Maria Walsh – Female solidarity as uncommodified value: Lucy Beech’s Cannibals and Rehana Zaman’s Some Women, Other Women and all the Bittermen

Abstract

This book chapter offers a close reading of work by British artists Lucy Beech and Rehana Zaman. It argues that their work speak in different ways to the material conditions of women’s immaterial labour in neoliberal capitalism. Introducing their work in a context in which ‘[o]ne of the hallmarks of our neoliberal age is precisely the casting of every human endeavour and activity in entrepreneurial terms’ (Rottenberg 2014), I explore what the groups of female ‘labourers’ that appear in their films might tell us about desire, needs and resistance to being subsumed under capitalist exploitation. I argues that while female empowerment is co-opted by neoliberalism, Beech’s and Zaman’s work oscillate between exposing exploitative commodified values and an uncommodified therapeutic pleasure in group experience.