Against Structurelessness: the resonance of 1970s and 1980s feminisms on current collective work
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Unstructured groups may be very effective in getting women to talk about their lives; they aren't very good for getting things done.” When Jo Freeman spoke of the “tyranny of structurelessness” in radical women’s groups in 1970, she identified a long-standing problem for feminist collectives: the question of how to make group work “work” so that it could continue past its initial urgencies and ad hoc structure. Feminist collectives profoundly influenced artists, art historians and critics on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1970s and 80s, yet historical accounts of these groups’ activities rarely attend to the how of group work, producing gaps in intergenerational feminist knowledge transmission. How can we address the difficult and ugly feelings inherent to feminist collective work when these affects so often slip the archive’s net? How do contemporary feminist groups reanimate what Elizabeth Freeman (2011) and Rox Samer (2022) term the undetonated potential of feminism’s past? \n \nReflecting on our experiences with our respective feminist collectives, the Toronto-based EMILIA-AMALIA feminist working group (2016), and the London-based Feminist Duration Reading Group (2015), this paper examines the organizational structures, curatorial practices, and writing strategies each group has developed to sustain long term collaboration and “get things done.” Exploring the feminisms from the 1970s and 1980s that inform our projects, we discuss how we have devised events that aim to acknowledge the shortcomings and prejudices of earlier feminisms, while nonetheless recognising them as flawed, unfinished projects that laid foundations for feminist, trans and queer futures to come.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".