fermenting feminism, edited by Lauren Fournier

Contributors: Agustine Zegers / Clementine Morrigan / Eirini Kartsaki / Farida Yesmin /Hannah Regel / Hazel Meyer / Ida Bencke & Dea Antonsen / Jade Io Mars / Jessica Bebenek / Julia Polyck-O'Neill / Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint / Miles Forrester and Jen Macdonald / Maya Hey / Nicki Green / Regina de Miguel and Lucrecia Dalt / Robin Zabiegalski /Rubina Martini / SE Nash and Stephanie Maroney / Sarah Nasby / The Unstitute / Alice Vandeleur-Boorer and Tereza Valentová / WhiteFeather Hunter / Zayaan Khan / Zoë Schneider

116 pages, 21 x 30 cm
Design: Zille Bostinius
ISBN: 978-87-998667-1-7
Publisher: Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, 2017

The digital, open-access version of Fermenting Feminism is archived through Artexte/e-artexte in Montreal, and can be downloaded here.

fermenting feminism brings together artists and writers whose work responds to what it means to bring fermentation and feminism into the same critical space. These are works and texts that approach fermentation through intersectional and trans-inclusive feminist frameworks, and works that approach feminisms through the metaphor and material practice of fermentation. As both a metaphor and a physical process, fermentation embodies bioavailability and accessibility, preservation and transformation, inter-species symbiosis and coevolution, biodiversity and futurity, harm reduction and care.

Fermentation as a process of transformation becomes both a metaphor and a material practice through which to explore important issues for feminist artists and researchers, from the politics of labour, affect, survival, and care to colonialism, food, indigeneity, and the land. Is “feminism,” with its etymological roots in the feminine, something worth preserving? In what ways might it be preserved? In what ways might it be transformed? Is feminism a relic of the past, something that has soured? Or is feminism still a vital imperative? fermenting feminism positions fermentation as a potentially vital and viable space to re-conceive of feminism’s past, present, and futures.

Spanning the speculative and the literal, the embodied and the ephemeral, the voices in fermenting feminism reinvigorate questions of health, materiality, canonicity, community, consumption, ritual, and tradition. The works in this publication obscure the line between illness and well-being, between science and witchcraft, between human and non-human, and between sentient and non-sentient to flesh out pressing political, theoretical, aesthetic, and ethical questions in the present.

Working across the disciplines of art and science, fermenting feminism makes space for multi-disciplinary experimentation, including engagements with new materialisms, food studies, critical disability and mad studies, sexual diversity studies, and trans-inclusive intersectional feminist theory and practice.