Pre-emptive mourning against the bomb: exploded domesticities in art informed by feminism and anti-nuclear activism
Article
Kokoli, A. 2017. Pre-emptive mourning against the bomb: exploded domesticities in art informed by feminism and anti-nuclear activism. Oxford Art Journal. 40 (1), pp. 153-168. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcx004
Type | Article |
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Title | Pre-emptive mourning against the bomb: exploded domesticities in art informed by feminism and anti-nuclear activism |
Authors | Kokoli, A. |
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, I trace 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 by 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. |
Research Group | CREATE/Feminisms cluster |
Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) |
Journal | Oxford Art Journal |
ISSN | 0142-6540 |
Electronic | 1741-7287 |
Publication dates | |
Online | 10 May 2017 |
30 Mar 2017 | |
Publication process dates | |
Deposited | 20 Apr 2017 |
Accepted | 08 Dec 2016 |
Output status | Published |
Accepted author manuscript | |
Copyright Statement | This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Oxford Art Journal following peer review. The version of record Alexandra M. Kokoli; Pre-Emptive Mourning Against the Bomb: Exploded Domesticities in Art Informed by Feminism and Anti-Nuclear Activism. Oxford Art J 2017; 40 (1): 153-168. doi: 10.1093/oxartj/kcx004 is available online at:https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcx004 |
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcx004 |
Web of Science identifier | WOS:000401751400009 |
Language | English |
https://repository.mdx.ac.uk/item/86y66
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