| Sukanya Deb <> | Wed, Mar 12, 1:43 PM |  | |
| to Moakshaa | |||
Dear Moaxes,
Sending you some mid-week thoughts as I wade through the garden that you have meticulously laid out. I watched a couple of films in the last week which I was reflecting on in relation to your source essay for this issue, thinking of feminist utopias.
So I watched Born in Flames (dir. Lizzie Borden, 1983) which is this story set in New York, where post-the socialist-democratic Revolution, a Women’s Army has taken shape in response to crimes against women. They deploy guerilla tactics and are considered to be enemies of the State. The issues that the Women’s Army respond to remain relevant to our present. Can violence against women, for example, be considered to be a systematised tool of oppression? The varying perspectives made me reflect on the multiplicity of voices within feminist discourse.
I also watched Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980) by Pedro Almadovar. Almadovar always stuns me with how he depicts female characters. I’m always taken by the complexity and intensity that he is able to capture in women. Messy, gross, indecisive.
Both these films were punk in their tone – Born in Flames had this counter-narrative of an underground radio where the host believes in the power of music over armed revolution to capture a feminist utopia. The soundtrack is fantastic – especially the radical killjoy lyrics. They’re both very fun films!
Pepi, Luci, Bom is a big ol’ lesbian film about three women and how they strike a friendship. Bom is also part of a punk band and has this powerful dyke aura (at the tender age of 16 lol). She takes an interest in Luci who’s a masochist married to a policeman. Luci wants to be treated like dirt, but his husband loves her like his mother. The masochism intensifies eventually and we see Luci and Bom’s servile partnership lead to its end.
Seeing some of these radical portrayals of women, I was thinking about the language we embrace to speak of resistance/ space/ revolution. Is it benign? How can we reimagine women and their secondary portrayal/ position? Is feminism no longer cool in our cultural discourse?
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Another Garden
Can a collection of algae cyanotypes be considered a herbarium? Can a photobook be a garden? Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes are a lovely marvel in the history of photography.
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Leaving you with some stray thoughts – speak soon!
– Sukanya
| Moakshaa Vohra <> | Thu, Mar 20, 12:27 PM | | |
| to me | |||
Dear Sukanya,
Your reflections have been sitting with me this week, making me think more deeply about feminist utopias and the spaces women create – both in defiance and in refusal. I haven’t seen Born in Flames or Pepi, Luci, Bom, but your reading of them makes me think about how women navigate, disrupt, and reimagine space – sometimes loudly, through collective revolt, and at other times through quieter movement and gentle gestures.
The underground radio in Born in Flames reminds me of how alternative infrastructures have always allowed women to circulate – whether through secret reading groups, veiled gardens, or whispered solidarities. What does it mean to claim space – not as fixed territory, but as something fluid – moving through frequencies, presence, and resistance that doesn’t always announce itself? Perhaps the feminist utopia isn’t just about autonomy but about movement – creating circuits through restrictions and regulations, finding brief exits from invisible and visible institutions, and generating new networks of possibility.
Your question – whether feminism is still “cool” – stayed with me. Feminism has always been messy, fragmented, a project of constant negotiation – much like the women in Pepi, Luci, Bom: gross, indecisive, excessive. In the history of feminist movements, what forms of refusal have been considered too ugly, too improper, too inconvenient to be absorbed into mainstream narratives? Perhaps this is why feminism has never really been “cool” – at least, not in the way coolness requires legibility. The feminism that makes it into mainstream culture is often polished, marketable, and coherent – designed to be understood and absorbed. But what about the feminism that refuses to be sold? The one that is too angry, too fractured, too irrational?
Maybe that’s where the garden comes in – not as a utopia, but as a space of contradictions : cultivation and decay, invitation and exclusion, care and neglect. A place that resists a single narrative, where things grow unevenly, unruly, where certain species simply refuse domestication.
You mention Anna Atkins’ cyanotypes – can a photobook be a garden? If so, then perhaps archives – especially those assembled with care, by women, for women – are gardens too? Spaces of preservation, but also sites of possibility, where knowledge and memory are cultivated in ways that resist linear histories. Maybe this edition of the Purée is a garden in the making – a space that grows through the entanglement of our voices, shaped as much by what we choose to include as by what remains unsaid.
Best,
Moakshaa