Wilding (Performance Lecture and video installation) The radical female body in protest

“Rights of assembly struck me as different from rights of association or rights of free expression. They fundamentally involve the body in a collective, embodied set of acts.” (Butler 2015). The practice research project Wilding is concerned with the vulnerable female body as a site of protest in feminist revolt. According to Butler, the female body in protest is a precarious body, precarity describing the “conditions that threaten life in ways that appear to be outside of one’s control” (Butler 2009: i). Wilding is a collaboration with queer performance maker Emma Bourke, a descendant of militant suffragette Emily Wilding Davison, who famously jumped in front of the King’s horse to attach a feminist flag, in her fight for Women’s Rights at the 1913 Epsom Derby. The performance questions the validity of violence to protest an oppressive system. We are particularly invested in the female body at risk during radical feminist revolt, and the relation of protest to queerness, “if the term is taken in its most theoretical sense to mean the bending and modification of normative structures of power and sociality” (Glazier 2015). Wilding explores the embodiment of protest in performance, and is a response to and a protest against the proposed policing bill. The Wilding video installation merges archival footage of the Epsom Derby with original videos, and is accompanied by a sound score of protest recordings merged with performance texts, representing the artists’ personal, political and phenomenological experiences of their protest bodies.