Mediated Pleasures in (post)Feminist Contexts
Watershed Media Centre, Bristol, Saturday 19th March 2005
Organised by the department of Visual Culture, U.W.E.

This symposium will explore the generational relationship between second-
wave feminism and contemporary debates about ‘third-wave’ or ‘post-
feminist’ identities as they are articulated in visual culture.  In
particular we are interested in the relationship between popular culture
and fine art in terms of female subjectivity. The symposium aims to
challenge the binary model through which artworks or media texts are
understood as either complicit with, or subversive of, patriarchal
representational structures. Debates about post-feminism often continue to
legitimate the division between ‘good’ feminist ‘mothers’ and ‘bad’ post-
feminist ‘daughters’. But, are there trajectories within second-wave
feminism, both in theory and practice that might provide grounds for a
rapprochement?  Is third-wave feminism marked by a different model in which
the relationship between femininity and feminism is fluid, ambiguous or
uncertain? To what extent can practice drive theory in this regard? How
might feminist understandings engage positively with contemporary
representations of femininity when these speak of visual and bodily
pleasures that are always-already mediated through popular culture?

Our position is that the strategic imperatives that informed second-wave
feminism have shifted and, now that we are in a period of reassessment,
there is an urgent need to develop feminist thinking that acknowledges
mediated female pleasures in women’s art practice.

Programme

9.30amRegistration/coffee/tea

10.00am   Welcome and keynote speech – Paula Smithard
(Central St. Martin’s College of Art & Design)

11.00am Sue Tate (University of the West of England): Transcending binary
oppositions: the predicament and the promise of the woman Pop artist

11.30am Clare Johnson (University of the West of England): Temporal
Productions of Hyper-Femininity


12.00pm Coffee/tea


12.15pm Maria Walsh (Chelsea College of Art & Design):
The complication of time in Salla Tykka's Lasso (2000)

12.45pm Mo Throp (Chelsea College of Art & Design): Love Stories


1.15pm Lunch


2.15pm Bronwyn Platten (Gray's School of Art, The Robert Gordon
University): Minding Body: Embodying Mind

2.45pm Judith Rugg (Kent Institute of Art and Design): Interiority and
Psychic Space in Anya Gallaccio’s Couverture

3.15pm  Geraldine Finn (School for Studies in Art and Culture,
Carleton
University, Ottawa, Canada) What Kind of Saying Is A Song?



3.45pm Coffee/tea


4.00pm Plenary

4.45pm End