Bodies out of Place: Art, Activism, Feminism and Folk Music
- Submitting institution
-
York St John University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 528
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- Bradford Topic Folk Club
- Brief description of type
- Performance and Book Chapter
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
- February
- Year
- 2014
- URL
-
http://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/5020/
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This practice-based, multi-component output presents a synthesis of art, feminist theory and folk music developed and shared through 60 participatory performances, an album, two performed rituals and a book chapter. Turner is one half of the UK feminist folk duo Union Jill (with Sharon Jagger). Working through this collaboration, Turner has written and performed songs that critique the cultural expectations that constrain women’s aspirations and self-worth, satirising and supplanting those narratives with new stories that reimagine their place and potential.
This research takes up Ahmed’s interrogation of the ways in which women’s bodies become ‘out of place’ (2000). Through performance and reflection on the processes of music production it investigates how belonging is materially and symbolically constructed or denied, considering how participants (both audiences and performers) see and think through their bodies (Young, 1990). It reveals new insights through dialogic, participatory performances that ask audiences to consider their bodies in ways that challenge the gendered dichotomy of domestic/public spaces. Listening to the voices of participants opens up a critical space, generating a paradigm shift in which ‘bodies out of place’ find belonging; subverting dominant religious and cultural symbols that render them abject and impure.
The research has been disseminated through an iterative process, as each performance informs the next, in folk venues, civic spaces, festival including Edinburgh Fringe Festival, National Centre for Early Music and Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival, the book chapter ’The Female Music Producer and the Leveraging of Difference’ (Jagger, S & Turner, H. 2020), international and UK conferences and research workshops, including International Women’s Day workshop with Independent Domestic Abuse Services (York) and Feminisms in the Academy conference at Leeds Beckett University.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
