Pre-emptive mourning against the bomb: exploded domesticities in art informed by feminism and anti-nuclear activism

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.

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