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- Title
Pre-Emptive Mourning Against the Bomb: Exploded Domesticities in Art Informed by Feminism and Anti-Nuclear Activism.
- Authors
Kokoli, Alexandra M.
- Abstract
Art informed by second-wave feminism has often cast domestic space as a site of ambivalence if not unhomeliness, inspired by gender-critical dissent. This article expands on previous research into the strategic unhomeliness of feminist art by focusing on works informed by anti-nuclear activism as well as feminism in the 1980s. Drawing on psychoanalytic approaches to conflict, Kokoli traces anti-nuclear (per)mutations of dystopian domesticity in feminist visual and material cultures that give form to the collective nightmare of a nuclear holocaust. In the art practice under consideration domesticity is thrown into crisis anew: the home is expanded into a site of pacifist resistance while also being cast as the place of the feared premature and violent death of loved ones due to nuclear disaster. Motherhood and gendered care-giving are simultaneously challenged and mobilised in the consciousness-raising performances and posters of Sister Seven, as well as Margaret Harrison’s recreations of the periphery fence of the Greenham Common RAF military base. The feminist pacifist – curative – response to the threat of nuclear war as a ‘paranoid elaboration of mourning’ (Fornari) is pre-emptive mourning, which, unlike pre-emptive strikes, rises to the defence of survival.
- Subjects
LIFE in art; FEMINISM &; art; ANTINUCLEAR movement; DYSTOPIAS in art; MOTHERHOOD in art; SISTER Seven (Performer); HARRISON, Margaret; PACIFISM in art
- Publication
Oxford Art Journal, 2017, Vol 40, Issue 1, p155
- ISSN
0142-6540
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/oxartj/kcx004