Michelle Meagher - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Michelle Meagher

Women's Studies, Jul 1, 2012

American Review of Canadian Studies, Apr 3, 2014

Women: A Cultural Review, 2002

... at the work of Cindy Sherman from 1977 to 1987, identifies this gradual transformation as one... more ... at the work of Cindy Sherman from 1977 to 1987, identifies this gradual transformation as one in which the artist `dissects the phantasmagoric space conjured up by the female body, from its exteriority to its interiority' (Mulvey 1991:139). This is, Mulvey argues, a transformation ...

Somatechnics, Mar 1, 2016

Feminist Theory, Dec 1, 2011

Responding to a recent surge of interest in feminist art, its futures, and its history, this arti... more Responding to a recent surge of interest in feminist art, its futures, and its history, this article considers the nature and function of the dominant narratives that circulate and structure the field. Specifically, I explore the persistent story of inter-generational strife in which a first generation of artists and historians is understood to have been naïvely mired in an essentialism of which a second, more theoretically savvy generation has been subsequently cleansed. Although one would be hard pressed to identify contemporary scholars who promote this sort of generationally bound progress narrative, the story persists. Its persistence, I argue, has less to do with its truth telling ability and more to do with its ability to perform the function of disidentification.

Feminist Media Studies, Aug 15, 2013

Feminist publishing played an important role in the feminist art movement of the 1970s and into t... more Feminist publishing played an important role in the feminist art movement of the 1970s and into the 1980s, and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics was a key journal in this landscape. This paper argues that Heresies is important not only because it was a forum for some of the most influential feminist art women of the period, but because it experimented with an editorial structure that required participants to reckon with the discomforts of difference. Editors of the periodical took seriously the feminist critique of hierarchically structured organizational cultures and both promoted and practiced collective publishing. Moreover, through an emphasis on editorial statements, I consider how Heresies gives expression to the affective entanglements of the women involved in Heresies' specific form of collaboration and collective feminist politics. An examination of the editorials as sites of affective intensity helps to come to an understanding not of what women were thinking, writing, and making, but how they may have felt about their work and their relationships with women with whom they worked.

International Journal of Feminist Approaches To Bioethics, Aug 1, 2022

This article explores post-cesarean shame to understand how normative birthing ideals are tied to... more This article explores post-cesarean shame to understand how normative birthing ideals are tied to neoliberal and popular feminist expectations of what it means to be a “good” mother. Drawing on narratives shared on motherhood blogs, we note that feelings of shame associated with cesareans are tied to social pressures for unmedicated, vaginal birth. Rather than critique nonmedical or “natural” birth, this article explores the affective implications of approaching birth as a curated and controllable process. We conclude with suggestions for practitioners, moms, and their supporters on how to make room for births that are not good.

Feminist Theory, Jul 28, 2017

Although nostalgia is a much-maligned orientation to the world, feminist scholars including Heath... more Although nostalgia is a much-maligned orientation to the world, feminist scholars including Heather Hillsburg (2013) and Kate Eichhorn (2015) have argued that it might be recuperated for feminist ends. This article mobilises the call to rethink nostalgia through an analysis of the feminist stories and storytelling in Joan Braderman's 2009 film, The Heretics. A documentary about a feminist collective founded in New York City in the 1970s, The Heretics sets up a way of thinking about feminism's past that is steeped in nostalgia. Throughout the film, Braderman maintains that the 1970s were 'a time when everything seemed possible'. By contrast, she assesses the moment in which she makes the film as a time in which 'fear corrodes even the young'. As feminist viewers of the film who did not (indeed by virtue of age could not) experience feminism in the 1970s, we initially read the nostalgic narrative of loss framing the film with suspicion. By drawing on feminist scholarship on nostalgia and feminist storytelling, however, we argue that nostalgia can function in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) would call a reparative mode that enriches the relationships that feminist scholars, activists and cultural workers bear to feminisms' pasts.

International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing

Drawing on experience gained from building a feminist digital humanities project in Linked Open D... more Drawing on experience gained from building a feminist digital humanities project in Linked Open Data (LOD), this article outlines five principles for authoring data for feminist scholarship and research. Using data from the New York–based Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, the AdArchive project represents advertising information from the magazine using RDF triples – the building blocks of LOD – in a dataset that will be both interoperable with other datasets and queryable on the larger Semantic Web. With an explicit commitment to feminist praxis, the AdArchive project provides a practical example of how data authoring can be shaped by feminist orientations. Ultimately, we argue that there is no neutral digital form or tool in either LOD or other digital environments, but researchers can successfully practise feminism when approaching the remediation of data.

IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics

This article explores post-cesarean shame to understand how normative birthing ideals are tied to... more This article explores post-cesarean shame to understand how normative birthing ideals are tied to neoliberal and popular feminist expectations of what it means to be a “good” mother. Drawing on narratives shared on motherhood blogs, we note that feelings of shame associated with cesareans are tied to social pressures for unmedicated, vaginal birth. Rather than critique nonmedical or “natural” birth, this article explores the affective implications of approaching birth as a curated and controllable process. We conclude with suggestions for practitioners, moms, and their supporters on how to make room for births that are not good.

American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism, 2018

The essays collected in this special issue of American Periodicals are all, in one way or another... more The essays collected in this special issue of American Periodicals are all, in one way or another, inspired by the Publishing Feminisms Conference held in Banff, Alberta in 2015. The call for papers for that conference was broad. Conference participants considered two key questions. What can print culture tell us about feminism’s past(s), its present articulations, and its future aspirations? What role does feminist print culture—a category that includes zines, periodicals, feminist presses, scholarly periodicals, popular periodicals, textbooks, blogs—play in the expansion of feminist politics, perspectives, and communities? We maintained that the conference would expand feminist print culture studies, and specifically feminist periodical studies, by facilitating analyses of contemporary texts and communities. The goal of the Publishing Feminisms Conference was to explore the relationships between post-1960s feminisms and feminist print culture—both the texts themselves and the prod...

In memory of Sharon RosenbergIn July 2012, a two-day symposium was held at the University of Albe... more In memory of Sharon RosenbergIn July 2012, a two-day symposium was held at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Alberta Canada), to celebrate and remember the life and work of Canadian feminist and cultural studies scholar, Dr. Sharon Michelle Rosenberg. Sharon was educated at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto and worked in the Sociology department at the University of Alberta from 2002 until her death in 2010. Her intellectual practice dealt with questions surrounding trauma, memory and remembrance, and the relationship between the living and the dead. Her scholarly work spanned the fields of cultural studies, queer theory, and feminist theory. Sharon was, from the early days of her dissertation work, interested in finding ways to disrupt the limited and limiting ethos of the university and the structures that shape academic knowledge creation and representation. In a 2010 essay in The Future of Memory, edited by Richard Crownshaw, Jane Kilby, an...

Australian Feminist Studies, 2021

ABSTRACT This article is a case study of the economic ephemera of Heresies, a feminist periodical... more ABSTRACT This article is a case study of the economic ephemera of Heresies, a feminist periodical produced by feminist art workers based in New York from 1977 to 1993. Inspired by recent scholarship in periodical and print culture studies that emphasise the value of print ephemera and under-examined ‘back matter’, we consider Heresies’ advertisements and subscription forms as symbolically rich artifacts that allow us to address and understand the implications of the magazine’s perennial struggle to stay financially afloat. This was a struggle complicated by an editorial collective’s suspicion – and indeed, sometimes-outright rejection – of traditional capitalist marketing practices. The pressure of funding a magazine without compromising anti-capitalist and anti-commodity political commitments was felt hard by Heresies, which was, like so many feminist periodicals produced in the 1970s and 1980s, largely volunteer-run, underfunded, and beholden to grants, gifts, generosity, and discounts. Archival records of Heresies’ budgetary woes are sparse; advertisements and subscription forms reveal the magazine’s orientation to its audiences and its political commitments. This article explores what advertisements and subscription forms, and more generally the economic ephemera of the magazines’ front and back matter, reveal about the culture of this specific periodical and the networks that supported it and that it sustained.

Feminist Theory, 2017

Although nostalgia is a much-maligned orientation to the world, feminist scholars including Heath... more Although nostalgia is a much-maligned orientation to the world, feminist scholars including Heather Hillsburg (2013) and Kate Eichhorn (2015) have argued that it might be recuperated for feminist ends. This article mobilises the call to rethink nostalgia through an analysis of the feminist stories and storytelling in Joan Braderman's 2009 film, The Heretics. A documentary about a feminist collective founded in New York City in the 1970s, The Heretics sets up a way of thinking about feminism's past that is steeped in nostalgia. Throughout the film, Braderman maintains that the 1970s were 'a time when everything seemed possible'. By contrast, she assesses the moment in which she makes the film as a time in which 'fear corrodes even the young'. As feminist viewers of the film who did not (indeed by virtue of age could not) experience feminism in the 1970s, we initially read the nostalgic narrative of loss framing the film with suspicion. By drawing on feminist scholarship on nostalgia and feminist storytelling, however, we argue that nostalgia can function in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) would call a reparative mode that enriches the relationships that feminist scholars, activists and cultural workers bear to feminisms' pasts.

