the importance of groups when returning to feminism’s histories, and imagines them as a feminist chorus. Beginning by delving into feminist archives, the works addressed “re-speak” what is found there, from a list of women artist names in the Women’s Art Library, to sections of text from books by women writers (the first is an experimental choral piece by the artist Clare Gasson, the second is an ongoing project, also titled A Feminist Chorus, by the artist and writer Lucy Reynolds). This “re-speaking” is imagined as both a traditional chorus of voices singing or saying together, and as a form of feminist history-making. This paper also explores how these feminist choruses engage with the legacy of consciousness-raising as a form of embodied activation, keeping archival texts alive through speaking and discussing them together. This is explored through the politically motivated re-writing of Zoe Leonard’s 1992 text “I want a dyke for president” on the eve of the UK election in 2015, and the Women of Colour Index Reading Group (set up by Samia Malik, Michelle Williams Gamaker and Rehana Zaman) which explores a collection of material on women of colour artists. Across the different forms of the feminist chorus the interaction between re-speaking as a form of bringing to life, and re-working through discussion, is related to the legacies of feminist small group work. 

About the speaker
Catherine Grant is a Senior Lecturer in the Art and Visual Cultures departments at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the co-editor of Fandom as Methodology (2019), Creative Writing and Art History (2012), and the questionnaire on “Decolonizing Art History”, Art History, 2020. She is a co-lead of two research networks: “Group Work: Feminism and Contemporary Art” and “Animating Archives”. Her book A Time of One’s Own: histories of feminism in contemporary art, will be published by Duke University Press in Autumn 2022. 

To attend, please email spahpg@essex.ac.uk for the Zoom link. The seminar will also be streamed in NTC 3.07 for those wishing to attend on campus.