Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts

Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts interrogates the politics of space expressed via womxn’s artistic practices, which prioritise solidarity and collaboration across borders, imagining attentive geographies of difference. It considers belonging as a manifestation of processes of becoming that traverse borders and generate new spaces and forms of difference. In doing so, the book aims to catalyse mutual social relations founded upon responsibility and response-ability to each other. The transnational framework activates concerns around belonging at a time of intensified divisions, partitioning global narratives, unequal trajectories and increasing violence against bodies of the most vulnerable, largely founded on Eurocentric paradigms of political, economic and cultural superiority.

The contributors engage in a conversation signalling transversal thinking and artmaking in order to articulate and activate ‘in-between’ spaces. This is to welcome co-affective models of belonging that question versatile embodiments of subjectivity as both agentic and as interrelational. Organised around the triangulation of modes of belonging: spatial, affective and collective, overarched by a transnational lens that acknowledges non-hierarchical, local and socially relevant genealogies against universalising politics of globalisation, these essays consider afresh ways in which female agency disrupts borders and activates concerns around different forms of belonging, citizenship and transnationalisms.

Cover Image credit: Keren Anavy, Garden of Living Images (2018), general installation view (detail). Courtesy of the artist and Wave Hill. Photographer: Stefan Hagen

Basia Sliwinska is an art historian and theorist working as a Research Fellow at the NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal. Recent books include Feminist Visual Activism and the Body, editor (2021), The Evolution of the Image: Political Action and the Digital Self, co-editor (2018) and the monograph The Female Body in the Looking-Glass: Contemporary Art, Aesthetics and Genderland (2016).

Catherine Dormor is Reader in Textile Practices and Head of Research Programmes at the Royal College of Art, UK. A practicing artist and researcher, her recent publications include the co-edited book The Erotic Cloth: Seduction and Fetishism in Textiles (2018) and A Philosophy of Textile: Between Practice & Theory (2020). She is Regional Editor (Europe) for Textile: the Journal of Cloth & Culture and her artworks feature in a number of international collections.