#criphd

[criphd]

made this substack for collecting some writing abt my phd research...maybe...?! plz subscribe if ur interested ! first post hopefully coming in march ???

[thecolorblockcurator]

@criphd this is actually what my thesis was on!! I took all the photos I could find that intentionally included Marcel Moores shadow, or reflection (there were so many!!) to make that argument.

I never got it published because I’m done with academia- so if anyone wants to run with that topic feel free!! It’s so interesting.

And when they were writing about their arrest, Moore talked about how she was in the process of making photo collages and had hundreds of cut photos of Cahun all over the bed & the nazis who arrested them burned the photos and mocked them. Moore said usually she kept them locked up hidden under the floor boards.

So that definitely points to collaboration if not complete authorship of Moore of the collages they made of Cahun.

What do you like about Claude Cahun?

I wrote one of my undergrad thesis about Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s collaborative art. I love the complexities of their work, I love that it was a true collaboration, everything that they did, photography, poetry, play writing/costume design, political activism, sculpture. There is this one photo of Cahun on a sea wall, that Moore took. Cahun is wearing fairy wings and looks like she’s prancing across the wall. And it’s amazing and full of life and joy and absurdity.  And then after Cahun died Moore took a photograph of the empty sea wall and you can feel the absence of Cahun, you feel the grief, and you’re just looking out at the ocean, knowing that happiness happened there, but now it’s gone.

[criphd]

I decide I’m going to read three biographies of enid nesbit, so i can compare them and decide what view of her life and self is the most accurate and the most interesting to me in terms of her socialist literary output.

I decide to become an expert on the three big socialist dora’s of my loose time period ; dora montefiore (<3), dora marsden, dora russell. 

I decide to read the works of henry james because his critical voice is highly present in contemporaneous literary discussion so getting to grips with his realist novels is a good idea. 

I go on deciding, and deciding, and not sleeping enough forever. 

There is a strike at the university because they want to get rid of 300 jobs and are ceaselessly careless about it all. 

More and more it becomes clear to me my hopes for any kind of even vague academic job stability are getting further from my fingertips with every month that goes by. 

I decide in order to combat this hopelessness i must become an expert. An expert in my field and an expert in my wider field - i must become excellent at all british literary history, i must know the ins and outs of literary production from one end of time to the next. I must know about the most popular and canonical as well as the ill-defined, marginalised, mishappen little pockets of literature. 

I decide i need to re/learn french. I decide i need to figure out a transnational aspect of my project and i start looking at postdoctoral positions to see the feasibility of them, whether my tiny seedling of an idea might fit, might get chosen in the lottery cranking of funding applications. (i’m not halfway through my phd yet, i decide to try and let some of this go.)

I decide i need to learn norwegian too of course and it needs to be good enough to understand miniscule periodicals from the 19th century.  

I decide to try and accept that it’s unattainable to try and become an expert in everything, i cant learn every language, time period, niche yet meaningful text in order to shore up my future within academia. 

I decide to try and accept how tired i am. 

I decide to try and accept that what i work on - the voices i am extricating from newspaper archives - matters to me (even if it doesn’t matter to the academy). I decide to try and accept that what i work on - the sophisticated political development of women during the fin de siècle - matters to me (even if it doesn’t matter to the academy). 

I try to accept what i cant control. My supervisors go on strike. 

I decide to stop deciding things and go to sleep.

[criphd]

doing a phd (taken on the same day) …

[criphd]

adventures in developing a short term writing routine notes & practices :

[i returned to this ask response from julia @northwindow abt creating a writing routine to help me w this bc it was a rly great answer !]

my working days are sunday, monday, wednesday & thursday (unless im too spoonless to work) so i sort of plan to write & edit on all of them at this point. i might develop a more specific routine where some days i dont write at all &/or maybe days where i'm editing things i've already written.... but this is in development & wld obvs change depending on if i have a deadline imminently.

30 minute free writing time is the least amount i aim for what i write in a day - but it doesn't have to be all at once [bc my capacity to concentrate sometimes does not work for any longer then 10 or so mins !] but i definitely on some days i go for much much longer than that

marking down ideas whenever they strike me & sifting thru them for prompts when i am sititng down to do some actual writing

trying to get some reading done without being so precious about being At My Best illness wise !! its okay to not remember or get all of it in one go/have to return/reread/whatever/ blah blah

working in different places - but mostly just at my desk at home, nd at my desk on campus (i need good chairs!!). but if i get bored i shouldn't forget i can book a study room in the library ! or work in a cafe (this isn't especially easy for me tho but it could be a nice change for a short time)

sending out a draft to one of the lovely ppl who look over things for me before shabbos so i can take a total break whilst its being mulled over by someone else.

writing in response to a quotation / using it as a prompt / if i'm stuck

also i honestly love to eat lunch whilst working.... so eating lunch at my desk whilst my word doc/etc are open :)

i also wanna try :

seeing how many words i can write in 52 minutes & then have a 17 minute break after (hopefully whilst eating a tangerine) ... (i dont kno why i just think it would be right!!!)