Women's Studies, Jul 1, 2012

American Review of Canadian Studies, Apr 3, 2014

Women: A Cultural Review, 2002

... at the work of Cindy Sherman from 1977 to 1987, identifies this gradual transformation as one... more ... at the work of Cindy Sherman from 1977 to 1987, identifies this gradual transformation as one in which the artist `dissects the phantasmagoric space conjured up by the female body, from its exteriority to its interiority' (Mulvey 1991:139). This is, Mulvey argues, a transformation ...

Somatechnics, Mar 1, 2016

Feminist Theory, Dec 1, 2011

Responding to a recent surge of interest in feminist art, its futures, and its history, this arti... more Responding to a recent surge of interest in feminist art, its futures, and its history, this article considers the nature and function of the dominant narratives that circulate and structure the field. Specifically, I explore the persistent story of inter-generational strife in which a first generation of artists and historians is understood to have been naïvely mired in an essentialism of which a second, more theoretically savvy generation has been subsequently cleansed. Although one would be hard pressed to identify contemporary scholars who promote this sort of generationally bound progress narrative, the story persists. Its persistence, I argue, has less to do with its truth telling ability and more to do with its ability to perform the function of disidentification.

Feminist Media Studies, Aug 15, 2013

Feminist publishing played an important role in the feminist art movement of the 1970s and into t... more Feminist publishing played an important role in the feminist art movement of the 1970s and into the 1980s, and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics was a key journal in this landscape. This paper argues that Heresies is important not only because it was a forum for some of the most influential feminist art women of the period, but because it experimented with an editorial structure that required participants to reckon with the discomforts of difference. Editors of the periodical took seriously the feminist critique of hierarchically structured organizational cultures and both promoted and practiced collective publishing. Moreover, through an emphasis on editorial statements, I consider how Heresies gives expression to the affective entanglements of the women involved in Heresies' specific form of collaboration and collective feminist politics. An examination of the editorials as sites of affective intensity helps to come to an understanding not of what women were thinking, writing, and making, but how they may have felt about their work and their relationships with women with whom they worked.

International Journal of Feminist Approaches To Bioethics, Aug 1, 2022

This article explores post-cesarean shame to understand how normative birthing ideals are tied to... more This article explores post-cesarean shame to understand how normative birthing ideals are tied to neoliberal and popular feminist expectations of what it means to be a “good” mother. Drawing on narratives shared on motherhood blogs, we note that feelings of shame associated with cesareans are tied to social pressures for unmedicated, vaginal birth. Rather than critique nonmedical or “natural” birth, this article explores the affective implications of approaching birth as a curated and controllable process. We conclude with suggestions for practitioners, moms, and their supporters on how to make room for births that are not good.

Feminist Theory, Jul 28, 2017

Although nostalgia is a much-maligned orientation to the world, feminist scholars including Heath... more Although nostalgia is a much-maligned orientation to the world, feminist scholars including Heather Hillsburg (2013) and Kate Eichhorn (2015) have argued that it might be recuperated for feminist ends. This article mobilises the call to rethink nostalgia through an analysis of the feminist stories and storytelling in Joan Braderman's 2009 film, The Heretics. A documentary about a feminist collective founded in New York City in the 1970s, The Heretics sets up a way of thinking about feminism's past that is steeped in nostalgia. Throughout the film, Braderman maintains that the 1970s were 'a time when everything seemed possible'. By contrast, she assesses the moment in which she makes the film as a time in which 'fear corrodes even the young'. As feminist viewers of the film who did not (indeed by virtue of age could not) experience feminism in the 1970s, we initially read the nostalgic narrative of loss framing the film with suspicion. By drawing on feminist scholarship on nostalgia and feminist storytelling, however, we argue that nostalgia can function in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) would call a reparative mode that enriches the relationships that feminist scholars, activists and cultural workers bear to feminisms' pasts.

International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing

Drawing on experience gained from building a feminist digital humanities project in Linked Open D... more Drawing on experience gained from building a feminist digital humanities project in Linked Open Data (LOD), this article outlines five principles for authoring data for feminist scholarship and research. Using data from the New York–based Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, the AdArchive project represents advertising information from the magazine using RDF triples – the building blocks of LOD – in a dataset that will be both interoperable with other datasets and queryable on the larger Semantic Web. With an explicit commitment to feminist praxis, the AdArchive project provides a practical example of how data authoring can be shaped by feminist orientations. Ultimately, we argue that there is no neutral digital form or tool in either LOD or other digital environments, but researchers can successfully practise feminism when approaching the remediation of data.

IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics

This article explores post-cesarean shame to understand how normative birthing ideals are tied to... more This article explores post-cesarean shame to understand how normative birthing ideals are tied to neoliberal and popular feminist expectations of what it means to be a “good” mother. Drawing on narratives shared on motherhood blogs, we note that feelings of shame associated with cesareans are tied to social pressures for unmedicated, vaginal birth. Rather than critique nonmedical or “natural” birth, this article explores the affective implications of approaching birth as a curated and controllable process. We conclude with suggestions for practitioners, moms, and their supporters on how to make room for births that are not good.

American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism, 2018

The essays collected in this special issue of American Periodicals are all, in one way or another... more The essays collected in this special issue of American Periodicals are all, in one way or another, inspired by the Publishing Feminisms Conference held in Banff, Alberta in 2015. The call for papers for that conference was broad. Conference participants considered two key questions. What can print culture tell us about feminism’s past(s), its present articulations, and its future aspirations? What role does feminist print culture—a category that includes zines, periodicals, feminist presses, scholarly periodicals, popular periodicals, textbooks, blogs—play in the expansion of feminist politics, perspectives, and communities? We maintained that the conference would expand feminist print culture studies, and specifically feminist periodical studies, by facilitating analyses of contemporary texts and communities. The goal of the Publishing Feminisms Conference was to explore the relationships between post-1960s feminisms and feminist print culture—both the texts themselves and the prod...

In memory of Sharon RosenbergIn July 2012, a two-day symposium was held at the University of Albe... more In memory of Sharon RosenbergIn July 2012, a two-day symposium was held at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Alberta Canada), to celebrate and remember the life and work of Canadian feminist and cultural studies scholar, Dr. Sharon Michelle Rosenberg. Sharon was educated at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto and worked in the Sociology department at the University of Alberta from 2002 until her death in 2010. Her intellectual practice dealt with questions surrounding trauma, memory and remembrance, and the relationship between the living and the dead. Her scholarly work spanned the fields of cultural studies, queer theory, and feminist theory. Sharon was, from the early days of her dissertation work, interested in finding ways to disrupt the limited and limiting ethos of the university and the structures that shape academic knowledge creation and representation. In a 2010 essay in The Future of Memory, edited by Richard Crownshaw, Jane Kilby, an...

Australian Feminist Studies, 2021

ABSTRACT This article is a case study of the economic ephemera of Heresies, a feminist periodical... more ABSTRACT This article is a case study of the economic ephemera of Heresies, a feminist periodical produced by feminist art workers based in New York from 1977 to 1993. Inspired by recent scholarship in periodical and print culture studies that emphasise the value of print ephemera and under-examined ‘back matter’, we consider Heresies’ advertisements and subscription forms as symbolically rich artifacts that allow us to address and understand the implications of the magazine’s perennial struggle to stay financially afloat. This was a struggle complicated by an editorial collective’s suspicion – and indeed, sometimes-outright rejection – of traditional capitalist marketing practices. The pressure of funding a magazine without compromising anti-capitalist and anti-commodity political commitments was felt hard by Heresies, which was, like so many feminist periodicals produced in the 1970s and 1980s, largely volunteer-run, underfunded, and beholden to grants, gifts, generosity, and discounts. Archival records of Heresies’ budgetary woes are sparse; advertisements and subscription forms reveal the magazine’s orientation to its audiences and its political commitments. This article explores what advertisements and subscription forms, and more generally the economic ephemera of the magazines’ front and back matter, reveal about the culture of this specific periodical and the networks that supported it and that it sustained.

Feminist Theory, 2017

Although nostalgia is a much-maligned orientation to the world, feminist scholars including Heath... more Although nostalgia is a much-maligned orientation to the world, feminist scholars including Heather Hillsburg (2013) and Kate Eichhorn (2015) have argued that it might be recuperated for feminist ends. This article mobilises the call to rethink nostalgia through an analysis of the feminist stories and storytelling in Joan Braderman's 2009 film, The Heretics. A documentary about a feminist collective founded in New York City in the 1970s, The Heretics sets up a way of thinking about feminism's past that is steeped in nostalgia. Throughout the film, Braderman maintains that the 1970s were 'a time when everything seemed possible'. By contrast, she assesses the moment in which she makes the film as a time in which 'fear corrodes even the young'. As feminist viewers of the film who did not (indeed by virtue of age could not) experience feminism in the 1970s, we initially read the nostalgic narrative of loss framing the film with suspicion. By drawing on feminist scholarship on nostalgia and feminist storytelling, however, we argue that nostalgia can function in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) would call a reparative mode that enriches the relationships that feminist scholars, activists and cultural workers bear to feminisms' pasts.