Woman Up!

Woman Up! Series 4 Episode 3 Frances Hatherley: On Class, the female grotesque and Sublime Dissension.

May 23, 2022 Amy Dignam, Susan Merrick and Frances Hatherley Season 4 Episode 3
Woman Up!
Woman Up! Series 4 Episode 3 Frances Hatherley: On Class, the female grotesque and Sublime Dissension.
Show Notes

Dr Frances Hatherley is a writer, researcher and curator. Her writing provokes critical engagements with working-class women’s subjectivities, creativities, art works, and notions of a classed-aesthetics.

In 2018 she was awarded her PhD from Middlesex University titled “Sublime Dissension: A Working-Class Anti-Pygmalion Aesthetics of the Female Grotesque” examining the intersections of class and gender in the formations of grotesque, and sublime femininities in art and visual culture.

She has published writing on surrealism and the subversive female grotesques of Leonora Carrington’s book The Hearing Trumpet and in David and Al Measles’ film Grey Gardens, and on working-class sexualities and fat femininities in characters from the comic Viz, as well as challenging stereotypes of working-class aesthetics in the photography of Richard Billingham. Other articles discuss class, sexuality, education in film and television.

In 2020 She published her first book on Jo Spence, with a foreword by Marina Warner, titled Class Slippers: Jo Spence, Fantasy, Photography & Fairytales.

Frances has been involved in curating several exhibitions in the UK, the first at the Pelz Gallery working with Patrizia di Bello and a group of MA students, with a show titled “Cultural Sniping: Photographic Collaborations in the Jo Spence Memorial Library” in Spring 2018. She co-curated the exhibition “Jo Spence: From Fairytales to Phototherapy” at the Arnolfini, Bristol, December 2020 – June 2021. Before Christmas, she was involved in curating the expanded film project “The Hurrier: Poor on the Roll” with Anne Robinson showing at galleries APT and Five Years, taking up topics of women, work, sexuality, and time travel.

And she’s currently working on her second book exploring her conception of the Anti-Pygmalion in representations of women in art and popular culture with a focus on the practices of working-class cultural workers in Britain. 

This episode was produced in partnership with Procreate Project