[criphd]

this is belated but bc it has been another full year i thought i should write out some stuff i did in it as a reminder of my progress& my hard work !: (this is definitely not chronological lol)

read almost ? the whole of 1909's women's columns in justice [abt 35% of the material]

had a big meeting with ppl in the department abt my health & what to do which was good !!

went to a women's grassroot's activism conference specifically to see june hannam & karen hunt talk, but there was some interesting stuff on feminist community builiding aside from my faves

checked thru some of commonweal to see if they had a women's column [ofc no] & what women were contributing [mostly translation, eleanor marx for a while was writing the international notes section]

transcribed like... 10 - 20% of the columns i've read for quotations n better archiving

started writing about 'justice', the 'working class feminist everyday' & freed myself a little from the worry abt 'not being literary enough'

i had an another apr like .... 6 months from the last one which was a bit crazy but it went rly well ! i submitted the beginnings of what would become my draft chapter, & had a great panel meeting abt my work n what i'm doing :)

went to see the play underdog twice lol

experienced the worst pain flare of my entire life lol but survived it & did not kill myself !!! literally i have had an insane health year !!

i submitted my biggest, most complicated & important piece of work yet: a very draft chapter about women's columns in socialist newspapers & the identity & ideology work they do for socialist women/socialist feminism [it was 13600 words]

made some more friends !! :)

came up against the difficulty of finding resources about women of the second international [in english, but also in general they are sooo erased + ignored :(]

had around 9 supervisions

finally got a fucking not awful chair at my desk on campus !! and a laptop stand ! just wish they would give me a mouse lol

read a bunch of natalia ginzburg

became kinda obssessed with chartism lmao... thanks mike sanders ! & ella !

felt a lot more confident & like i have the capacity to be coherent about my research & that's rly lovely :)

went to a talk abt abortion access & travel between the netherlands & germany in terms of reproductive rights

managed to maintain a short term writing routine which bodes well for me :)

fell in love with lina murray

took a month long deeply needed break

:) so yh ! it's been so tough but it's also happening !

[criphd]

the deadline for my first [!!!] full chapter is due in a month [on thr 10th july] so here is a ~small list of things to do so that i dont get overwhelmed but i can do the things most useful to writing like 10000 more words than i have.... also have to figure out how to develop some kind of writing routine i think but that's so hard atm !! anyway ::

reread mike saunders intro / chapter 1 to the poetry of chartism

skim jake's piece on morris

finish reading all of our women's circle

look @ barbara green on the women's column

try to find the hannam and hunt definition from 1999 ?!

decide what to do about margaretta hicks.... i dont think i will include her tbh but maybe just double check that.

think abt the other columns & ways to bring them in...

also to read the intro / first chapter of benedict anderson's imagined communities

[criphd]

everyone was very very nice at my [first] practice run presentation :) <3 & i only cried a bit but afterwards when they were being rly nice to me !!

[criphd]

trying to decide if i should make a zine abt my research / abt the socialist newspapers & whether that would be 100% procrastination from other work OR if it could be a cool, fun, interesting exercise that might help me articulate stuff …. & then also share it w my ppl. i got accepted into a periodical workshop to present abt my work so i do need to think about speaking specifically about what im doing to other ppl so..... cld b helpful for that ???

but also i am so fucking exhausted

[criphd]

ann ardis in new women, new novels just takes as a matter of course that the discourse that names 'the new woman' is coherent enough to be directly responding to actual literal real women, but i dont think that should be just beleived, considering the dispersed & nascent way that women were for example joining the work force [for middle class women more specifically]... especially considering much of the exploration / creation of the parameters of 'the new woman' was by conservative & reactionary men + women who were like decrying & creating a monstrous woman figure that basically didnt actually exist lol [if only she had, she seems soooo sexy]

i did rly like her introductory chapter but she just immediately starts off by talking about the name as opposed to trying to write an argument that says 'yes there was a new woman movement' when evidently there wasnt just like.... women existing.... doesn't mean u can start deciding they r 'new women' or not bc that shows how baseless the whole framework is... or just like women continuing to be talked about a lot like they have been the whole victorian era .... that's not new !.... how discourse abt the 'new woman' is really different to 'the woman question' is not clear to me at all either lol

it's soooo obvious that the 'new woman' is basically an entirely constructed persona for the literary and art world & has barely any impact for political women - like the fear abt women does come from their behaviour & politics to some degree [but then misogyny is misogyny is misogyny so....], but not in the sense of an actual movement with genuine political aims or organising to be clear!!!.... to be fair i think ardis is mostly aware of it but i just think like i'm not convinced by her argument or assumption that the discussion of women in periodicals is uniquely different from other early discussion & criticism of her, at least from the 1860s there's such a clear through line, the only link is the woman part, not that there's some distinct seperation out

also feel like this is a rly annoying way to talk abt proto/feminist politics without saying that like socialism was Big with Women at some points but u dont like explicitly political women so instead its all vague & acts like women as a class have loyalty to eachother when unfortunately they do not !!! or getting into the intense conservatism of a lot of these famous victorian protofeminists who u just want to like girlbossify & ignore how much they loved imperialism for example [i dont think ann ardis is doing this so much... this is just more general ig]

