Pre-emptive mourning against the bomb: exploded domesticities in art informed by feminism and anti-nuclear activism

Kokoli, Alexandra M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3730-8570 (2017) Pre-emptive mourning against the bomb: exploded domesticities in art informed by feminism and anti-nuclear activism. Oxford Art Journal, 40 (1) . pp. 153-168. ISSN 0142-6540 [Article] (doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcx004)

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Abstract

Art informed by second-wave feminism has often cast domestic space as a site of ambivalence if not unhomeliness, inspired by gender-critical dissent. This article expands on previous research into the strategic unhomeliness of feminist art by focusing on works informed by anti-nuclear activism as well as feminism in the 1980s. Drawing on psychoanalytic approaches to conflict, I trace anti-nuclear (per)mutations of dystopian domesticity in feminist visual and material cultures that give form to the collective nightmare of a nuclear holocaust. In the art practice under consideration domesticity is thrown into crisis anew: the home is expanded into a site of pacifist resistance while also being cast as the place of the feared premature and violent death of loved ones by nuclear disaster. Motherhood and gendered care-giving are simultaneously challenged and mobilised in the consciousness-raising performances and posters of Sister Seven, as well as Margaret Harrison’s recreations of the periphery fence of the Greenham Common RAF military base. The feminist pacifist – curative – response to the threat of nuclear war as a ‘paranoid elaboration of mourning’ (Fornari) is pre-emptive mourning, which, unlike pre-emptive strikes, rises to the defence of survival.

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