Collage and Queer Embodiment

Abstract

Abstract This chapter investigates the significance of collage to feminist experimentation and queer embodiment. It weaves together a study of Ali Smith’s writing as a theorist, art critic, and novelist in the context of feminist collage with art by Pauline Boty who was, during her short life, considered Britain’s only female pop artist. Autumn, Smith’s 2016 novel, set—and published—in the wake of the Brexit vote, revitalized interest in Boty and connects collage aesthetics to the queer edges of resistance. This chapter tracks Boty’s craft media and subversive political processes, looking at how Smith uses collage as a framework that dramatizes the ruptures and repairs between nations and individuals, as well as between the personal and the political. Smith writes her characters into the political friction of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, layering creative storytelling with unflinching critiques of nationalism and xenophobia, environmental crises, academic and institutional gatekeeping, surveillance and technology, and the challenges to women’s archives and the patriarchal timeline of canonical history-making. At the same time, this chapter traces a celebration of queer domestic life, the beauty and persistence of art, and the feminist practice of remaking and repairing the timeline of women’s creative agency across media.