I am super excited and honoured that some small pieces of my own punk history are featured in the new exhibition Grrrl Germs: Feminism Goes Viral, curated by Astria Suparak.
The exhibition runs until Sunday 29 November at the Great Park Gallery in Irvine, and is free to attend. It also featured at the inaugural Daisy Chain Fields festival.
If you (unlike me) happen to be in California, you can see displays that include posters from three gigs we played with my old band Not Right: Ladiyfest Sheffield in 2013, the Riot Grrrl Valentine’s Ball in Brighton, 2014 (with our friends Big Joanie, among others), and Revolt #7 in Coventry, 2014.
The latter poster was one of several I designed for Revolt, a feminist club night which ran in Coventry from 2012-2017 – I was part of the organising collective along with Not Right guitarist Kirsty Lohman. It features an image of Beverley Ishmael, drummer for The Tuts, who headlined that gig. You can see a bit of this poster in the top left corner of the super cool flyer for Grrrl Germs!
I say this is part of “my” personal history, but the really great thing about the exhibition from what I have seen is that it explores feminist punk as a collective activity: something that so many of us have done together, across the world and over the decades. I think that’s a very beautiful thing. Here’s to our shared pasts, and the futures we are still building together.
In recent years I have co-authored numerous peer-reviewed essays for edited collections. I have just made three of these freely available, from books originally published in 2020 and 2021.
Why is this happening now? Well, it’s basically due to moves toward so-called “open access” within the bizarro world of academic publishing. I try and publish my work in places that will also let me share my work for free. For book chapters, publishers usually impose an embargo period of 2-3 years, after which authors are allowed to share the post-peer-review version on our own website. The essays I have recently uploaded have all had their embargo end, so I’m excited to now share them more widely.
You can download the essays by clicking on the links below.
Queering Community Development in DIY punk spaces Also published in the book: Arts, Cultureand Community Development (Policy Press) Written with my long-running collaborator Kirsty Lohman, this essay looks at grassroots community organising within queer, feminist, and anti-racist punk spaces. We argue that this organising is often prefigurative: that is, it actively models and enacts the changes that punks want to see in the world. Looking at events such as First Timers and Decolonise Fest, plus bands such as Big Joanie, we explore what happens when marginalised people create their own cultural spaces, and seek to facilitate access to these spaces for others who are often denied artistic and political expression.
Men transmasculine and non-binary people and midwifery care Also published in the book: Midwifery Essentials(Elsevier) I contributed to this essay as part of the Trans Pregnancy research project team. Our project spoke with over 50 men, transmasculine, and non-binary people who experienced pregnancy and childbirth in Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, the UK, and the USA, plus a handful of midwives who have supported people from this group. In this short essay, we briefly outline the positive and negative experiences that trans birth parents reported having with midwives, plus challenges reported by midwives themselves. On this basis we make 8 recommendations for developing best practice with trans people in midwifery services.
Depathologising Gender: Vulnerability in Trans Health Law Also published in the book: A Jurisprudence of the Body (Palgrave Macmillan) I co-wrote this essay with Chris Dietz, a scholar of Law at the University of Leeds. Drawing on feminist and trans critiques of human rights models, plus an analysis of gender recognition laws in countries including Argentina, Denmark, and the UK, we argue for a new approach to understanding the fight for depathologisation in law and medicine.
These three essays are just some of the many peer-reviewed academic publications I make freely accessible on this website. For more work on a range of topics relating to trans studies, feminism, and/or community development, see my publications page.
Dr Ruth Pearce 