ABSTRACT
‘From the politics of representation to a politics of acts’ follows the currents of feminist insights into the politics of representation from the 1970s to the present. Our focus is largely on photography, and to a lesser extent painting and print-making. Photo-media has provided feminists with a persuasive and sustained platform from which to firstly call out stereotyped mass media images of femininity and then create more nuanced analyses of visual representational systems. The world’s ubiquitous Imperial archives have also been re-routed through feminist and decolonial photography to reclaim and re-enliven their historical captives. The chapter canvasses important aspects of gender, racial and cultural identity politics from a feminist, anti-identitarian and studio-centric approach that has sought to imagine resistant and alternative forms of subjectivity since the late 1960s. Artists discussed include Australians Helen Grace, Susan Norrie, Vivienne Binns, Paula do Prado, Fiona Foley, Karla Dickens and Tracey Moffatt alongside work by the Indonesian artist Octora, Alice Maher from Ireland, and the South African photographer Zanele Muholi.
