This UWinnipeg Women’s and Gender Studies interdisciplinary course explores a wide range of cultural practices such as performance, poetry, zines, crafting, street art, video and film, radio, spoken word, comics, and hypertext, to develop connections among artistic practices and feminist theory. To understand the economic, political and social conditions that women artists face, we investigate cultural production by women artists and critically engage a wide range of feminist culture and practices. We explore concepts such as interpretation, representation, cultural production, appropriation, censorship, voice, the body, identity, cultural democracy, and cultural resistance. Topics may vary. Students develop their own creative work.
2018 Collaborative Project
The 2018 Collaborative Project was an opportunity for all the members of the class to work, think, and make, collectively, and display their work in a public forum. It provided an engaging and transformative environment to share ideas and feed off of each other’s energy and creativity to create something entirely unique but meaningful to each of us individually. The conversations initially revolved around wrestling, and aliens, and a handful of individual threads spiralling in many directions. However, after a few productive sessions of conversation, reflection, and asking questions, the stray thoughts were wrangled and transformed into a feminist performance art intervention, entitled “Unravelling the Pussy Hat” created by our very own artist collective of sorts, aptly named, The Institute for Higher Unlearning. Images by Mahlet Cuff.
2018 Artist Bookworks
The final project of 2018 Feminist Cultural Productions allowed the students to take the simple concept of an artists’ book, or bookworks, and produce an original piece. First, attention was given to the definition, or perhaps lack, of an artists book, and in particular, how it’s indefiniability allows for the artist to stretch and reimagine the traditional notion of a book, or even an artist’s portfolio. Then, the class visited a local artists’ books library, Also As Well Too, and engaged with and marvelled at the works on display. In this library, the class held informal brainstorming sessions, shared their bookwork proposals, and helped each other shape fledgling ideas into something tangible. In a few short weeks, each student artist presented their final work to the class, along with their intentions and artistic choices made.
Queering my Diary: A Feminist Exploration of Self – Jen Sebring
CONCEPT: My bookwork is an exploration of the formation of my queer feminist identity, and how it feels as though it has always been apart of me in some way. It was inspired partially by the notion of non-linear time, and how experience re-informs one’s past, future, and present self. This bookwork represents me coming to understand my past, future, and present self, not as separate entities, but as moving parts that reshape themselves and the meaning I make from them.
FORM: I wanted to work with poetry, as poetry and writing in general is what I have turned to in my life to engage with my many thoughts and questions. I thought the somewhat disorganized or “mashed” aspect of collage would convey a non-linear understanding of self. I decided to make a collage on corkboard, that would fold open, upon unwinding the yarn, and the attached poem. I felt this would put the “reader” in a mindset that is open to the ideas I was trying to portray. I liked the idea of the physical opening of the book to be a laborious and involved process, just as my feminist and queer identity formation has been.
CONTENT: The content of the collage is pages from my favourite books, quotes, text messages with friends, journal entries, and poems I have written. I picked pieces that demonstrated the thought process I have relied on in my life – of self reflection, and asking questions – as I felt they explored my relationship, experience, and development of a feminist thought process. Further, as a feminist art piece, some of the collage contents trace moments of my coming out process as queer. The piece itself, is queer or feminist, in that it challenges normative ways of thinking, in this case, about time and identity. At times it feels that a feminist identity is a “before” and “after” process, but I hope that this piece represents that queer and feminist ways of thinking, of asking questions, have always been a part of me, in some way, no matter how small.