Yesterday my friend Luke and I discussed “Femininity Slashed: Suffragette Militancy, Modernism and Gender” by Caroline Howlett. Before he read it, I told him it’s not as hard to follow as Judith Butler (whose “Critically Queer” we had discussed the day before), and he was elated, commenting “So, it’s like Butler Lite: half the esoterica, all the flavor.”
Which seems pretty accurate to me. I am amazed at both Butler’s and Howlett’s work, but especially Howlett’s reading of the Suffragettes’s early 20th century femininity as “‘femme-ininity’ or woman-oriented feminine performance” (76), and her reading of Mary Richardson’s 1914 hatcheting and slashing of the painting Rokeby Venus along similar lines.
The painting:
Coincidentally, the same day I write about Feminism, Queer Theory, and Judith Butler, I read Torill Mortensen’s blog post including this picture she took of a poster glued to a building in Bergen:
Mortensen writes that the first line translates as:
We really appreciate
Judith Butler
She is marvellous and very wise! Her books “Gender Trouble“ and “Bodies that Matter“ have become the theoretical fundament of the queer theory/queer movement.
