A portrait of Kent Professor Davina Cooper will be amongst those to feature in a collection of ‘counter portraits’ of feminist scholars.
Professor Cooper’s portrait will be painted as part of a project being undertaken by Professor Chris Beasley, an artist who is also a full-time academic in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Adelaide in Australia. The overall project will include paintings and block prints but is expected to be exhibited in two main phases. The entire collection of portraits features women academics who teach about women and gender relations – that is, women who produce knowledge about women in society.
Professor Beasley was inspired to begin the project as a way of counter balancing the dominance of portraits featuring male scholars on the walls of the buildings at her university. She said: ‘I noticed how virtually all of the artworks held in the senior management building were of men in authoritative poses and felt keenly aware of how women were not represented in the university – and of my own continuing outlier status as a female professor.’ A subsequent tour with the Director of University Collections revealed no more than two paintings of women.
Professor Beasley said: ‘The project was also influenced by conversations I had while on a visit to the UK to give various papers (one of these involved going to Kent Law School to give a paper there and see Davina). I met up with Professor Leslie Moran at Birkbeck who has been writing for some time about authoritative portraits of powerful men in law schools and their meaning. Conversations with Les further convinced me of the importance of undertaking counter-portraits, in particular of feminist scholars.’
Initially, Professor Beasley chose to paint group portraits of women who are currently working, and who have previously worked, in the Department of Gender Studies and Social Analysis (previously Department of Women’s Studies) at Adelaide. Realising the paintings would take some time to complete, Professor Beasley decided to produce a series of block prints of the same women that could be finished more quickly. With this phase of the project nearing completion, Professor Beasley hopes to exhibit the block prints on International Women’s Day next year. In a later phase of the project, she will exhibit sets of single subject portraits, one of which will be of a painting of Professor Cooper and another of which will be of Emerita Professor Raewyn Connell, a well-known gender scholar who recently transitioned from Bob to Raewyn.
Professor Cooper is Professor of Law and Political Theory at Kent Law School. Her main areas of research sit at the interstices of socio-legal studies, political theory, social diversity and the transformational potential of state and non-state sites. She has explored these themes in articles, book chapters and books over twenty years, including in: Challenging Diversity: Rethinking Equality and the Value of Difference (2004); Governing out of Order: Space, Law and the Politics of Belonging (1998); Power in Struggle: Feminism, Sexuality and the State (1995); and Sexing the City: Lesbian and Gay Politics within the Activist State (1994). Her most recent book, Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces (Duke University Press, 2014) was awarded the Charles Taylor Book Award in 2015.
Earlier this year, Professor Cooper was awarded the Feminist Theory Annual Essay Prize 2016 in recognition of ‘excellent scholarship’ for her essay ‘Bringing the state up conceptually: Forging a body politics through anti-gay Christian refusal.’