Charting cartographies of resistance: lines of flight in women artists’ narratives

Abstract

In this paper I chart lines of flight in women artist’s narratives. In focusing on the complex interrelations between the social milieus of education and art, what I suggest is that they should be analysed as an assemblage where power relations and forces of desire are constantly at play in creating conditions of possibility for women to resist, imagine themselves becoming other and for new possibilities in their lives to be actualised. As a novel approach to social ontology the theory of assemblages offers an analytics of social complexity that accounts for open configurations, continuous connections and unstable hierarchies, structures and axes of difference. In reconsidering resistance as immanent in dispositifs of power and assemblages of desire, what I finally argue is that women artists’ narratives contribute to the constitution of minor knowledges and create archives of radical futurity.

Keywords:

• art education
• assemblage theories
• lines of flight
• minor knowledges
• narratives
• resistance

Notes

1. The artists Irene Runayker and Pauline Crook, whose narratives I draw on in this paper, have asked me to use their real name.

2. Runayker’s paintings are available at: http://www.irenerunayker.com.

3. AHRC award: B/SG/AN10693/APN17267, 2004–2005.

4. See Tamboukou (2010b).

5. See Tamboukou (2008b) for an extensive discussion of a genealogical approach to narratives.

6. See Tamboukou (2008a).

7. For an overview, see Squire, Andrews, and Tamboukou (2008) and Riessmann‐Kohler (2008).

8. See Tamboukou (2003).

9. In arguing that Foucault’s technologies of the self need to be gendered I have traced genealogical lines in the care of the female self and have shown how women teachers have decisively bent the lines traced by Foucault. See Tamboukou (2003).

10. Maynard’s unpublished autobiography, chap. 35, 386, Queen Mary and Westfield College Archives.

11. Maynard’s, unpublished autobiography, chap. 44, 2–3.

12. See, amongst others, Cherry (1993).

13. The notion of agencement has been translated as assemblage by Brian Massumi (Deleuze and Guattari 1988), however some commentators have suggested that the term does not have a suitable English equivalent. As translator Daniel W. Smith explains, agencement comes from the verb agencer which means ‘to put together, organize, order, lay out, arrange’ (Deleuze 1997, 183); these notions are probably more complicated than just assemble.

14. For an overview of the artist’s work, see http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/stevens_may.html

15. See Tamboukou (2010).

16. Massachusetts College of Arts, Archive, 1998, 3.

17. See Tamboukou (2010) for a detailed discussion of the cultural hierarchies in Boston and the rift between the School of the Museum of the Fine Arts and the Massachusetts Normal Art School.

18. Chicago’s work can be seen on her website (http://www.judychicago.com/).

19. Critical feminisms are those feminist positions that according to Braidotti (1991) have attempted to express the female self as incomplete, plural, fragmented and yet rooted in her bodily reality. (See Tamboukou (2003) for an overview and critical discussion of this literature in relation to ‘technologies of the female self’.)

20. See Buchanan and Colebrook (2000) for encounters and tensions between Deleuze and feminist theories.

21. For an overview of this literature, see DeLanda (2006, 127–8).

22. The ‘sensible’ here should not be understood as something that makes sense, but as something that can be perceived by the senses, ‘what is visible and audible as well as what can be said, thought, made or done’ (Rancière 2009, 85).

23. As I have discussed elsewhere in detail, askesis is central in Foucault’s theorisation of the technologies of the self and in women’s reconfiguration of them in their auto/biographical narratives. See Tamboukou (2003).

24. Throughout my genealogical project in the constitution of the female self in art I have traced a series of intermezzo becomings. See Tamboukou (2010).