The Feminist before the Archive

CLASS DESCRIPTION

This lecture examines the feminist archive as both a site of erasure and a space of potential re-inscription. It also explores the position of the feminist before the archive, as an agent of disruption and complication of received categories and historical narratives. What counts as an archive, and who decides what is worth keeping, after all? Through examples from art, performance, and collective projects, we will look at how feminist practices rethink the archive as a living, creative space where memory and imagination meet. Rather than a static collection of documents, the feminist archive becomes a way to resist exclusion, to care for forgotten voices, and to build shared histories for the future.

ABOUT OUR LECTURER

Giulia Palladini is a writer, educator and curator currently based in Mexico City. For the past fifteen years, she has taught and developed critical and creative projects around theatre and contemporary art in both academia and the art world on an international level. She was research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and Senior Lecturer in Performance at the University of Roehampton in London. She presented her work in various formats in numerous art institutions, such as the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Tate Modern in London, the Centro de Cultura Digital in Mexico City and the Museum Reina Sofia in Madrid, and collaborated as dramaturg with artists like Mapa Teatro, Sara Leghissa and Tara Fatehi. As a curator, she has conceived a number of projects fostering a dialogue between artistic practice and critical reflection, such as Feminismos Antipatriarcales and Poetic Disobedience (UK 2021), Antidotes: thinking live arts in the political landscape (Mexico, 2024) and Rumbos de vida (Italy, 2024). She is the author of The Scene of Foreplay: Theater, Labor and Leisure in 1960s New York (2017) and editor (with Marco Pustianaz) of Lexicon for an Affective Archive (2017), alongside a number of essays, translated in various languages.

INSTAGRAM: @red__giulia

FACEBOOK: @giulia.palladini.75

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AUTUMN/WINTER TERM 2025

Monday 15th September

Luisa-Maria MacCormack (she/her)

Female Sexuality and the Male Gaze

Monday 22nd September

Dr. Kate Pickering (she/her)

Feminist Religious Worldbuilding in Contemporary Art

Monday 29th September

Julia Kotziamani (she/her)

Misogynist Bureaucracies: Administrative Erasure and the Feminist Body

Monday 6th October 

Noelle Perdue (she/her)

The Evolution of Post-AI Pornography

Monday 13th October 

Erin James (she/they)

The Real Housewives of Racist TV Tropes: a Black Feminist Reading of Reality TV

Monday 20th October 

Jo Harrison & Holly Isard

RECORDING ONLY - Breastfeeding as work: the contradictions of breastfeeding under capitalism

Monday 27th October 

Luisa-Maria MacCormack (she/her)

The Vagina Dentata: Myths of The Monstrous Feminine 

Monday 3rd November

Catherine McCormack (she/her)

Eve and the Serpent: Snake Symbolism and Repressed Histories of the Feminine

Monday 10th November

Dr. Lena Mattheis (they/she)

From Thou to They: Gender Nonconformity Pronouns in Literary History

Monday 17th November

Giulia Palladini (she/her)

The Feminist Before the Archive

Monday 24th November

Gudrun Filipska (she/her)

Eco-Feminist Art and Science Fiction

Monday 1st December

Anna Titov (she/her)

Clarice Lispector: Existentialism and Dark Feminisms

Monday 8th December

Jennifer Jasmine White (she/her)

Fashioning Labour: Feminist Art and The Industrial Body

Monday 15th December

Anna Johnson (they/them)

Writing Motherhood: An Embodied Understanding of our Own Oppression

RECORDING

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