Feminism, Adult Education and Creative Possibility

Imaginative Responses

Darlene E. Clover, Kathy Sanford, Kerry Harman, Darlene E. Clover, Kerry Harman, Kathy Sanford

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350231061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This book argues that feminist aesthetics as practices of adult education can inform our responses to gendered, racial, class and ecological injustices. It illustrates the critical, creative, and provocative pedagogical theorising, research, and engagement work of feminist adult educators and researchers who work in diverse community, institutional, and social movement contexts across North America and Europe. This book captures the complexity, diversity, energy, and imagination of those who theorise, decolonise, facilitate, investigate, visualize, story, and create within the politics of gender (in)justice and radical change.

Part I

VISUALIZING AND THE FEMINIST IMAGINARY

Chapter 1

Curating Visibility: The Disobedient Women Exhibition as a Representational Feminist Pedagogy of Possibility

Darlene E. Clover and Kathy Sanford

Women dominate their own experience by imaging it, giving it form … In their exact recording of their experience they establish women’s claim as individuals … They define for themselves woman as she is and as she dreams.

Meyer Spacks, 1976, p. 414

Issues of vision, visibility, representation and imagination are central concerns of feminist adult educators and cultural theorists. We speak collectively of the historical invisibility of women, the need to give visibility to women’s diverse stories, perspectives and experiences, the visual power of self-representation and the need to inspire an imagination of possibility (e.g., Butterwick & Roy, 2016; Clover et al., 2017; Manicom & Walters, 2012).

The online Oxford English Dictionary defines vision as the ability to see or what can be seen from a particular position or perspective. Visibility is how clearly or easily one can see as well as the act of attracting attention. Invisibility is that which cannot be seen straightforwardly or even at all. The imagination is the forming and envisioning of new ideas, images or concepts whilst representation is the practice of portraying these imaginings in order to call particular understandings to mind. Despite the presumption of neutrality inherent in these definitions, they are in fact riddled with relations of power and particularly, gendered relations of power. Vision, visibility, imagination and representation are always political because they are about what we are able, allowed or made to see and thus, to know and to imagine about the world, ourselves and others (Vendramin, 2012). Feminists Cramer and Witcomb (2018) refer to this pedagogically as people ‘seeing what they are being taught to see and to remain blind to what they are being taught ignore’ (p. 2). Over the decades, cultural feminists such as de Beauvoir (1949) and Marshment (1993) have illustrated the historically problematic patriarchal nature of our representations – our imagery, language and narratives – that have been ‘done by great men [with] singular obstinacy’ (Pomata, 1989, p. 1). In her 2020 book entitled Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed by Men, Criado Perez shows that in fact little has changed. Both the chroniclers of the past and the architects of the present and future have taken ‘the lives of men … to represent those of humans overall. When it comes to the lives of the other half of humanity, there is often nothing but silence’ (p. xi). Criado Perez refers to this as a world ‘disfigured by a female-shaped absent presence’ (p. xi). Given this, what we are being taught to see is a world created and imagined for and about men and what we are being taught to remain blind to is the stories of women in all their diversity. Men, however, have not stopped at making their own lives and deeds central to almost every single story and aspect of the world. They have envisioned, imagined, storied and represented women through the ‘male gaze’, the practice of turning women into objects by robbing them of subjectivity. As a result, women ‘participate unequally in the practices through which social meanings are generated and the world is made’ (p. 2). We live in a world of female-faced poverty, sexualized violence and harassment, and movement control, and all too often, continuing low levels of self-esteem. Many women have a limited sense of future possibility, unhealthy obsessions with beauty and body image, a lack of historical memory and gender consciousness which causes them to blame themselves and other women rather than patriarchy, and to denigrate or dismiss feminism as a relic of the past (McRobbie, 2009; Scott-Dixon, 2006).

