Third seminar 
Feminist Politics and Activism: Exploring Autofiction, Affective Expressions, and Digital Landscapes 

January 22nd, 2025 
To join the seminar, please click here. 

Smriti Verma 
Wolfson College, University of Oxford (UK) 
Form as Strategic Necessity in Contemporary Women's Autofiction. 
The study of women's autobiographies as texts depicting stories of plight, rage and empowerment has been crucial to the development of gender studies in the Western academy. However, such scholarship reduces women's life-writing to source material, obscuring the text from the purview of formal literary criticism in order to privilege a reading of authenticity. In attempting to synthesise scholarship on narrative form with purposeful feminist activism, this presentation explores form as strategic necessity in contemporary women’s autofiction and further analyses the radical possibilities inherent in autofiction for assessing current feminist discourses on care, community and women's work. I correlate such scholarship, which combines questions of formal manoeuvring with political purpose to the category of the radical aesthetic. 
 
In order to do so, this presentation explores formal experimentation as politicized form in Levy’s series of living autobiographies: Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013), The Cost of Living (2018) and Real Estate (2021). I connect formal experimentation with a tangible, contemporary feminist consciousness and situate the experimental autobiography as a locus for exploring the gendered mechanisms of power. In the process, I analyse the ways in which Levy mobilises the form of the experimental autobiography to work through a feminist politics of the present. 

Catherine Evans 
Carnegie Mellon University (US) 
Threadbare Politics: The Affective Lives of Feminist T-Shirts. 
For over 60 years, working-class feminist activist Kipp Dawson has built coalitions across international and US social movements. At actions, events, and in everyday solidarity, she has donned a wide range of political fabric, and, to date, has saved over 250 t-shirts documenting her activist activities. A brief sampling of these shirts includes groups like the Grey Panthers from Berkeley, California; Women Against Pit Closures in the UK; the Coal Employment Project international conferences; and major marches on the US Capitol for abortion, LGBTQ+, worker, and civil rights. Her shirts, coupled with archived photographs, reinsert the impact of t-shirt fashion in working-class, queer feminist political life. This paper “takes stuff seriously” to consider how these shirts, items that are customarily discarded or donated, bear traces, tears, and wrinkles that remember, to follow Sara Ahmed, “a history can be how history is smoothed over.” I follow critical approaches from queer cultural studies and archival studies to carefully engage the materiality of Dawson’s t-shirt collection and how the shirts circulated and continue to circulate. I argue that Dawson’s shirts and her intimate relationship with them can be understood as unraveling the threads between feminist political life, sexuality, and fashion. 

Frederic Mirindi 
University of Manitoba (Canada) 
Digital Feminism: Intersectionality and Activism in the Age of Social Media. 
This research explores the evolution of feminist activism in the digital age, focusing on how social media platforms have transformed the landscape of gender equality movements. By examining case studies of viral feminist campaigns and online communities, we investigate the role of intersectionality in shaping modern feminist discourse and action. The study analyzes how digital spaces facilitate the amplification of marginalized voices, particularly those of women of color and LGBTQ+ individuals, thus reshaping the feminist narrative. We argue that while social media has democratized feminist activism, it also presents challenges such as echo chambers and performative allyship. Through qualitative analysis of online content and interviews with digital feminist activists, this research aims to contribute to our understanding of how technology is redefining feminist praxis and coalition-building in the 21st century.