The agential cut and paste: Collaging feminisms

Collage is a practice with particular feminist resonances that has both touched and been touched by many feminist hands for varied feminist means. Figures such as Mary Delany, Claude Cahun and Wangechi Mutu have all practised collage as a strategy for subversive and disruptive world-making. As feminist art critic Lucy Lippard describes, collage is ‘born of interruption’. This article traces some of these interruptive, feminist uses of collage and asks what it might mean to use collage as a feminist research and (hi)storytelling strategy. Drawing on Karen Barad’s theorisations of the agential cut as a boundary-making practice, I propose a collage-based feminist research strategy wherein archival materials, knowledges, bodies, subjects and things are agentially cut, arranged and pasted together/apart in unexpected ways to produce unexpected dis/connections, attachments and relationships. A collage-based approach to feminist materials and knowledge disrupts hegemonic understandings of materiality, linearity, clarity and coherency, and opens up alternative ways of knowing feminisms and their things. I argue that collage locates the feminist researcher and (hi)storyteller as actively response-able to and for their research, its gestures, its narratives and its results, and ask what kinds of visions and versions of response-ability emerge from this. What kinds of structures are our cuts supporting? Whose histories are our cuts re-membering? In short, who lives and who dies in our feminist research and (hi)storytelling? With collage, these questions are felt and touched by the researcher, the cutter and the paster, and therefore felt as embodied questions that matter ethically, ontologically and epistemologically.