Our research over the past fifteen years has concentrated on museum exhibitions as important pedagogical spaces of vision, visibility, imagination and representation. Exhibitions are public representational structures, discursive imaginary formations through which people are able to see and thus come to know something about their topic. Benjamin (2014) calls them a ‘play of forces … ideal for influencing the public’ (p. 29). For Bartlett (2016), exhibitions are important because they ‘mark the significance of their subject’, lending it authority, legitimacy and socio-cultural value (p. 307). Museum and gallery exhibitions are also visited yearly by millions of people who come to be entertained but more importantly, to learn, and visitors tend to trust what they are learning through the exhibitions as ‘truth’ (e.g., Hannay, 2018). This is problematic because our studies over the past twelve years have uncovered what we call in feminist adult education a hidden curriculum nestled in the folds of displays and exhibitions worldwide that contributes actively to the female ‘absent presence’ and our current state of gender blindness. Through means both visible yet invisible, representational yet misrepresentational, imagined yet misconceived, men are persistently visualized and storied in exhibitions and displays as ‘knowers’ who perform actively, deeply and intentionally upon the world. When it comes to women, however, it is as though there is ‘nothing to see here so kindly move along’. Until women are able to represent themselves visually and to tell their own stories publicly, they will remain subject to the disempowering voyeurism of the ‘male gaze’ (e.g., Marshment, 1993; Clover et al., 2017; Sanford, et al., 2020).

Although imagining and storying women’s lives as material for exhibitions is a relatively recent phenomenon, women worldwide are in fact curating feminist exhibitions as sites of resilience and resistance. The very act of their staging makes a statement about women’s substantive contributions to the evolution of humanity and the ‘radical feminist ideologies and collective activities’ (Crane, 2000, p. 2) that exist in the interest of gender justice and change. By showcasing women in all their diversity, feminist exhibitions not only lend them authority, value and legitimacy, they also pedagogically incorporate their content ‘into the extra-institutional memory of the museum visitors’ (p. 2).

In this chapter, we focus on our own exhibition as a site of resistance and feminist interventionist strategy. In 2017–18 we curated a multi-media research exhibition entitled Disobedient Women: Defiance, Resilience and Creativity Past and Present in two separate galleries in Victoria, British Columbia. Drawing on feminist exhibition praxis and adult education we tell the story of how this exhibition came into being and its pedagogical intentionality. We focus on both design and content because the power of this feminist exhibition – and one could argue all exhibitions – is that it performed as both the messenger – the educator and carrier of a tale – and the message, a feminist imaginary of paintings and posters, poetry and puppets, videos and newspaper clippings, textiles and installations that told a tale of historical and contemporary defiance, resistance and resilience, and it offered another way of seeing and knowing the diversity of feminist power and activism.

Impetus and title

Disobedient Women was designed around a number of key features that scholars argue are inherent to feminist exhibitions (e.g., Best, 2016; Robinson, 2013). The first is that on one hand, feminist exhibitions can materialize as a result of work over time, a long, slow development, yet at other times, they are curated more hastily in response to a critical moment. Disobedient Women in fact combined these two elements. The idea for this type of exhibition had percolated in our more than two decades of studying feminist activisms and arts-based and creative practices as well as our need to ‘represent’ our findings in more creative and accessible ways. The actual act of curating Disobedient Women was, however, a more immediate response to a very immediate problematic moment in time. The Canadian government was in the midst of planning a ‘celebration’ of the Sesquicentenary of Confederation, the coming together of separate provinces into one nation called Canada. The narrative surrounding this event, however, was deeply patriarchal, showcasing stories of ‘white’ male colonial discovery, muscularity and war. Not only did this narrative exclude women but it ignored a century of challenges to its neat patriarchal ordering of things. Based on this, as well as a visit Darlene had made to a wonderful exhibition entitled Disobedient Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, we decided to adopt the term ‘disobedience’ for the title of the exhibition. Disobedience means a ‘refusal to obey rules or someone in authority’ (Oxford Dictionary Online, n.p.). For Bachelard, ‘to disobey in order to take action is the byword of all creative spirits and … the spark behind all knowledge’ (cited in Flood & Grindon, 2015, p. 7).

A second feature of feminist exhibitions identified by Robinson (2013) is that they are surveys rather than themed shows, illuminating specific or diverse elements of women’s movements. Based on both our research and the moment in time noted above, we decided to centre the exhibition at the intersections of women’s activism and political-activist artworks. The ‘survey’ quality of Disobedient Women is captured best in the Call for Objects, Belongings, Images and Stories we created and disseminated widely through a variety of social media platforms as well as to women’s organizations, transition houses, artist collectives, art galleries and museums and by word of mouth. The Call adopted Bachelard’s view that ‘the history of human progress amounts to a series of Promethean acts’ (cited in Flood & Grindon, 2014, p. 7). On one hand, they are public acts that aim to break the bonds of oppression. Women enter the public sphere with extraordinary courage, raising their heads above the parapet and taking to the streets to speak truth to power and challenge injustice. We invited women across the province to submit representations of the past and the present that illustrated highly visible and political acts of resistance and defiance in the public sphere. We received a variety of protest placards, puppets, protest buttons, quilts, pamphlets, record albums, puppets, banners, t-shirts, videos, newspaper clippings of women being arrested and more. On the other side, however, Bachelard speaks to disobediences that are ‘patiently pursued, so subtle at times as to avoid punishment entirely’ (p. 7) but they are nevertheless critical processes of refusal and defiance. To showcase these acts, we invited representations and stories by and about women who had made more understated yet equally important ‘activist’ contributions. These women sent us altered books, quilts, poetry and much more (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The exhibition. Photo by Darlene Clover.

