UC Berkeley

Feminist Gestures argues that gestures act as a first step in rehearsing relationality, allowing us to develop embodied strategies that counter the forces and temporalities of dictatorial, patriarchal, colonial, and imperial violence. It tracks the resistant potential of small physical movements across art forms, from early twentieth-century modernisms to 1980s feminisms in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe. This dissertation argues that non-codified gestures—described in literary texts, enacted in performance arts, and documented in film and photography—arise during historical moments and geographical and social contexts in the twentieth century where speech is limited, expression curtailed, and survival squeezed. The project draws on queer and feminist theory, Global South critiques, studies in phenomenology and performance, and embodied research to undertake comparative studies on works by Virginia Woolf, Maria Aurèlia Capmany, María Irene Fornés, Diamela Eltit, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Gabriela Mistral, Ana Mendieta, and Colectivo LASTESIS. I find that modernist feminists’ attention to the body as a site of oppression is later honed into gestural feminist art that reclaims bodies-in-relation as sites of resistance. While the project acknowledges that much of performance’s power lies in its immediacy, Feminist Gestures contends that this potential can be re-activated during moments of reading a text or about a performance. Even as tensions between written text and nonverbal physical movement animate the project, I aim to undo strict boundaries between gesture represented on the page and gesture represented in the body by drawing attention to the role of embodied imagination. Unlike a thumbs-up, a wave, or a shrug, the gestures I study call us—sometimes inviting, sometimes demanding—as readers and viewers into our own bodies and sensibilities. From consideration of a fist opening and closing in Cha’s experimental art book Dictee, to hands “spelling out what is unseen” in Mistral’s poem “El reparto,” to an ankle flick in Woolf’s fictional biography Orlando, the dissertation shows that descriptions of gestures in texts never remain in the realm of representation alone. Because we do not immediately know what such non-codified gestures mean, we have to bring our readerly and embodied faculties to details that might initially seem auxiliary or minor. It is through this process of engagement, I argue, that embodied relationality can arise, if we are willing. Shared movements foment collective political mobilization; gestures invite a loosening of ties to individual subjectivity, allowing us to come into solidarity through our bodies.