AD7506 - Appendices
Research
Intersectional feminism
Intersectional feminism offers a lens through which we can better understand one another and strive towards a more just future for all.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American law professor who coined the term in 1989 explained Intersectional feminism as, “a prism for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other,” in a recent interview with Time.
“All inequality is not created equal,” she says. An intersectional approach shows the way that people’s social identities can overlap, creating compounding experiences of discrimination.
“We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts,” Crenshaw said.
Intersectional feminism centres the voices of those experiencing overlapping, concurrent forms of oppression in order to understand the depths of the inequalities and the relationships among them in any given context.
If feminism is advocating for women’s rights and equality between the sexes, intersectional feminism is the understanding of how women’s overlapping identities — including race, class, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation — impact the way they experience oppression and discrimination.
Intersectional feminism considers the many ways each woman experiences discrimination. “White feminism” is a term that is used to describe a type of feminism that overshadows the struggles women of colour, LGBTQ women and women of other minority groups face.
Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage. Examples of these factors include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, weight, and physical appearance. These intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing.
Intersectionality is not about pitting different people or groups against each other to assess who is most marginalised or disadvantaged. Instead, intersectionality aims to understand how different people’s experiences are shaped where multiple forms of oppression or disadvantage interact.
The purpose of intersectional feminism is to recognise how different aspects of a person’s identity might interact to change the way they experience the world – and the barriers they might face as a result.
It allows us to view the world outside of our own experience and better understand how different forms of marginalisation can deepen and amplify each other to create unique vulnerabilities, ones that cannot be addressed through one-size-fits-all solutions. Recognising this can allow us to be more critical of how we view the systems of power we are trying to change and be more targeted in the ways we seek to further gender equality.
This understanding of the world is central to the work of our partners and influences the way they address the issues impacting the communities they serve:
- Women and girls were disproportionally impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and this was particularly true for young women in Asia and the Pacific. IWDA worked with young women leaders in Cambodia, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Samoa to highlight their stories of marginalisation and leadership during the pandemic.
- In Timor-Leste, class and socioeconomic discrimination intersect with sexism, making it hard for poor women to get elected because of the high cost of campaigning in the newly democratised nation.
- Research IWDA has contributed to in Cambodia shows that women with disabilities are more likely to face violence from immediate family members, and more likely to experience controlling behaviour from partners.
Intersectionality is a broad concept, and it’s still one that’s hotly debated in the feminist community. We don’t claim to be authorities on anyone else’s feminism, but to us, acknowledging how different forms of discrimination intersect with and amplify gender-based discrimination is a critical way to ensure all women, trans, intersex and non-binary people reap the benefits of advancing gender equality for all.
https://iwda.org.au/what-does-intersectional-feminism-actually-mean/
https://oecd-development-matters.org/2022/04/13/why-intersectional-feminism-matters-for-development/
A Guide To Relational Aesthetics
Features, Guides – 14 Feb 2018 – Share
https://somethingcurated.com/2018/02/14/a-guide-to-relational-aesthetics/
“Relational aesthetics” is a term coined by art critic, historian and curator Nicolas Bourriaud, originally for the exhibition “Traffic,” held at the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux in 1996. Inseparable from the concept, Bourriaud further expanded on the term in his 1998 book, Relational Aesthetics, defining the movement as: “A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.”
Formally born in the 90s, following the birth of the Internet and the concept of virtual networking, Relational art saw artists endeavouring to communicate with viewers through participatory installations and events. Relational artists rejected the making of conventional art objects, opting to engage audiences through situations which called for, and at times demanded, interpersonal interaction, facilitating community among participants. These practices have their roots in earlier art movements, namely Dada, Conceptual art, Fluxus, and Allan Kaprow’s “Happenings.”
