Loneliness and Feminism
1 April 2021
Feminism is sustained by collective organising but one of the dominant emotions that has driven women to organise and to campaign for different gendered relations has often been a sense of loneliness. A gendered perspective on loneliness allows us to see at once how politicisation can ease and provide a language for loneliness and at the same time be alienating and isolating; it allows us to see the ways in which loneliness might be both individual and systemic. Loneliness, in this way, might be understood as a kind of gauge for a system that is no longer operative, revealing the false community at the heart of the nuclear family, capitalism and patriarchal life. It can be hard to talk about being lonely or to measure it and we might think, in this way, of feminism as an ideal historical critique for understanding how women have thought differently about organising social life. When the Hastings Women’s Study Group set out to investigate the topic of women and loneliness in 1984 they concentrated on women’s lives and relationships, looking at young single women, motherhood, marriage and loneliness, widowhood as ‘an amputation’, women as carers and old age. The findings are a kind of experiment in where to go looking for the lonely and provide a feminist language that accommodates all of loneliness’s gendered subjects. One of the most interesting insights of the study is the way in which loneliness provides a vocabulary for revealing the constrictedness of gendered relations in private and public space and it opens up new questions about the connection between public resources and the management of isolation.
In this talk, Dr Eleanor Careless will present a paper on her research as part of The Business of Women’s Words (BOWW) project and loneliness within the context of the feminist publishing revolution that unfolded during the UK Women’s Liberation Movement [WLM] of the 1970s and 80s, with a special focus on Spare Rib magazine. Dr Celeste Orr, who has recently co-edited a special issue of Feminist Theory, will provide a response to the paper.
Bios
Dr. Eleanor Careless is a Research Fellow at the University of Sussex for The Business of Women’s Words (BOWW) project. The BOWW project has included creating the first digital map of the UK WLM in partnership with the British Library where it is now displayed for public use. Her research has been published by College Literature, Modernist Cultures and Palgrave, and she is the co-editor of a special issue on the poetry of Anna Mendelssohn for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.
Dr. Celeste E. Orr is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at St. Lawrence University. Orr is in the process of co-editing a Special Issue of Feminist Theory with Dr. Shoshana Magnet, marking the advent of “Feminist Loneliness Studies.” This special issue will unpack and theorize the potential perils and generative possibilities offered up by the profound emotion, loneliness. Additionally, Orr is currently working on their book manuscript for University of British Colombia Press, Cripping Intersex: Exorcisms and Compulsory Dyadism. Their research has most recently been featured in Boyhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2019) and Mothering, Mothers, and Sport: Experiences, Representations, Resistances (Demeter Press, 2018).
Loneliness and Technology is a Special Interest Group (SIG) that has been set up to think about the challenges of this moment and literature’s role in helping us navigate them. It’s designed to initiate discussion around how we think about loneliness as a political history of emotion, how literature offers us a space to nurture solitude, and how technology induces and resists feelings of isolation.
The aim of the project is to investigate how a range of fields, as they struggle to adapt to the digital, depend on literary elements to convert feelings of isolation into more productive forms of solitude and loneliness. The intention is to provide a forum to think about the challenges to teaching and working online in the current climate, and literature’s role in providing us with the emotional skills to manage that adaptation.
It is designed as a cross-sector and interdisciplinary project that seeks to draw on expertise in the fields of literature, psychoanalysis, digital humanities, mental health, architecture and the history of work and education to bring together researchers and prompt discussion around how we relate to the digital and what it’s possible to do with thinking and feeling.
Planned projects include a seminar series that will run in the spring and a special issue of Issues in English in the autumn.
Anyone interested in joining the group or who’d like more information about it is invited to contact Dr Jess Cotton.
