Output details

Celebrating Twenty Years of British Gender and IR

This co-authored article for International Feminist Journal of Politics, proposes that feminism is core to the development of International Relations despite the relative absence of women in key positions of responsibility. Feminist Studies is therefore tasked to rethink the political and international through feminist and artistic imagination, creating a counterpoint to the grand narratives/ theories of masculine approaches. Hackett, as one of three artists and sole male, is commissioned to develop artist-led research methods out of his previous work, Our Story Scotland, an LGBT exhibition, Aberdeen and to apply these to new issues: gender, violence and the political work of feminism. He trials four different methods (Ending Feminist Futures?, Centre for Gender Studies, Aberdeen University, 24-5.10 2008 (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/genderstudies/events/99)):

• a Zine IN/OUT, opened to the world wide web, addresses themes such as bodies and disability (Kuppers’ The Olimpias); gender and sexuality (Brew’s provocative photographs of partially naked men Asking for It) (http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2008/08/where_is_femini)

• an exhibition for the conference includes the Zine artists and a film created by 16 year old girls looking at feminism (Glasgow Women’s Library)

• an interview with Brew (Tate Modern) focusing on her role as a female photographer objectifying men.

• a series of interviews/questionnaires with internationally acclaimed feminist artists, activists/scholars focusing on the ethics of Brew’s work, including McCabe, writer of the on line F word; Hsiao-Hung-Pai, Guardian journalist and writer on migrant labour; Paloni, author of Queer Lives; and Hunter, a feminist New Zealand artist.

Hackett complicates Brew’s possibly simplistic gender role reversal that mimics the values of the female model, resulting in debate on the ethics and risk for both the photographer and her male subject. He opens up the temporal and spatial boundaries of feminism’s role, creating a non-intimidating space in which multiple perspectives can be heard (pp310-314).