WILDING- the body at risk in militant feminist revolt (performance lecture)

“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 Performance as Research project Wilding is concerned with the precarious female body as a site of protest in feminist revolt, 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 non-binary, queer performance maker Emma Bourke, a descendant of the militant suffragette Emily Wilding Davison, who died at the Epsom Derby in 1913 after running onto the race track in an attempt to pin a suffragettes’ flag to the King’s horse. Wilding uses a Performance as Research methodology to challenge myths surrounding femininity and precarity, and explores the meaning of feminism to non-binary people today. The project is furthermore invested in the female body 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). The Wilding performance lecture merges archival footage of the Epsom Derby with autobiographical confession, and is accompanied by a soundscore of protest recordings merged with feminist Euro-Punk. Wilding explores the embodiment of protest in performance, is a response to and a protest against the UK’s policing bill, and explores the performers’ personal, political and phenomenological experiences of their protest bodies.