Lies: A Journal of Materialist Feminism, No. 1 (2012)

“LIES is a new journal spearheaded by a feminist collective based in Oakland, Baltimore, Los Angeles and New York City.

LIES is a communist journal against communists.

LIES is a platform for certain conversations and critiques that are difficult, impossible or dangerous if cis men are in the room.

LIES attacks the legacy of racism and transphobia that has plagued feminist organizing and strives to develop new ways of making autonomous feminist practices today that take pointed and militant attacks on white supremacy and transphobia as essential parts of feminist struggle.

LIES came out of our experience within struggles. It seeks to embody and develop in print the practice of autonomy that we needed to save ourselves in the midst of movements squared on patriarchy and fueled by the subordination of everyone but white cis men.

LIES draws its purpose and support from networks and circles of feminist, queer, and trans people, our friends and comrades to whom this journal is devoted.”

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License
250 pages

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Rosalind Krauss: Bachelors (1999)

“Since the 1970s Rosalind Krauss has been exploring the art of painters, sculptors, and photographers, examining the intersection of these artists concerns with the major currents of postwar visual culture: the question of the commodity, the status of the subject, issues of representation and abstraction, and the viability of individual media.

These essays on nine women artists—gathered as Bachelors—are framed by the question, born of feminism, “What evaluative criteria can be applied to women’s art?” In the case of surrealism, in particular, some have claimed that surrealist women artists must either redraw the lines of their practice or participate in the movement’s misogyny. Krauss resists that claim, for these “bachelors” are artists whose expressive strategies challenge the very ideals of unity and mastery identified with masculinist aesthetics. Some of this work, such as the “part object” (Louise Bourgeois) or the “formless” (Cindy Sherman) could be said to find its power in strategies associated with such concepts as écriture feminine. In the work of Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, or Sherrie Levine, one can make the case that the power of the work can be revealed only by recourse to another type of logic altogether. Bachelors attempts to do justice to these and other artists (Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Louise Lawler, Francesca Woodman) in the terms their works demand.”

Publisher MIT Press, 1999
October Books
ISBN 0262112396, 9780262112390
228 pages

Reviews: James Elkins (CAA Reviews 1999), Fred Andersson (Leonardo 2000).

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Laurie Penny: Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (2011)

“A feminist dissection of women’s bodies as the fleshy fulcrum of capitalist cannibalism, whereby women are both consumers and consumed.

Modern culture is obsessed with controlling women’s bodies. Our societies are saturated with images of unreal, idealised female beauty whilst real female bodies and the women who inhabit them are alienated from their own personal and political potential. Under modern capitalism, women are both consumers and consumed: Meat Market offers strategies for resisting this gory cycle of consumption, exposing how the trade in female flesh extends into every part of women’s political selfhood. Touching on sexuality, prostitution, hunger, consumption, eating disorders, housework, transsexualism and the global trade in the signs and signifiers of femininity, Meat Market is a thin, bloody sliver of feminist dialectic, dissecting women’s bodies as the fleshy fulcrum of capitalist cannibalism.”

Publisher ZerO Books, an imprint of John Hunt Publishing, 2011
ISBN 1846945216, 9781846945212
79 pages

interview with the author, cont. (Maeve McKeown, New Left Project)
review (Abby O’Reilly, The Independent)
review (Zoe May Sullivan, The Oxonian Review)
author’s columns: The Guardian, New Statesman, The New Inquiry

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