Slippage(s): Messy bodies and other spaces in research

The body has a fraught relationship with feminist thinking, raising uncomfortable questions about identity, corporeality and knowledge. Artists working across multiple disciplines have also been invested in exploring these ideas to articulate bodily experience and challenge unequal power structures, yet they have tended to privilege representational strategies to do so. What happens in those spaces beyond or at the edges of representation or language where slippages occur? What about those bodies whose sense-making leaks out of or disrupts normative categories? Practice research too involves multiple slippages, resistances, tensions. To keep such research alive, it is vital its slippery knowledges and embodied practices are claimed rather than othering their messiness.

Drawing on the work of Kristeva and others, Slippage(s) explores the intersections between feminisms in its multiple forms, the body and practice research, with language at its core. Taking the form of a performance and a hybrid paper, it considers the inherently messy and fragmentary nature in each and asks: what happens when sites of slippage are embraced, exposed and harnessed in and as the research? Whilst the word slippage is associated with a loss of power, it is here reclaimed as a site of resistance; one that can shift power structures and enable new spaces of practice and modes of meaning-making.