[criphd]

are women even publishing serialised fiction in non-women centric/specific periodicals in the victorian era? i cant find a serialised novel by a woman that is not being published by a women's specific paper [yes]

[criphd]

[a letter] Forward, WITH the Men

“Dear Comrade, I should like to offer a protest against a suggestion made by Mrs. Montefiore at the meeting held on the 28th inst. at Chandos Hall. she suggested that as the women of the party would be doing a large amount of work for the forthcoming S.D.P. bazaar, they should claim a certain percentage of the fund raised. The bazaar, I understand, is being raised for the definite purpose of helping the election fund of the party, irrespective of sex, and as members of the party we women share the glory of doing our share of useful work. I would suggest that the women form schemes of their own whereby they could raise funds. Where we can work amicably together dont let us be the first to cause any bickering. I utterly deplore this question of “Women versus Men” inside our own party. I admit that women have to be approached in a different manner than men. Hence, the existence of our Women’s Circles, which are run in the majority of cases by our own women comrades, who endeavour to educate the women in the principles of Social-Democracy and make them as class conscious as we possibly an. But if out women comrades continue to raise the question of sex, the must expect to have the opposition of men, and I do not think it sets a very good example. I think the men get at us at times, because they know we get a little bit out of temper, and i do not think we should take a lot they say with regard to women as seriously as we do. I fear I am taking up a lot of space, but i should like to say that we women go forward or go backward with the men, and we want to go forward with them and prove that we are capable of doing things, and help to bring about, as quickly as possible, that state of society, where we can say with truth, from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. – Yours, in the Cause,” (Jennie E. Cockerton, May 8 1909)

Another letter – “Dear Sir, While sympathising with the women who are endeavouring to interest their fellow women in Socialism by means of Circles, I would, as an old-time member of the S.D.F., like to make a few remarks on E. Anderson’s letter in your issue of May 1.

First of all I must take exception to her saying that previous to the establishing of the circles only a woman here and there with exceptional opportunities could attain a footing in the branches. My own experience was directly opposite to that. 

I joined a branch, being interested in Socialism, and found there a truly fraternal spirit, everyone ready to listen if I had anything to say and treating my opinions with consideration- in fact, i was looked on as an equal. In no case was I or any other woman member “contemptuously brushed aside” or “looked on as a mere camp follower.” While admiring the self-sacrifice of the leaders of the circles, it seems to me that such circles may prove a very real danger to the equality of the sexes by dividing instead of uniting them.

There were no circles in those days, and the women used to speak side by side with the men, but on this May-Day, when, according to E. Anderson, things are so much improved, the only platform that women spoke from was that of the children - a fitting one, truly, but too narrow if their interests extend no farther.

Poverty and unemployment affect women deeply - not to mention their right to the vote - and on these and many other questions of vital impotence woman must have something to say from her point of view, for only thus will the whole truth be presented to the workers, and failing this there is no true equality” (Nellie Bloodworth, May 8 1909)

[criphd]

i got some feedback about the first chapter draft that i handed in and its rly positive and i actually just feel so overwhelmed!!! its so so nice to hear im on a rly good track and some of my ideas r insightful or at least solid [alongside stuff that obviously needs developing] but for some reason i actually feel stressed by the praise lmao, maybe bc i did work really really hard on it and obviously it still is a partial and very clumsy piece of work but yh.. idk !!! its like a tiny glimpse into how much more i have to do i guess? i am trying to just rly hear the praise bc i think i do hold myself to rly high standards so i feel like i ~should get good feedback and that means when i do get nice comments or whatever i dont feel as joyful abt them as i should i think. does that make sense? anyway :) love my supervisors, v happy, v exhausted, :)))

[criphd]

historians of british socialism mention women more than once challenge!!!!!!!

[criphd]

making progress!!! word count is increasing :)) got to at least 1700 words today ! v happy w myself for that :)

[criphd]

had my latest supervision.... cried quite a bit in it. i think im really struggling with the fact that it’s been my dream to do a phd for a really long time & now that i’m actually doing it it feels less like a dream and more like a nightmare. or at least like the rest of my life it is also overlayed by + disrupted/distorted by my illness[es] & that just sucks & isnt something i imagined would happen so much when i dreamt about it. the stress i feel about ‘being behind’ is so much to do with the fact that i ~think i’m not doing enough/ not living up to my expectations [which have always been ludicrouslly high], it’s not about what is actually true in terms of my work - neither of my supervisors think i’m behind, i get positive feedback everytime we talk / i share work [even if it isnt perfect lol] etc. it’s fine. it’s all going to be fine.