WELCOME TO MAI ISSUE ONE

Demystifying the worthy figure behind our journal’s name, Mariah Larsson reads MAI Manifesto and praises Mai Zetterling (1925-1994) to show her as the most fitting patron of our work.

Rebecca Harrison shares a personal, critical reflection on cultural evaluations of women’s work and the metaphors of light.

Unintentionally, in offensive language, the sexist Trump reminded all women that, as Rebecca Walker once said, ‘to be a feminist is … to join in sisterhood with women.’

Agency and activism in comics aimed at young women: a case study of Sally Heathcote: Suffragette, Lumberjanes, and Ms Marvel.

Backman Rogers watches Maja Borg’s Future My Love (2012) to ponder on our quests for happiness and intimate relationships.

Elkin situates the diaries of Alix Roubaud and Susan Sontag alongside their creative work. A new reckoning of the personal and political.

Jones views Marjorie Liu’s Monstress to argue that this comic series radically reworks and counteracts the racist and sexist standards of mainstream comics.

A critique of neoliberal recuperations of feminism: women on the market 2.0.

Going back as far as 1914 to tell the story of a suffragette Mary Richardson, Mary McGill contemplates the power of female gaze in today’s selfie culture.

A personal reflection on the nature of the photographic error. Piper-Wright situates happenstance and error as a feminist photographic response.

In November 2017, the Scottish BAFTA winner, Hope Dickson Leach and MAI contributing editor, Neil Fox talked about women, film industry, privilege, boring and interesting cinema and much more.

Mairead Case interviews Stephanie Acosta and Daviel Shy who made The Ladies Case Almanack (2017), an experimental feminist film inspired by Djuna Barnes’ 1928 book.

Discussing their seemingly distant projects, photographers Patricia Prieto Blanco and Yasmine Akim share ideas on female creative practice and self-identification.

Persona Non Grata Sonata is a video essay (6’32”). Using sequences from Persona (1966) and Autumn Sonata (1978), the essay was made in 2018.

Bête Noir is an experimental narrative short film that illuminates the internalization of the male gaze.

In a deconstruction of Ukrainian wedding traditions, Solomiya Moroz explores Oksana Kazmina’s feminist interventions in archival video footage.

Inspired by Tracey Emin’s My Bed and Shelley Jackson’s My Body— A Wunderkammer, Jessica Tillings produces a series of artworks concerned with process, self-portrait and the power of blood.

Inspired by the ‘Thirteen Tenets of Future Feminism’, Sophia Kier-Byfield writes an affective document in fragments about a series of events and workshops at O space in Aarhus, Denmark.

Following the media storm around Maria Schneider’s treatment on the set of Last Tango in Paris, Jazmine Linklater draws on manifestoes, media interviews and Laura Mulvey’s essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ to create a bristling textual collage.

In a personal, cross-genre piece examining female desire, Nia Davies interrogates the three-way dynamic between viewer, viewed and photographer on Instagram.

Paulette Jonguitud articulates the struggle to continue feminist practice in art, and in life, in this fabular tale of women’s existence during wartime.

Forty-two years after Chantal Akerman made her film about Jeanne Dielman, Gloria Dawson writes a poem as she watches the woman on the screen.

In a fragmentary poetic essay, Amy McCauley examines penises, the act of looking and two works by female artists: ‘Fillette’ by Louise Bourgeois and ‘Action Pants’ by Valie Export.

A retrospective critical assessment of Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970).

A review of Khairani Barokka’s Indigenous Species (2016).

A critical look at Kara Keeling’s first monograph The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (2007).

A critical reflection on the ‘Digital Violence’ symposium at Anglia Ruskin University: engaging with contemporary digital politics and misogyny.