The Red Gown: Reflections on the Visual History of Menstruation in Scotland

Over the last decades, menstruation has become more present in public discourse in Scotland.While scholars are increasingly documenting this change, little attention has been paid to therole of menstrual art made in Scotland. In this article, we explore the historic contexts ofmenstrual art in the town of St Andrews and in Scotland during the late twentieth and earlytwenty-first century, and ask what this reveals about menstrual absence and presence in publicdebates. We do this in collaboration with artist Bee Hughes, whose practice focuses on thevisible and invisible aspects of menstruation, and who was artist in residence at St Andrews in2020. Due to a university strike and a pandemic, our collaboration changed and subsequentlyfocused more on the histories of menstrual art. We thus assess symbols and collections ofmenstrual visual culture in Scotland, including the use of the ceremonial red gown at theUniversity of St Andrews, and menstrual art collections at Glasgow Women’s Library and StAndrews Special Collections. Together, we reflect on how their histories might be both present(institutionalised) and absent (when not on display). 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Researching the Researchers: The Impact of Menstrual Stigma on the Study of Menstruation

Menstruation has been historically stigmatised through a variety of strategies cross-culturally, including silencing and marginalisation. Such stigmatisation has affected the inclusion of menstruation as a topic of research across disciplines, reproducing stigma through a lack of research and new knowledge. I set out to discover more about the perceived nature and impact of such stigmatisation on the professional experience of menstrual researchers. The research cohort was a group of nine scholars from humanities and social science disciplines, living and working in the UK, USA and Russia, who came together in 2020 for a two year project to research menstrual history, activism, politics, education and culture in order to better understand the Scottish context of legislation to 'end period poverty'. I was also a member of this group and this paper is structured through an autoethnographic enquiry. My qualitative research was interview-based using online video meetings. My data shows that the perceived impact of menstrual stigma on academic research has altered, with older researchers experiencing more barriers in the early stages of their careers than younger ones do now. However, menstrual researchers still experience challenges they consider to be stigma-related in publishing menstrual research, in obtaining permanent positions centred on their specialisation, and in attracting long-term and large-scale funding. This research shows how entrenched stigma can lead to a feedback loop of victimisation that is difficult to escape from, and suggests that academics working on stigmatised topics may need specific types of institutional support in order to progress, publish and flourish.

Encoding Queer Erasure in Oscar Wilde’s "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

Literary scholars generally agree that the aesthetic qualities of Oscar Wilde’s influential text, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) classify it as a modernist work. At the same time, textual scholars have long speculated over the role of aesthetics in Wilde’s revision process in an apparent effort to reduce or obscure the homoerotic themes in the manuscript. Electronic editing standards such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) enable scholars to trace in detail the development of homoerotic themes within a digital space. Using the TEI standard, my project transcribes and encodes the first chapter of this manuscript, which introduces the story’s three main characters, Basil Hallward, Lord Henry Wooten, and Dorian Gray. In analyzing Wilde’s suppression of the homoerotic elements, I draw from debates in Textual Scholarship and Queer Historiography to explore how electronic editing might restore or "rescue" queer subjects and themes. I end with proposing a method for electronic editing that marks Wilde's alterations and deletions in TEI formal language in a way that probes the potential of TEI's “queerability.” My method examines how TEI might work as a tool of containment that suggests elusiveness through constraint. My work here manifests the intricate handling of homoerotic elements within a distinctly queer ethos.

The Contagious Effects of Rural Violence: Social Pathologies and Injured Bodies in Blasco Ibáñez’s La barraca (The Cabin)

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s La barraca (The Cabin, 1898) presents a vivid portrait of the struggles of the rural population of the Valencian huerta. When the local people prevent a plot of land from being cultivated as an act of popular resistance against the landowning class, the arrival of Batiste Borrull provokes a campaign of marginalisation and aggression against his family. The collective violence of the mob enacted by men, women and children is unleashed against his daughter Roseta, his sons, and finally five-year-old Pascualet, who is pushed into an irrigation ditch by hostile boys and contracts a fatal infection. The mounting brutality that culminates in the death of a young child becomes a powerful manifestation of social pathologies including rural primitivism, alcoholism and entrenched poverty. This article explores ideological and discursive contexts for the portrait of rural violence at the turn of the twentieth century, including class-based theories of degeneration and crowd psychology. It also examines the trope of stagnant water that courses through the plain as a symbol of contamination, echoing the moral sickness of rural society. Critics have argued that in his social protest novels, Blasco Ibáñez denounces the idle and degenerate bourgeoisie, following instead the anarchist and socialist argument that the vices of the proletariat are the result of capitalist exploitation (Fuentes 2009). By contrast, this article proposes that La barraca underscores the primitivism and pathological violence of the landless rural labourers, thereby reinforcing a bourgeois ideological foundation for the exposition of social injustice in late nineteenth-century Spain.

