Paper short abstract:

I will consider a variety of collage practices as alchemical transformation pertaining to women and children; I’m especially interested in exploring issues of irruption and interruption.

Paper long abstract:

My paper takes its inspiration from a phrase attributed to a magical alchemist who likened the work of alchemy to “women’s work and children’s games.” Key to his notion of alchemy is the handling of materials—cutting and pasting, assembling ingredients together in a recipe, or mixing chemicals to create gold.

I will consider a variety of collage practices as alchemical transformation, focusing particularly on the strategy of interruption. Collage practices often share an impulse to interrupt the flow of dominant discourse and imagine new configurations of meaning. This strategy is especially apparent in the practice of “culture jamming” that has been an important practice informing a great deal of current work that bridges the art and scholarly divide.