Selected Annotations for "Reading Women"

Carrie Schneider’s exhibition, Reading Women, consists of a series of portraits of women reading books authored by women. As a companion to this exhibition, the Miller ICA has invited artists and thinkers, who represent a range of women's perspectives, to annotate books that they want to encourage people to read–in an effort to inspire the action that Reading Women  so poignantly explores. 

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Submitted by Angela Washko

Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective
by Donna Haraway

from [Feminist Studies - Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575-599]

There is a myth perpetuated by conservative media, the tech industry, data science and beyond that it is possible to have an objective perspective. Donna Haraway tackled the privileges embedded in claiming objectivity and argues for a rethinking of how we assess what is considered objective or rational and the biases embedded in who gets to claim that perspective in this 1988 essay for the Feminist Studies journal. In the work she takes down Western cultural narratives about objectivity through arguing for a feminist objectivity that acknowledges the specificity of location, relationship to the subject, embodied experience and cultural experience should be considered valid and valuable when making knowledge claims.

“I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people's lives. I am arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity.”

— Donna Haraway, pg 589 Situated Knowledges

Diary of a Teenage Girl
by Phoebe Gloeckner, 2002

Phoebe Gloeckner’s “semi-autobiography” of her teen years is an intense, dark, and frankly brutal look at being a young woman exploring her coming of age sexuality in libertine yet predatory and patriarchal 1970’s America. Gloeckner’s writing and illustration style is raw, bold and surprisingly delicate as she presents a refreshingly complex perspective on a young woman’s precarious and meandering search for desire, acceptance and a platform for her voice despite the dark contexts she finds herself in. Recently adapted into a film – I highly recommend reading the book over the film (though the film is good too!).

Sister Outsider
by Audre Lorde, collection of essays compiled 2007

This collection of Audre Lorde’s poems, essays and talks is a powerful assembly of her works from 1976-1984. Her argument for the importance of anger, poetry, joy and hopefulness within the lives of women is inspiring and essential for activists, artists, feminist scholars and all of us working on burnout-prone social justice work (particularly evident in her essay “Poetry Is Not A Luxury”). Her voice is incredibly powerful and highly relevant to our current political moment and her concerns about the priority of white voices within feminist academic and artistic discourse are essential to conversations about intersectionality happening today. Her 1984 talk she gave at NYU entitled “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” critiques the academy’s liberal claims of inclusivity in ways that we are still critiquing the academy today. The talk is an important reminder to white women that feminism without intersectionality is white supremacy.

“It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians. And yet, I stand here as a Black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of Black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable.”

— Audre Lorde, from “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House” in “Sister Outsider.”

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Submitted by Cameron Shaw

Euphoria
by Lily King

Euphoria by Lily King is enthralling and a book I recommend often. King’s protagonist Nell Stone—inspired by anthropologist Margaret Mead—is simultaneously caught in a love triangle with fellow scientists and at a watershed moment in her research. Set in New Guinea, where the trio is stationed, the book weaves in and out of narrative perspectives—the sometimes breathless pace mimicking the tension of discovery and unknowingness the researches are experiencing with each other and their subjects. It’s a rich portrait of desire, longing, and loss that came at a time I needed to see those modeled most.

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Submitted by Keijaun Thomas

At the Bottom of the River
by Jamaica Kincaid

In Jamaica Kincaid’s collection of short stories at the bottom of the river Kincaid takes us on a journey over the course of 10 short stories/ poems. The collection starts with the prose “Girl”. I’m starting here because in many ways his piece see the reader up for moving through the eyes of a little black girl and mother/ elder relationships through a series of lessons, instructions and advice. Through out the collection of stories one finds themselves confronted with notions of shame, sexuality, evolution being some of the themes that are present in a post colonial Caribbean island, which leads me to “Blackness”. In the prose Blackness, one begins by experiencing the blackness of the nights sky falling in a silence that is soft and deafening at the same time. The narrator speaks of a detachment and the erasure of self. The struggles of being a little black girl moving through the world and the power structures in place. 

Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art
by Jennifer Doyle

In Jennifer Doyle’s book, Hold it Against Me the book moves through multiple histories in art history, specifically artworks that deal with emotion, difficulty, affect, feelings and the many layers that frame a myriad of identities through art and its inevitable connection to how one deals with difficulties. Dissecting artworks such as, Incorruptible Flesh: Dissociative Soarkle (2006) by Ron Athey and From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995-1996) by Carrie Mae Weems. The book ask difficult questions and frames how we think about accessibility trough emotions, how Athey’s work confronts vulnerability for viewing the artist naked body in relation to audiences, how Weems’s photographic and text based works delving into the archives of history to ask how does one locate themselves in a history that is theirs and not their own? 

Yves, Ide, Solstice
by Yves B. Golden

In Yves B. Golden’s collection of poems, Yves, Ide, Solstice the reader moves through what at times feels like entering the poets boudoir. The work is gentle, soft and at the same time difficult and hard but always cascading off of the readers tongue. You can feel her speaking to past lovers, ancient truths, Mother’s from yesteryears. Many of the poems feel the reader is a witness, we listen from behind closed doors just before they open to allow us to enter and escape. The main theme being how one enters love as well as how love escaping us. Through a triptych of identities we move through Yves, Ide and Solstices coming into perceptions of how we experience the molding and undoing of selfhood. 

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Submitted by Liz Park

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Based on methodical historic research, the fiction follows generations of a Korean family in the twentieth century Japan and paints a vivid picture of their experience of systemic discrimination and social alienation in a country that refuses to recognize their humanity. The title refers to the Japanese slot machine as well as the gambling business often associated with Zainichi Koreans—those who came from Korea when it was under Japanese colonial rule. Pachinko is also a metaphor for the somewhat rigged yet unpredictable life of the quiet matriarch of the family, who, though is well-developed and demonstrates strength, is frustratingly at the mercy of men—a gangster lover from her youth, a conservative brother-in-law, and even an indignant son who breaks her heart. This is a rare work of fiction that speaks truth to power on a subject that few have written on.

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Submitted by Ingrid Schaffner

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

When I got to the end of this book, I felt abandoned! The last page was like a door shut me out of the ancient world and the mind of Roman Emperor Hadrian that Marguerite Yourcenar makes so phenomenally real and complex to inhabit. In the process of dying, Hadrian recalls a political life, intellectual joy, sensual pleasure, agonizing grief. The death of his lover Antonius happens to you. This book is full of smells, mysteries, history, and clarity. That it was one of my friend Anne Chu’s favorite books—she referenced it in her art—is also meaningful.