Introduction: Representation in/of Classical Music

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“GRASP ALL, LOSE ALL”: RAISING AWARENESS THROUGH LOSS OF GRASP IN SEEMINGLY FUNCTIONAL INTERFACES

From baroque proto-cybertexts to countercultural gestures by historical avant-gardes there is a longstanding tradition of disruptive strategies by artists at the interstices of societies’ demand for order, control and functionalism. For the avant-gardes, and their multiple artistic inf(l)ections, part of the strategy had to do with radical changes in the way sensory perception came to be depicted by Modernism. Placing emphasis on the confluence of several arts and media, the innovative character of their proposals had much to do with the ways in which they were able to embrace notions representing modernity, such as “simultaneity,” “dynamics”, “motion”, as well as ideas such as the symbiosis between human and machine. For that purpose, they searched to induce estrangement and defamiliarization, namely by using seemingly functional mechanisms in order to raise awareness through loss of grasp. Taking from the idea of raising awareness through seemingly functional mechanisms, I argue that non-functional/dysfunctional digital interfaces that are part of contemporary artworks dealing with digitally-based haptic reading processes (namely, digital literature) are largely influenced by early avant-garde artistic proposals. Through its metamedial aesthetic and poetic critique of digital media, digital literature reinvents inherited strategies of subversion and disruption already explored by modernism, raising awareness in regard to the artwork’s processes of signification and affect. Seen as a variation of a rich heritage of experimentation with seemingly functional mechanisms in the arts, such strategies reenact age-old tensions between tradition and innovation, while laying the foundation for (re)new(ed) ways of reading and writing in digital multimodal environments.

Staging Scores: Musical composition as strategy and structure of performance

In this article, we deploy overlapping conceptual frameworks to address contemporary performance work we were involved in devising, which explored the representation and utilisation of classical music from a theatrical and structural perspective. It combines Postdramatic Theatre (Lehmann, 2006), Composed Theatre (Rebstock and Roesner, 2012) and Score Theatre (Spagnolo, 2017) in order to expose how our performance practices are invested in the language, etiquettes, and compositional principles of classical music.

The Geographies of Poverty: Modernist Photo Texts in the Age of Social Media

This essay explores the representation of economic precarity in the twenty-first century, and particularly how new media technologies have impacted such representations, through two photo-text projects: Matt Black’s American Geography (2014-Present) and Radcliffe “Ruddy” Roye’s When Living is a Protest (2015-Present). Both adapt the visual style of New Deal documentary practiced by photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, and Gordon Parks – a genre that Jeff Allred refers to as the “modernist photo text” – to document the after-effects of the 2008 Great Recession; and both specifically were created to circulate on Instagram, the image-and-text based social media platform initially launched in October 2010. Black’s and Roye’s Instagram series exemplify a resurgence in documentary following the financial collapse of 2008. At the same time, they offer limit cases for the way that “born digital” literary and visual art can re-imagine modernism’s insistence on media specificity for twenty-first century artistic works, especially those keyed to capturing the social life of economic crisis.

From Print to Digital: Reappropriation of the Ready-Made Image in Works of Margit Sielska and Weronika Gęsicka

between print and digital photomontage practices through theworks of two women artists, Margit Sielska (1900-1980) and Weronika Gęsicka (1984-),addressingthe way these lesser-known, non-Anglophone artists reveal a continuity ofinterests across time. Changes in technology have allowed the cut and pastetechnique of photomontage to evolve from the use of scissors and glue to the useof software. Byreappropriating and manipulating the ready-made image of women andstereotypical family life from printed and photographic materials, both artistschallenge assumptions about a woman’s role in society while constructing newsettings and realities for their subjects to occupy. In both instances, thecombinatory process of montage serves to question and disrupt traditional andnormative representations of women and domesticity. By drawing on theparallels between artworks made with different techniques but deriving from theshared creative process of appropriating and manipulating the ready-made imageto create new, unexpected situations, the article reveals a continuity betweencertain modernist practices and contemporary digital culture. 

Brandon is a Network Not a Name: Fictocriticism & the Cyberfeminist Art of Shu Lea Cheang

The cyberfeminist art practice of Shu Lea Cheang evinces a particular relation of generative complicity with the art object—what Canadian cultural theorist Jeanne Randolph referred to as “the amenable object” (1983). Randolph, who pioneered “ficto-criticism”—a method of writing that intentionally blurs theory, poetics and narrative—wrote of the amenable object as an incomplete creation whose “ambiguous elements” allow the viewer to make “subjective interventions” in the work. Likewise, Cheang’s participatory installations and non-linear online narratives operate as amenable object-texts, requiring the user to not only navigate but contribute to them through acts of critical play and improvisation. Across Cheang’s oeuvre is also a nomadic politics of border-crossing that resonates as loudly with Donna Haraway’s cyborg as it does with the experimental feminist writing that became associated with fictocriticism. In this paper, I examine correlations between fictocritical approaches and formal tactics in Cheang’s studio practice to consider them as interrelated cyberfeminist strategies of resistance and dissent; ones that arose in counterpoint to the proliferation of deterministic, technocapitalist narratives. In particular, I look at how the fragmentation, partiality and double-voicing seen in many fictocritical texts were echoed in the user-experience of Cheang’s Brandon (1998), a sprawing network that posited the queer body as a collective series of actions. I conclude by looking at how these same techniques recall methods from Dadaism and Surrealism in the early 20th century and reflect on the recurrent role of indeterminacy in art and literature more generally to stem the entropy of binary paradigms.