In 1992, art dealer Gavin Brown helped artist Rirkrit Tiravanija transform 303 Gallery, then on Greene Street, into an operational kitchen for a part performance, part installation piece titled “Untitled (Free).” Tiravanija, in perhaps the most cited work of Relational art, moved all the contents of an art gallery storeroom and office into the exhibition space and staged his work in the back rooms; the art consisted of cooking Thai cuisine for his audience. The viewers became active participants, first locating the backrooms, then consuming the food and engaging in conversations with the artist and one another.
Big Conference Centre Limitation Screen, by Liam Gillick, explores architecture’s role in human interactions. Part Minimalist sculpture, part corporate capitalist architecture, his structure is seen ultimately as a mere “backdrop or décor” for the interactivity of audiences. “Despite their affinity with minimalist architectural design, Gillick’s installations are characterised by their indeterminate look, halfway between decorative and utilitarian, fact and fiction. Deliberately deceptive, they require viewers to rethink their own ways of perceiving and interpreting art,” art critic Charlotte Laubard writes.
The community project, Streamside Day, by French artist Pierre Huyghe, consisted in part of a parade and celebration in a suburban development. In an interview with Art21, the artist explained: “Streamside is a little town, north of New York. It was under construction when I found it, and I created—or invented—a tradition for it. I was interested in the notion of celebration, and what it means to celebrate. I tried to find a story within the context of the local situation, looking for what the people there had in common.” Members of the Streamside community can choose to execute the celebration again each year, not unlike playing a composer’s score.
Vanessa Beecroft’s work is largely performance-based, often featuring female models as living art objects that exist somewhere between figure and object, static and dynamic. Much of Beecroft’s work is informed by her personal struggle with an eating disorder and she consistently explores issues of body image and femininity in contemporary culture. For VB35 at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, Beecroft instructed her live models to stand motionless, clad in designer shoes and rhinestone bikinis, or in some cases simply in shoes. Guests of the exhibition had an uncanny encounter with figures that resembled fashion advertising images but were in fact live human beings.
Vanessa Beecroft, “VB35”
Performance at Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum,
New York, 1998
(via Guggenheim Museum)
Relying exclusively on the human voice, bodily movement, and social interaction, Tino Sehgal’s works uniquely fulfil the parameters of a traditional artwork with the exception of inanimate materiality. His situations produce meaning and value through a transformation of actions rather than solid materials, as was particularly evident during Sehgal’s 2010 presentation of This Progress at the Guggenheim , when he stripped the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda of all physical artworks, and employed the ramp as a platform for discourse. Sehgal trained special docents of all ages to guide visitors up the museum’s ramp, having conversations and discussions with them as they walked.
Art scholar Claire Bishop has been a critical voice regarding certain aspects of the movement, arguing that artists such as Tiravanija and Gillick do not democratise art but simply reinforce their pre-existing, closed art world and thus ignore its implicit class politics. For Bishop, Relational artist Thomas Hirschhorn offers an alternative by highlighting underlying social antagonisms. For Documenta 11, held in Kassel, Hirschhorn worked with locals in a nearby low-income, immigrant neighbourhood to erect a temporary structure that served as a site for community debates on the writings of French philosopher Georges Bataille. Participants from the neighbourhood could, and did, voice their opinions on Bataille in the monument’s makeshift television studio, thus becoming part of the art while viewing it.
More recently, between 2008 and 2009, The Double Club, a project conceived by artist Carsten Höller and Fondazione Prada, saw a converted Victorian warehouse beside London’s Angel tube station offer a unique approach to entertainment and hospitality, creating a dialogue between Congolese and Western contemporary music, lifestyle, art and design. Open for a limited duration, The Double Club was not only a vibrant new public space in the city but also an alliance of two cultures in real life, facilitating cross-pollination without any attempt of fusion. The Double Club consisted of three spaces: Bar, Restaurant and Disco. Each space was divided into equally sized Western and Congolese parts on a decorative and functional level, generating an inspiring perspective on double identity as well as on cultural coexistence.