Natalya Lusty

Sexing the Manifesto: Mina Loy, Feminism and Futurism

CCORDING to Roger Conover, ‘Mina Loy’s goal was simply to become the most original woman of her generation’ (1996: xiii). While the audacity of this ambition might account for Loy’s association with nearly every avant-garde movement of her day*Futurism, Imagism, Dada and Surrealism*Loy’s connection with these movements, like her fluid association with the various national cultures of England, Italy, France and the United States, also made her one of Modernism’s most elusive figures. It is as though Loy was everywhere but paradoxically nowhere, so much so that by the early 1920s a rumour began circulating in Paris that Mina Loy was an invented artistic persona. Hearing this story Loy turned up at one of Natalie Barney’s notorious salons and formally declared, ‘I assure you that I am indeed a living being. But it is necessary to stay very unknown’ (Conover 1996: xii). Like her mythic status as the most original woman of her generation, as well as the most elusive, Loy’s writing, especially from this early period, is at once difficult and luminous, radically original and yet clearly struggling with the legacy of traditional political and poetic form. While so much of her work is ignited by the collective energies and innovations of various avant-garde precepts, it also remains distinctly and defiantly autonomous, providing a challenge to the gendering of modernism as a masculine innovative enterprise. Despite the mounting stature of Loy’s critical reception, her legendary status still seems to overshadow the difficulty of her idiosyncratic voice, with its heightened polemical effect evident not only in the manifesto writings, a genre premised on passionate disputation, but also in the early poetry, in the form of an elegant dissonance that navigates the pleasures A w N A T A L Y A L U S T Y .......................................................................................................

Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis

Contents: Introduction: disturbing subjects: surrealism, feminism and psychoanalysis Masking the crime of femininity Surrealist transgression and feminist subversion Disturbing the photographic subject Fashioning the lesbian subject of surrealism Surrealism, violence and censorship Conclusion: disturbing the feminist subject Bibliography Index.

Riot Grrrl Manifestos and Radical Vernacular Feminism

ABSTRACT This essay argues that Riot Grrrl manifestos were instrumental in promulgating a form of radical feminism that demonstrates the enduring nature of feminist radicalism. While a great deal of important work has been written on the movement, little attention has been paid to how these manifestos developed a distinctive political language and culture. By foregrounding the volatility of feminine youth and the historical erasure of the girl subject as a radical political agent, Riot Grrrl manifestos redefined the gendered (and ageist) exclusionary practices of the radical public sphere, promoting unified forms of resistance, often symbolised as a personal, albeit contagious, awakening to the realities of harassment, repression, violence and ridicule. This kind of molecular, contingent politics worked to exploit the contradictions inherent in young womens lives rather than to overcome the differences that had splintered more congealed formations of feminist politics. In rejecting the traditional claims of the radical public sphere, Riot Grrl manifestos insist on a vernacular feminism that strategically emphasises micropolitical action over grand narratives of resistance and revolution. While these manifestos draw on aspects of second-wave radical feminism and older forms of avant-garde culture, they push the genre of the manifesto into new territory by stressing everyday forms of resistance, defining their imagined consistency as porous and reactive rather than exclusive or over-determined.

Rethinking historiography and ethnography: Surrealism’s intellectual legacy

ABSTRACT Taking up Maurice Blanchot’s perceptive claim that “Surrealism remains always of our time”, the essay traces the importance of Surrealism for rethinking the methods of historiography (for Walter Benjamin) and ethnography (for James Clifford) in ways that allow us to appreciate the significance of Surrealism’s intellectual legacy. In his early essays on Surrealism and the monumental, unfinished work, The Arcades Project, Benjamin developed a new historical methodology, what I term surrealist historiography, that sought to uncover the latent dimensions of culture, obscured by the dazzling sheen of progress embedded within conventional historical narrative. If Benjamin found in Surrealism a way to overcome the limitations of a Rankean historicism, the point of departure for Clifford’s essay, “On Ethnographic Surrealism” is the crisis of ethnographic authority precipitated by a postcolonial critique of the discipline of anthropology. Clifford’s aim in this essay is thus to provide a provocative reassessment of Surrealism’s self-reflexive ethnographic spirit and what it might contribute to a refashioning of ethnographic practice as a polyvocal assemblage that holds in tension disparate material realities and aesthetic principles. Surrealism’s intellectual legacy thus lies, as Michel Foucault has claimed, in its path-breaking interdisciplinarity, which is why it continues to be, for Blancot and others, “a brilliant obsession”.