Woman Up!
WomanUp! podcast speaks to and about artists, academics, writers and activists, midwives, carers and more all (m)others and all womxn. Those challenging ideas and ideals, questioning assumptions and provoking social change.
Originally created under the Desperate Artwives collective, Woman Up! is a podcast dedicated to creating a living archive of these people and this work, that anyone can access. We find those trying to change current structures founded on biases that have to do with gender, caring responsibilities, race, and the integration of the private and the public space. We have conversations about lived experiences, achievements, and aspirations and we will share campaigns and awareness around crucial intersectional struggles and subjects.
Series 4 included 6 episodes produced in partnership with the innovative Procreate ProjectWoman Up! is produced by Artists Amy Dignam and Susan Merrick
Special thanks:
Althea Greenan and The Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths College for providing us space and equipment to record for S1 and S2 as well as support for the project;
Rosemary Schonfeld and OVA for the use of their track Early in the Evening, and to the Women’s Liberation Music Archive for storing such inspirational music that we can then find!
Mike Dignam for remixing the track
Woman Up!
Woman Up! Series 4 Episode 3 Frances Hatherley: On Class, the female grotesque and Sublime Dissension.
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