Curatorial activism: Inclusion, participation and agency

When you asked me to write my own label, I was shocked because I had no idea what to say and I expected you to do it. That’s been my past experience with galleries … I just want to say thank you for giving me this chance.

Email excerpt from a commissioned artist

Another key design element of Disobedient Women was curatorial activism. According to Message (2013), curatorial activism is ‘attempts by individuals to engage with, represent and often contribute to social and political protest and reform movements’ (p. 1). Our intent was to not only represent women’s movements of activism and creativity in the province of British Columbia (BC), but also to join with and add to the numerous protests emerging around the explicit colonial history shrouded in the celebratory narrative of the Sesquicentenary. As feminists, however, we also took curatorial activism in a different and participatory direction which was an antithesis to the normative practices of curation where exhibitions are designed, conceptualized and narrated by the curator. Having said this, we did have a role to play in the curation, but in the interests of contributing to social movements we let go of as much power as was possible. The first participatory strategy we used was the Call noted above, which we disseminated far and wide to get the most diversity of representation and items as possible. The second strategy was to establish an advisory group of women who could guide the thinking, framing, design and curation of Disobedient Women. We pulled together a very diverse group, consisting of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, an art education professor, two PhD students with experience in museums, curators from a local heritage site and the Legacy Maltwood Gallery, adult educators from the provincial museum and an art gallery respectively. We also included four very interested UVic graduate students, one of whom centred her project around the exhibition. We met individually with members over the months and five of these women contributed artworks to the exhibition. What was most important about this group of artists and curators, however, is that they asked us critical questions about curatorial responsibility, the look and the feel of the exhibition, and the argument, narrative or allegory that would hold it together to withstand interrogation but equally provoke dialogue and challenge.

Our third curatorial activist strategy was to commission seven artists to create pieces for the exhibition around the theme of ‘disobedience’. We identified these women through our own networks, and they also supplied names of feminist activist artists. We met individually with each artist to outline the exhibition focus and their particular artistic genres and ideas. Artists’ backgrounds were diverse in culture, gender and age. The works they submitted included paintings, videos, installations, two sets of puppets, protest buttons and posters. All the artists were asked to compose their own label descriptors because, borrowing from Cixous’s (1976) comment above, we wanted the women to literally write themselves into the language and texts of the exhibition.

Our third participatory strategy was to interview two older women for their stories of resistance, resilience and solidarity. One interviewee was a local woman physician, Mary Wynne Ashford, who had for decades been a highly visible anti-nuclear activist. As an artist, Mary Wynne also produced a set of puppets for the exhibition (see Figure 1.2). Another interview was with Indigenous Elder May Sam. Feminist Indigenous adult educators remind us of the importance of rendering visible the diverse leadership roles Indigenous women have played as well as their use of arts-based practices to resist the sexist foundations of Canada’s colonial relations (e.g. Harris, in press). May Sam’s work often goes unnoticed because it is representative of the quieter side of activism, specifically, keeping her culture alive by knitting traditional sweaters and teaching the traditional practices to youth. But she is a powerful force in both her own community and as a (university) elder in residence. As a fourth strategy, we reached out to archivists at the University of Victoria and the Royal BC Museum to identify items in their collections. We will discuss some elements of this shortly.

A fifth feminist curat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Introduction: Opposites, Intersections, Turns and Other Imaginative Possibilities
• Part I VISUALIZING AND THE FEMINIST IMAGINARY
• Part II STORYING AND THE FEMINIST IMAGINARY
• Part III DECOLONIZING AND THE FEMINIST IMAGINARY
• Part IV CARING AND THE FEMINIST IMAGINARY
• Index
• Imprint