Manchester University Press
1 Introduction
Abstract
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the feminist stakes of women artists in the United States and Britain. It analyses how three artists, Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly, worked with the visual dimensions of language to transform how women are perceived. The book focuses on aggression and traces how its repression plays out across Spero's Codex Artaud and Solanas's SCUM Manifesto. It also traces how Solanas deploys language as a weapon capable of 'cutting up' patriarchal authority. The book shows how her history as a feminist lesbian of the 1960s helps evoke a historical milieu that brings the stakes of Codex Artaud into sharp relief. It argues that in Post-Partum Document, texts and pieces of writing become fetish objects that Kelly arranges into visual and linguistic 'poems' that forestall a confrontation with loss.
Abstract
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the feminist stakes of women artists in the United States and Britain. It analyses how three artists, Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly, worked with the visual dimensions of language to transform how women are perceived. The book focuses on aggression and traces how its repression plays out across Spero's Codex Artaud and Solanas's SCUM Manifesto. It also traces how Solanas deploys language as a weapon capable of 'cutting up' patriarchal authority. The book shows how her history as a feminist lesbian of the 1960s helps evoke a historical milieu that brings the stakes of Codex Artaud into sharp relief. It argues that in Post-Partum Document, texts and pieces of writing become fetish objects that Kelly arranges into visual and linguistic 'poems' that forestall a confrontation with loss.
Chapters in this book
- Front matter i
- Dedication v
- Contents vii
- List of figures viii
- Acknowledgements xv
- 1 Introduction 1
-
I Writing the ‘I’ otherwise: telegraphing black feminism in the work of Adrian Piper and Angela Davis
- 2 Adrian Piper’s textual address 29
- 3 Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis 72
- 4 Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud 107
- 5 Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression 146
- 6 Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document 186
- 7 Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey 232
- 8 Conclusion 267
- Bibliography 269
- Index 286
Chapters in this book
- Front matter i
- Dedication v
- Contents vii
- List of figures viii
- Acknowledgements xv
- 1 Introduction 1
-
I Writing the ‘I’ otherwise: telegraphing black feminism in the work of Adrian Piper and Angela Davis
- 2 Adrian Piper’s textual address 29
- 3 Letters from an imaginary enemy, Angela Davis 72
- 4 Writing the drives in Nancy Spero’s Codex Artaud 107
- 5 Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and the texts of aggression 146
- 6 Rewriting maternal femininity in Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document 186
- 7 Feminist desires and collective reading in the work of Laura Mulvey 232
- 8 Conclusion 267
- Bibliography 269
- Index 286
