Values

Neuro-Somatic affirming
Neuro-Queer
Anti-ableist
Anti-racist
Intersectional feminism
Collaboration
Dialoguing nuance
Connecting throughout the margins

Credits and acknowledgments

The project title:
"to feel, to speak, to dare" is a partial quotation borrowed from Audre Lord's seminal text: 'Poetry is Not a Luxury', 1985.

The Rolling Eyes Study group is named after Sara Ahmed's feminist equation: "rolling eyes = feminist pedagogy" Sarah Ahmed The Feminist Killjoy Handbook

Glossary

ANGER
In her keynote speech “The Uses of Anger” at the National Women's Studies Association Conference, 1981, Audre Lord distinguished hatred from anger:
"Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.".
US researcher and storyteller Brené Brown defines anger as “an emotion that we feel when something gets in the way of the desired outcome or when we believe there's a violation of the way things should be.” Read that again with me… We feel violated, wronged, and harmed. Anger is an emotion that tells us something is wrong. Anger sparks action.
Sara Ahmed argues in The Cultural Politics of Emotions (2004), that feminism is deeply interconnected with what feminism is against; the impressions of historical violence against embodied subjects is both what feminism is and is against. Feminist anger as against-ness would be the response to the impossibility of a subject position outside such historical conditions.
Anger is an appropriate political and ethical feminist response to historical violence and suffering. Anger is a movement that interprets and transforms that historical violence and suffering; it is a way of moving from pain, to recognizing that such pain is wrong, to acting to transform the social and political conditions that gave rise to that pain. As such, anger is an attachment worth holding onto. Utilizing the work of black feminist Audre Lorde, and social psychologist Carol Tavris, Ahmed argues that anger, affectively and effectively, is world-making. She states, feminist anger “is not simply defined in relationship to a past, but as opening up the future” (p. 175). It is an against-ness that also entails a for-ness, and with this it at once recognizes the historicity of suffering while imagining a futurity of different possibilities.


INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISM:
Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American law professor coined the term Intersectional Feminism in 1989 as, a prism for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other. All inequality is not created equally. Intersectional feminism centres the voices of those experiencing overlapping, concurrent forms of oppression in order to understand the depths of the inequalities and the relationships among them in any given context.

MARGINALISED
Marginalisation manifests itself in a wide range of ways in society from those who are disenfranchised through poverty and locale, to those who are disenfranchised through race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability and/or ill-health, religion and through personal circumstances, such as children of migrants and refugees, and children who are bullied, for example.

WOMEN
The project will welcome all women, including cis and trans women, and non-binary and two-spirit.

Letters of support

to feel, to speak, to dare
a project by Gemma Gore

Project mindmap

Sedimented Stories from Doggerland workshop at JHG, Southampton (2023).

In-between (the closer you look at a word the more distantly it looks back)
launch at University of Southampton (2024).

Love Kept Us Warm (by artist collective Stair/Slide/Space) action based research launch at JHG (2019).

Love Kept Us Warm: listening workshop at JHG (2019).

Monoprint x Self-portrait workshop - for Princes Trust at JHG (2023/24).

Camera Obscura + drawing invitation for Family Fun Day at JHG (2024).

Fragment from workshop as lead artist for John Hansard Gallery Associate + Socially Engaged artists network session (2023).

Precedent artwork documentation

Attuning / Listening / Bodies PAC activation (collage) for More Than Ponies / 'a space' arts (2022).