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The hacker ethos around repair

Image 1: Spelman Cups (2016) ceramic, mixed media. Photo: Bridget Harvey.

Technically there are five of you, but actually only four. Really you are three and one other.

None of you are really broken, but all are damaged, bar one. Small, glazed, white, glossy.

Three old, one new. Slip cast, tipped out of a plaster mould, handles moulded too, joined later.

For L. & M.

Desire is an exile, desire is a desert ...

Never an individual exile, never a personal desert,

 but a collective exile and a collective desert.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (1972: 452)

Introduction

Introduction

Introduction

The world’s an untranslatable language
without words or parts of speech.
It’s a language of objects
Our tongues can’t master,
but which we are the ardent subjects of.
If tree is tree in English,
and albero in Italian,
That’s as close as we can come
To divinity, the language that circles the earth
and which we’ll never speak. (Wright, 2010)

Introduction

Feminism is dead? Long live feminism!

Is it feasible to explore, dissect and live feminism within academia, a system that contributes and feeds into the very discrimination and violence denounced by feminism itself? And if so, what are the tools necessary to dismantle the master’s house to paraphrase Lorde (1984)? What is the role of activism and writing, and how can we incorporate these practices in feminism?

Injustice should be greeted with protest and careful, courageous strategic action. But the end goal must remain always in view: as King said so simply: “A world where men and women can live together.” Building such a world takes intelligence, control, and a spirit of generosity. That spirit has many names: Greek philophrosunḕ, Roman humanitas, biblical agapḕ, African ubuntu – a patient and forbearing disposition to see and seek the good rather than to harp obsessively on the bad (Nussbaum, 2016: 249-250)