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Redrawing boundaries: suffrage artists, spatiality, gender, and power
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Morton, Tara (2023) Redrawing boundaries: suffrage artists, spatiality, gender, and power. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b3985175~S1
Abstract
During the early twentieth century British women’s suffrage campaign, women artists, and some men, produced a wealth of visual materials for the cause from colourful banners and posters, to post cards and household ephemera, making a significant contribution to the visual spectacle of the movement. Yet, the only comprehensive text on suffrage artistry was published thirty-five years ago and while recent scholarship has begun to address the neglected identities and entrepreneurship of those behind suffrage visual culture, suffrage artists themselves are often lost in the boundaries between visual and political histories. This thesis makes a major contribution to the scholarship offering fresh voices and perspectives on suffrage artists’ gendered struggle for creative alongside political power at this critical juncture of modernity. Differently, it uses a spatial framework to move between the disciplinary boundaries, and across the archival deficits that have frustrated the recovery and analyses of suffrage artists’ lives, politics, and creative energetics. The chapters are wrapped around themes of place, space, embodiment, mobility, and utopias, organising, re-grounding and reframing suffrage artists’ lives, work, bodies, identities, and legacies, across an assemblage of landscapes both concrete and symbolic, real and imaginative, local and global, past and present. The principal focus falls on artists aligned to suffrage art groups the ASL and the Suffrage Atelier. However, friends, supporters, and other discursive actors appear where their suffrage and feminist stories are enmeshed in the spatial drama of contesting the power politics of art and gender in this era. The thesis gives fresh insight into how suffrage artists collectively organised and challenged gender power structures through suffrage art’s diverse economies, their colonisation and occupation of male architectures in the city, their intertextual disruption of prevailing discourses on gender traits and sexualities, as well as bringing fresh class and colonial links to the fore in ways that add to suffrage, socialist and imperial archives. In this transitional phase for women’s art and women’s politics, it locates suffrage artists within broader, transformative feminist cultures. At the same time, it explores ways spatiality might better illuminate the lives of more marginalised women in the suffrage movement, while contributing to wider studies on gender and power.
Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
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Subjects: | J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe) | ||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Women -- Suffrage -- Great Britain, Women artists -- Suffrage -- Great Britain, Suffrage -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century, Women| -- Suffrage -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century, Art -- Political aspects -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century, Feminism and the arts, Women artists -- Political activity -- Great Britain| -- History -- 20th century | ||||
Official Date: | April 2023 | ||||
Dates: |
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Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
Theses Department: | Department of History | ||||
Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
Supervisor(s)/Advisor: | Richardson, Sarah | ||||
Extent: | 365 pages : illustrations (some colour, some black and white), maps (colour) | ||||
Language: | eng |
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