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Articulating Women

Articulating Women is designed to place theoretical concepts of gender in dialogue both with artistic expression and representation and with the experiences of professionals who make on-the-ground interventions (as teachers, volunteer trainers, academic leaders, those in charge of arts organisations).

Too often, women’s stories have been told by those with an agenda that does not recognise their achievements or acknowledge their viewpoint. In the past, women have been written out of history, science, and the arts, excluded and silenced through indifference, misrepresentation, and denial. Articulating women works to understand and counter, within different cultural contexts, this silencing of women’s voices while working to ensure that women are heard.

Articulating Women is designed to place theoretical concepts of gender in dialogue both with artistic expression and representation and with the experiences of professionals who make on-the-ground interventions (as teachers, volunteer trainers, academic leaders, those in charge of arts organisations). This allows theory to inform, but also to be tested against the expressive and experiential. In the process, the complexities of gender issues, particularly within complex social and cultural, and sometimes multi-cultural, contexts become more visible, highlighting the expectations associated with women’s place in a community. The project facilitates comparative discussions of different cultures and historical periods.

Interrogating Intersectionality

Articulating Women also interrogates the concept of intersectionality and constructions of gender as these intersect with other components of identity derived from political, social, cultural, religious, ethnic, and racialized discourses. It does so in ways that explore the tensions that emerge when theory, lived experience, productions and representations of identity through creative outputs, and professional practice are brought into dialogue. This is precisely what Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, in Intersectionality (2016), suggest is needed to refine the descriptive and methodological power, and political utility, of the concept.

Born out of the limitations of binary race- and gender-based critiques of the invisibility of Black women’s experience of compounded marginalisation and disempowerment, the concept went global at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in 2001 through Kimberley Crenshaw’s involvement. Nonetheless, the concept of intersectionality remains circumscribed by its origins in African American women’s experience of racism and sexism.

In an incisive article in the Feminist Review on Re-Thinking Intersectionality (2008), Jennifer C. Nash pointed out the theoretical and methodological evasions and assumptions that have plagued intersectionality and limited its utility. Nivedita Menon, Vrushali Patil and Kaveri Haritas, have wrestled with the limitations of intersectionality in relation to the complex gender politics within development agendas. Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s plea for a “feminism without borders” acknowledges the need to negotiate a politics of difference that still enables interventions based on collective understandings in an increasingly globalised world.

The interrogation of a concept that has important status in relation to both development agendas and to feminist theorising feels both timely and important.

Articulating Women is multi-organisational, multinational, and multi-disciplinary. It is an International Networking Project in receipt of AHRC funding. The project is supported by a partnership between Bluecoat Arts Centre; Christ University, Bengaluru; FACT; and Liverpool Hope University.

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