Gossip and Ghosts: Spectres of Lost Feminist Utopias

Sinclair, Jeanie ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-9823-7235 (2025) Gossip and Ghosts: Spectres of Lost Feminist Utopias. In: Haunted Modernities: Present Pasts and Spectral Futures, July 16-18 2025, Falmouth University, Falmouth Campus.

Preview	Slideshow (Gossip and Ghosts: Spectres of Lost Feminist Utopias) 20250717_HauntedModernities_SinclairJeanie.pdf - Presentation Download (3MB) | Preview
	Audio (NoUmandUm - Oral History Performance) No Umandum.m4a - Supplemental Material Download (6MB)

Abstract / Summary

This presentation considers the lost feminist utopian social imaginary of 1960s St Ives, and asks, how can using oral history with hauntology as a critical-creative heritage practice reveal hidden, gendered narratives in the history of St Ives’ creative community?

By looking at gossip in the oral history archive as a seance that conjures the spirit of 1960s St Ives, this discussion explores how this community created a sense of both individual and collective identity as a form of resistance to patriarchal capitalism, and how this was expressed and shared through parties and political activism. Mid-20th century St Ives was a place where women were able to have creative careers, explore alternative political views, transgress heteronormative gender roles and explore ideas of utopian collectivism.  To listen to the gossip in the archive is to “invite back the ghosts that sanitized history has banished” (McNeill, 2001). The complex and messy stories of women’s lives have been represssed by dominant patriarchal modernist narratives, however, these women’s ghostly voices cannot fully be suppressed. The archive’s spectral community creates a rupture that interrupts the tourist present and historiographies of St Ives to reveal a complex, gendered narrative of the history of the town’s creative community.
 
Drawing on oral histories from the St Ives Archive, gossip is a powerful tool that can unearth hidden and alternative queer and feminine narratives of modernities. (Rogoff, 1996) Using gossip as a methodology reveals the importance of the ghosts of feminine sociability as political resistance, the party as an alternative, feminine creative practice, and the complex relationships and vital support networks that developed between women in St Ives' postwar art community.

View Record (staff only)