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B3 W7: Gender, Art and Activism - Tutorial

"An affinity of Hammers" by Sara Ahmed p.221-234

"when we are not at home, when we are asked where we are from or who we are, or even what we are, we experience a chip, chip, chip, a hammering away at our being." p.221

Meet up
Find a theme
Someone take the lead
Make a plan together
Discuss the theory and analysis, pictures/videos (Interactive essay?)
Split the work

Ahmed - feminism is often TERFY. Relationship between trans* issues and feminism - letter that claimed transphobia was misued. Transphobia is seen as a system of rebuttal and refusal. Transfeminism as an affinity of hammers - through the hammering, a reciprocal hammering, we find alliances across differences.

Keegan - visibility and invisibility with the bathroom bill - neutrality

Ahmed - Affinity of hammers - your followers are a digital representation of a group of people with hammers able to support you or take down your opponents. Manipulating and mobilising free speech in the letter.

When we recognise the oppression of others, it is our responsibility to be allies in their hammering.

Keegan text - one of the participant of the NWSA - trans - the first meeting, they only had women's bathrooms - in 2014 they had another conference and changed the bathrooms in order to reflect on the trans association of the NWSA - Keegan wrote about how it was counter productive as it was not effective - their concept of neutrality erased the existence of the people who it was meant to protect/support

Ahmed - critique of transphobia was used as a tool to stop free-speech

How can art help us to recognise and destabilise patterns according to Archer? (Reflect on the concepts of pattern-jamming and dynamic static). How do the post-porn performance practices in Spain disrupted the feminist practice system? Can you think of other ways of disrupting the system with art?

Drawing attention to a pattern shows how the pattern is no longer effective. To jam it we change our views on the relationship between ourselves and others.

"Pattern-jamming necessarily obfuscates the neat ways that gender and other modes of identification are rendered into discrete bands within the patterns of everyday living. It revels in the genealogical and aesthetic attachments" (Archer, 2017: 312)

"Midst of the static and jammed signals, a space opened where people were forced to collectively imagine what was going on... out there... beyond what they already knew" (Archer, 2017: 312)










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