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The relationship between corporeal feminism and materialisms has been addressed in a number of recently emerging writings and artistic projects. In this essay, I focus on Cathy Wilkes' exhibition in the British Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 (although I suggest rather than being a singular event, it belongs to and further evolves her overarching constellation weaving art and life together) and explore her practice of meaning-making and questioning of production of knowledge driven by non-representationalist methodology understood as an affective material inter-action. I propose that Wilkes' practice performs embodied feminist materiality in matter-scapes activating threshold spaces in which intimate care-full encounters emerge. The figure of the threshold animates matter with/in which subjectivity is embedded and embodied, nurturing a care-full response-ability and a political responsibility in the context of patriarchal neoliberal and late-capitalist social structures marked by poverty, unpaid reproductive labour, precarity of work, refugee crisis, incomprehension and social injustice. It invokes vulnerable (resistant) transitions and liminal spaces. Wilkes' constellations grow together through vital matter and liveability.

This book examines contemporary feminist visual activism(s) through the lens of embodiment(s). The contributors explore how the arts articulate and engage with the current sense of crisis and political concerns (e.g. equality, decolonisation, social justice, democracy, precarity, vulnerability), negotiated with and through the body. Drawing upon the legacy of feminist art historical critique, the book scrutinises activist strategies, practices and resilience techniques in intersectional and transnational frameworks. It interrogates how the arts enable the creation of civil and political resilience, become engaged with politics as a response to disaster capitalism and attempt to reform and improve society.

This volume addresses the evolution of the visual in digital communities, offering a multidisciplinary discussion of the ways in which images are circulated in digital communities, the meanings that are attached to them and the implications they have for notions of identity, memory, gender, cultural belonging and political action. Contributors focus on the political efficacy of the image in digital communities, as well as the representation of the digital self in order to offer a fresh perspective on the role of digital images in the creation and promotion of new forms of resistance, agency and identity within visual cultures. Edited by Basia Sliwinska

In his theory of the 'mirror stage', the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan argued that the female body is defined by its lack of male attributes. Within this framework, he described female sexuality primarily as an absence, and assumed female subordination to the male gaze. However, what happens if one follows Jean Baudrillard's advice to 'swallow the mirror' and go through the 'looking-glass' to explore the reflections and realities that we encounter in the cultural mirror, which reflects the culture in question: its norms, ideals and values? What if the beautiful is inverted and becomes ugly; and the ugly is considered beautiful or shape-shifts into something conventionally thought of as beautiful? These are the fundamental questions that Basia Sliwinska poses in this important new enquiry into gender identity and the politics of vision in contemporary women's art.Through an innovative discussion of the mirror as a metaphor, Sliwinska reveals how the post-1989 practices of woman artists from both sides of the former Iron Curtain - such as Joanna Rajkowska, Marina Abramovic, Boryana Rossa, Natalia LL and Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova - go beyond gender binaries and instead embrace otherness and difference by playing with visual tropes of femininity. Their provocative works offer alternative representations of the female body to those seen in the cultural mirror. Their art challenges and deconstructs patriarchal representations of the social and cultural 'other', associated with visual tropes of femininity such as Alice in Wonderland, Venus and Medusa. The Female Body in the Looking-Glass makes a refreshing, radical intervention into art theory and cultural studies by offering new theoretical concepts such as 'the mirror' and 'genderland' (inspired by Alice's adventures in Wonderland) as critical tools with which we can analyse and explain recent developments in women's art.

This volume addresses the evolution of the visual in digital communities, offering a multidisciplinary discussion of the ways in which images are circulated in digital communities, the meanings which are attached to them and the implications they have on notions of identity, memory, gender, cultural belonging and political action. Contributors focus on the political efficacy of the image in digital communities, as well as the representation of the digital self in order to offer a fresh perspective on the role of digital images in the creation and promotion of new forms of resistance, agency and identity within visual cultures

In this dialogic chapter, we reflect on our collaborative curation of an exhibition that explored domesticity from feminist dissident perspectives. Featuring work protesting the changes to policy concerning domestic violence in Poland (Malgorzata Markiewicz), subverting, through craft, women's maintenance of the home as both dwelling and ideal (Su Richardson), unpicking maternal subjectivities while staging a confrontation between feminist and modernist approaches to art history (CANAN), and unsettlingly recasting the home as a site of violence and resistance (Paula Chambers), Home Strike (l'étrangère, 2018) is revisited as both an unfinished inter-generational and transnational project critiquing and defamiliarising the home, and an opportunity for reflection and exchange on the curators' own lived experiences of migration and patriarchal regimes of space. Personal meditations on (un)belonging, temporary habitats and object attachments are interspersed with critical observations on migration, xenophobia and the neoliberal demand for mobility, particularly in the case of cultural workers. As well as (a) correspondence and dialogic reflection on shared preoccupations, what follows is an exchange of letters working through the aftershocks of our co-curation of an exhibition and opening up new strands of thinking and research into projects yet unrealised. The epistolary form was adopted as a practical and equitable record-keeping of our exchange, but also for its rich tradition in feminist politics and thought: as Margaretta Jolly (2008) eloquently demonstrates, in the Women's Liberation Movement correspondence both charted the emergence of a new consciousness and sisterly alliances, and became a lab for the development of alternative ways of thinking and engaging with one another. Following recent feminist experimentation, we aspire to occupy the space between 'letter-writing as a formal convention' (Meskimmon, 2014, 31) and a dialogical critical feminist methodology of 'engaged essay-making' (ibid, 29).

Analysing SIA's music video Big Girls Cry (2015), this chapter argues for a recognition of corpomaterial and affective agency amongst forms of political resistance beyond forms of protest, in which engagement can be restricted by bodily and affective vulnerability. It signals the agential significance of quotidian corpomaterial and affective actions in enacting political resistance by focusing on anxious breathing diffused throughout SIA's music video. Although breathing and anxiety are not usually associated with politics, this chapter shows how quotidian corpomaterial and affective practices are intra-actively enacted through social power relations, and how they enact transformations, breaks, and re-directions of the ways social power relations are lived. It argues that striving for breath and for breathable lives needs a recognition of differential forms of political practices and resistance needs to focus not only on how bodies and affects act in politics but also how they enact politics in a quotidian manner.

The focus of the issue is on the concept of home in a transnational perspective. The articles included address feminist art and theory, and global studies which share a tendency to 'think across' disciplines, gender, place or materiality. The authors explore artistic practice in terms of 'trans-figurations' – material forms of thought operating across gender, place and belonging. They conceptualise the concept of home within the politics of domesticity and ideologies of nationhood and citizenship, as a powerful construct enabling the questioning of the production of space. The aim of this special issue is to activate thinking about home, identity and space in a transnational perspective drawing from feminist discourse.