Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

The feminist philosopher Alison Bailey noted, in an informal review of Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly
posted on Amazon in 2001, that she had never read Mary Daly closely “because the word on the academic
streets was that she had nothing serious to offer”. By the 1990s Daly’s works were derided as excessively
theological, utopian and essentialist. She was now radical in the wrong ways, in contrast to the antiessentialist
focus on performativity and desire that characterised much feminist thought of that subsequent
era. Daly was much more interested in women, than she was in gender. This paper calls for a re-reckoning
with the oeuvre of Mary Daly, performed through a reading of her introductions to each re-issue of her first
major work, The Church and the Second Sex. First published in 1968, it was reprinted in 1975 and 1985.
Daly’s introductions to each reprint narrate her movement away from the author she was in the previous
iteration, offering stories of intellectual and spiritual transformation in which the personal is political is
theological is philosophical. As she narrates herself intellectually, she embraces the manifesto as her form. In
her telling, writing becomes the vehicle for injunction, rather than commentary. This paper will map Daly’s
story onto the larger history of radical feminism, exploring the work performed by the logic of the manifesto
within the movement.
Amanda Third Recuperating the Feminist Manifesto: Reading the Female Terrorist’s Autobiography
The 1974 publication of Jane Alpert’s feminist manifesto, “Mother Right”, is cited as a key marker of the shift
from radical to cultural feminism in the US in the mid-1970s. Written underground, while she was on the run
due to her participation in left-wing urban terrorism in the late 1960s/early 1970s, the manifesto was
published and promoted by her close friend and feminist ally, Robin Morgan. Seven years later, after time in
prison, Alpert published an autobiography – Growing Up Underground – centring on her time with the
Jackson-Melville terrorist cell. This paper analyses how both Alpert’s manifesto and autobiography operate
as mechanisms for the female terrorist’s “reintegration” into mainstream society. Resonating as exculpatory
narratives, Alpert’s texts are notable for the ways they grapple with the institution of the family. Drawing
upon the antipsychiatry literature, and reading the texts through the lens of Michel Foucault’s work on
confession, I explore how such confessional narratives articulate with dominant cultural logics of gender to
contain, recuperate and exonerate the female terrorist. In doing so, I reflect upon the limits of the gendering
of the political.
Natalya Lusty
Riot Grrrl Manifestos and Radical Vernacular Feminism
This paper examines riot grrrl manifestos in the context of the emergence of a vernacular third wave
feminism in the early 1990s. Although riot grrrl 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 determined. It examines how early Riot Grrrl manifestos rejected the traditional claims and
modus operandi of the radical public sphere by insisting on a vernacular feminism defined through the
rhetorical figure of the girl and non-normative feminine behaviour to emphasize everyday, micropolitical
action over grand narratives of resistance and revolution. By reinscribing the very terms of radicalism to
critique both mainstream and alternative cultural domains these manifestos have much to teach us about
the enduring forms of radical feminism.
1Q
Visibility, Invisibility, and Disappearance in Social Media and Digital Culture (Chair, Grant Bollmer)
Exploring the visual culture of digital and social media, this panel examines the politics of trauma, representation,
and vision through discussions of selfies, smartphone photography, and online subjectivity.
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