WSW Circular Newsletter
Aug 1, 2024 10 Minute Read
Welcome to the digital version of WSW Circular Newsletter, created in the “What’s Still Good About Yesterday’s Liberation?“ workshop, taught by Jeanne Vaccaro. In addition to our writing, you can find our WSW Circular playlist and bibliography; a non-exhaustive assemblage of articles, books, films, exhibitions, digital collections + archives, and oral history projects related to feminist criticism, archives, and memory projects, as well as a link to download the newsletter for redistribution.
(WE)MANIFESTO
We came together at the Women’s Studio Workshop in its 50th year, in July of 2024. We are curious, hopeful, amateur, experienced, invested, desiring, creative, nostalgic, critical, ravenous feminists of all genders.
This (we)manifesto inherits and extends earlier (wo)manifestos, feminist interventions into patriarchal language and naming. Our workshop, “What’s Still Good About Yesterday’s Liberation?” took as its starting point the 1987 WSW workshop on feminist criticism—of which there is little archival information or institutional memory. Like many archive holdings, the 1987 booklet compiled and annotated by Josephine Withers offers its materiality and opacity. Our contact with the WSW archive points to the dual meaning of speculation: to see and to imagine.
We gather under the conceit that the time of feminism is then, now, and always. We are here to tell you that we are all stewards, students, and actants of feminist pasts and futures.
This newsletter is our missive to the past and future, our utopian wish. Let it be mailed, copied, shared, stolen, cut up, changed, or re-used in the feminist present in which it finds you.
Feminist Ethics of Care
Feminist care values ties that bind, urging compassion, empathy in mind, centering lived truths & moral ground. How is this practiced? Where is it found?
In mutual aid, collective care, sanctuary spaces everywhere, processes of reconciliation, accountability in creation.
Sharing knowledge, skills, & more, resources open, hearts restored. In daily acts, big or small, embodying care, answering the call.
What can you do, starting today? Live these values in every way!
Feminist FOMO: A Guide to Grieving Queer Spaces
How do you grieve something you’ve never had? How do you hold something you’ve never touched? We don’t have the answer.
Let your loneliness push you into ravenous curiosity. Visit an archive, read old newsletters, befriend elders, make art, and distribute zines.
Mourn the loss of physical space, but imagine what will come next. Don’t let your grief keep you from enacting a better future. Don’t close your eyes to the work happening now.
Our Process
Collaborative Cut and Copy
Glossary / Methods
Our process for this newsletter is grounded in feminist traditions that reflect our hunger for world-building. We engage with:
feminist criticism to name how race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and immigration status are used to support state violence and systemic oppression of marginalized people– and to strategize our interventions
feminist ethics of care to center relationships in our work and position ourselves and our collaborators in an affective web of mutual responsibility [Caswell and Cifor, 2016]
citationality to increase accessibility and acknowledge the labor that goes into cultural production.
utopia as fuel for our wildest desires
manifesto as a grounding force to put action to our desires
Button Remixing
Why the Workshop?
“We will do what art can be”
We disrupt and dismantle with art and education—
as honest creation stirs desire for change.
We shift our rhythm, peeling back the protective mask of privilege—
a new, vulnerable, revision.
“you mingle and your work mingles”
We come together in a circle; without authority,
against professionalization,
sharing skills to emphasize the process of experimentation.
With ideas. With materials.
Always taking actionable steps to hold space — pulling the margins toward center.
Land Acknowledgement
Action Items
Bibliography
Articles
Caswell, Michelle and Cifor, Marika (2016). From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives
Esteban Muñoz, José (2008). Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts
Hartman, Saidiya (2008). Venus in Two Acts
Risam, Roopika (2021). Digital Queer Witnessing: Testimony, Contested Virtual Heritage, and the Aprtheid Archive in Soweto, Johannesburg
McKinney, C. (2015).Newsletter networks in the feminist history and archives movement
Chidgey, Red (2014). Hand-Made Memories: Remediating Cultural Memory in DIY Feminist Networks
Cowan, T.L. and Jaus Rault (2018). Onlining queer acts: Digital research ethics and caring for risky archives
Cohen, Cathy (1997). Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?
Pham, Larissa (2024).Aruna D’Souza’s New Book Argues against Empathy
hooks, bell (1995). Women Artists: The Creative Process
Books
Cifor, Marika (2022). Viral Cultures
McKinney, C. (2020). Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies
Muñoz, José Esteban (2009). Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
Possanza, Amelia (2024). Lesbian Love Story: A Memoir in Archives
Ryan, Hugh (2022). The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison
Molesworth, Helen (2024). Open Questions
Ketchum, by Alex D. (2022). Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses
Grimstad, Kirsten and Rennie, Susan (1974, reprinted 2019). The New Woman’s Survival Catalog
Earnest, Jarrett (2018). What It Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics
Nochlin, Linda and Reilly, Maura (2020). Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader
Lippard, Lucy (1976). From the Center
Elkin, Lauren (2023). Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art
Podcasts
Films
Exhibitions
Cruising The Archive, 2012
MOTHA - Museum of Trans Hirstory & Art, founded 2015, ongoing
fierce pussy AND SO ARE YOU, 1991-2018, 2018
Stonewall 50, 2019
Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall, 2019
Y’all Better Quiet Down, 2019
ON OUR BACKS: The Revolutionary Art Of Queer Sex Work, 2019
Images on which to build, 2023
Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines, 2024
Archivo de la Memoria Trans: Nuestros códigos (Our codes), 2024
Collections and Databases
Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University
New York Public Library Gay & Lesbian Collections
Visual AIDS Archives and Artist Registry
Feminist Art Base at the Brooklyn Museum
AWARE - Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Oral History Projects
Film Collections
Workshop Participants
M. Dillie
Allison Elliott
Leslie Fandrich
Josie Wenig
Teacher: Jeanne Vaccaro
Archivist: Faythe Levine
Print & Tech Manager: Erin Moore
Designer: Cassandra Gillig