Abstract
Women Mobilizing Memory is the first comprehensive anthology in the emerging field of practice-based feminist memory studies. The book, as outlined in Marianne Hirsch’s insightful introduction, and then exemplified by a wide variety of case studies, performs three important theoretical and methodological interventions in the field of memory studies. First, Women Mobilizing Memory explores what constitutes feminist memory today, primarily by emphasising a feminist ‘ethics of transculturality’ that facilitates transnational conversations while also acknowledging ‘the limits of translatability’ of singular experiences and distinctive sociopolitical contexts (pp. 12–13). Second, it underlines the inherent transculturality of the twenty-first century virtual memory sites and spaces by forging new methodologies in the practices and analyses of online memory practices. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the book illuminates how feminist acts of memory discussed in the volume extend the ritual of commemoration and become powerful acts of resistance.
The publication of this book celebrates the conclusion of a multi-year, transnational, collaborative project that convened in multiple conferences, curated two exhibitions and staged or co-witnessed a number of protest-performances. The six editors—Turkish feminist scholars Ayşe Gül Altınay and Banu Karaca; Chilean director, performance artist and theorist María José Contreras; and American professors Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard and Alisa Solomon—represent the four geographical areas that the volume mainly covers: Turkey, Central and South America, Western Europe and the United States. Chapters interrogate the memory politics distinctive to these regions, such as postcolonialism, racial and gender injustices and authoritarianisms in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The twenty-seven chapters of this rich anthology discuss an impressive variety of genres of commemorative practices and performances. These include activist events, such as the mothers’ marches, political protests and collective walks, and artistic projects such as theatre performances, collective readings, photo exhibitions, visual installations and documentaries.
The essays together offer a comprehensive vision of what constitutes feminist memory-politics beyond the apparent gender-related thematic choices that include motherhood, as discussed in the chapters by Meltem Ahiska, Banu Karaca, Nicole Gervasio, Diana Taylor and Noémie Ndiaye, and in Milena Grass Kleiner’s very interesting study of an abandoned daughter. Other chapters discuss domestic violence and other forms of femicide, including Marcela A. Fuentes’ analysis of the #NiUnaMenos movement in Argentina, and Dilara Çalışkan’s essay on the Turkish government’s necropolitical violence against transwomen.
Distinctively feminist is perhaps the affective and aesthetic modality with which these acts of memory centre on motifs of void, silence and erasure. ‘Absence is matter in and of itself’, proposes Nicole Gervasio in her article on Turkish artist Aylin Tekiner’s On the Wall photo series (p. 260). Many of the commemorative rituals, protests and performances discussed or enacted by the authors of this volume set out to locate, uncover and visualise these absences. The studies excavate and remediate experiences that have been obliterated by hegemonic memory discourses and repressive ideologies. They thereby constitute narratives of counter-memories, weaving personal recollections and intimate memory traces into the collective memory of the patriarchal nation state.
The authors and artists included in the volume expose the often-invisible traces of the past through intimate embodied encounters. For example, in ‘Curious steps’, Bürge Abiral, Ayşe Gül Altınay, Dilara Çalışkan and Armanc Yildiz walk the streets of Istanbul to acknowledge the spaces of Armenian, Kurdish, Jewish and Turkish heroines who were erased from twentieth-century Turkish history. In ‘Aqui’, María José Contreras Lorenzini creates an interactive map of Santiago de Chile by recording herself with a drone as she performs ‘die-ins’, or lays motionlessly at locations where Chilean women disappeared during Pinochet’s military dictatorship. These two performances capture the ephemeral and spectral aesthetics that characterise the feminist memory works discussed in the volume.
María José Contreras Lorenzini’s theorisation of the use of digital mapping in her performance, Diana Taylor’s framing of ‘traumatic memes’ and Marcela A. Fuentes’s analysis of hashtag performativity highlight the multifaceted digital intervention in practice-based feminist memory. These articles demonstrate the world-making potential of digital activism that is ephemeral and durational, transnational and trans-temporal and attuned to the ‘ethics of transculturality’ (p. 12) that Marianne Hirsch underlines in her introduction. While the authors emphasise that memes, hashtags and performative acts travel cross-culturally, building new communities and creating new spaces, they also argue that embodied live experiences and their digital dispersions are inevitably intertwined. This convergence constitutes a multitude of publics with distinctive reiterations and cultural interpretations of the iconic digital and embodied memory signs.
Invoking erased lives, remediating suppressed experiences of trauma, and extending recognition to those who have been denied it has to begin with the acknowledgement of the vulnerable conditions in which these women, and women in general, have been violently placed by repressive patriarchies. The memory works in the volume, however, move beyond the ritualistic commemorations of the silenced victims and turn into powerful protest events and performances by owning the legacy of these shared vulnerabilities. Women Mobilizing Memory builds on Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay’s thought-provoking anthology Vulnerability in Resistance (2017). The anthology proposed that ‘vulnerability is part of resistance, made manifest by new forms of embodied political interventions and modes of alliance’ (ibid., p. 15). Vulnerability as a part of resistance was demonstrated in how vulnerabilities transmitted from the past can successfully mobilise current political and social movements. The most convincing support of this argument is Deva Woodly’s discussion of ‘generational trauma’ that the Movement for Black Lives takes up and uses to delineate the current sociopolitical realities to the history of institutional racism and the atrocities of the past: ‘In this sense, the movement mobilizes the memory of trauma and dehumanization for change’ (p. 223). Alisa Solomon juxtaposes Jeff Weiss’s intimate cabaret-theatre during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s with the series of his evocative performances in 2015 to demonstrate how the multigenerational act of co-witnessing and sharing of traumatic memory transforms into the celebration of ‘queer futurity’ and the survival of the community.
Ultimately, it is this forward-looking gaze that ties the case studies of Women Mobilizing Memory together. Whether the artists, activists and scholars in this volume ‘potentialize history’ by exploring ‘unrealized possibilities’ (Hirsch references the theorist Ariella Azoulay, p. 19), offer ‘new ways of becoming’ (Abiral et al., p. 96), ‘propose alternative feminist social scripts’ (Ndiaye, p. 378) or ‘dismantle patriarchal scripts and prefigure social change’ (Fuentes, p. 185), they all work towards transformative justice. This work entails empowering new feminist communities, connected through vulnerability, solidarity and care.