Unravelling Anti-Feminism: On the Domestication of Resistance

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Periodical article

Title:	Unravelling Anti-Feminism: On the Domestication of Resistance
Author:	Thomas, Kylie
Year:	2022
Periodical:	Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change (ISSN 2589-1316)
Volume:	7
Issue:	2
Pages:	8
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Southern Africa
Subjects:	feminism resistance crafts violence
External link:	https://doi.org/10.20897/jcasc/12761
Abstract:	This article provides a critique of neoliberal feminism and argues for nuanced and critical approaches to the question of what constitutes feminist resistance. It focuses on visual artist Billie Zangewa's creative practice and positions it within the longer history of how women have made use of traditional crafts, such as quilting and embroidery, as a means of expression and as a form of resistance. It positions Zangewa's work alongside that of some of her feminist contemporaries who have also used thread and cloth in their work to reveal how the political is woven through the fabric of everyday life. I argue that in order to understand why Zangewa's seemingly mundane, even bourgeois practice, has been framed and taken up as a form of feminist resistance, it is necessary to read her work through a historical lens that takes colonial dispossession and the brutal history of violence in Southern Africa into account.