Femininities Reimagined: Gender Politics in Contemporary British Moving Image Art

Abstract

This dissertation explores the status of feminist moving image practice within British art institutions in the twenty-first century. Since feminist politics gained momentum and moving image emerged as an artistic medium in 1970s Britain, both the political movement and medium have undergone a progressive process of institutionalisation and popularisation that threatens their countercultural potential. Contemporary artists working within the legacy of 1970s feminist film criticism and moving image must contend with a changed socio-political and institutional landscape where feminism faces the threat of capitalistic and neoliberal co-optation, while its suitability to provide an inclusive framework for contemporary gender politics has also come under question. In response to this context, this dissertation addresses two central questions: first, can politically driven moving image practices perform countercultural criticism even as they are integrated into institutional settings and discourses? Second, can feminist theory still provide a relevant critical framework for the analysis of contemporary moving image artworks that challenge heteropatriarchal representational structures? To answer these questions, I examine the moving image practices of a selection of artists—Marianna Simnett, Lucy Beech, Jamie Crewe and Michelle Williams Gamaker—who have come professionally of age in twenty-first-century Britain and are extending early feminist film criticism’s commitment to challenge white, heteropatriarchal archetypes of femininity (re)produced by dominant audiovisual culture in this changed geopolitical context. My analysis highlights how these artists are recontextualising this seminal feminist concern through queer, transgender and postcolonial perspectives, affirming feminism’s intersectional possibilities. I situate their practices in the context of what Visual Culture theorist Irit Rogoff has defined as the ‘research turn’ in contemporary art, where artworks function as privileged arenas for the production of alternative knowledges. Using techniques of subjective reenactment, re-citation and rescripting—strategies that are collectively conceptualised here as forms of reimagining—I demonstrate how these artists offer subjective, situated, speculative and intersectional approaches to gender representation that counteract the often universalising and objectifying mobilisation of gender politics within institutional contexts.