Inclusive searches & sources @UvA Romance languages (18)
The UNITE campaign runs for sixteen days from November 25th, International day for the elimination of violence against women, to December 10th, International Human Rights Day.
Active since 2016 and making the headlines with their protest at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, «Les Colleuses – the gluers – [are] feminist activists who have found a simple, cheap and effective way to make women’s voices heard» [source], i.e. pasting collages of black-lettered texts on walls, to denounce femicide and gender-related violence. While originating in France, similar (groups of) artists activists are now working also elsewhere, such as The Hate Lovers in Barcelona or LeDiesis in Firenze.
While the literature on graffiti and street art is vast, (scholarly) interest in the role played by women in the development of collage (i.e. the 2019 exhibition Cut and Paste at the National Galleries of Scotland) and of (overtly activist forms of) graffiti and street art (i.e. Diego López Giménez’s 2022 book Yo grafitera: Grafiti, street art y muralismo de mujeres) is – alas, unsurprisingly – more recent. Let’s take a look at how to explore it.
- Before starting
Even without considering this blog series’ focus on the Romance languages, it’s the international character of both phenomena – gender-related violence and creative answers against it – that advises to set up search strings in several languages and for different resources. While using French and English in the following examples, it is important to remember that the search strings below can also be translated into other languages and used in the same (and other) resources (check UvA-Library lists for Italian and Spanish). - “Quick & dirty search”: UvA CataloguePlus and Google Scholar
Searching the UvA CataloguePlus with “colleuses” retrieves only one relevant article, Stages, streets, and social media: Intersectional feminism and online activism in France during the pandemic, published in 2022 in “French Politics, Culture and Society” by Hamilton College Associate Professor of French Claire Moufard. Yet: check our previous post (Scholarly literature on) Spanish crime fiction about & by women (2): Books at the UvA Library (and their authors) on how to use even a single article, such as Moufard’s, to find other relevant publications (via citation tracking, the author’s personal website, etc.). Searching Google Scholar with “colleuses” and limiting the results to those after 2016, retrieves some additional titles. Just as with CataloguePlus’ results: mind the different meanings of ‘colleuse’ in French.
- Other (broader) search terms, and different (language specific) resources
If deciding for a broader scope of our literature search, CataloguePlus can be explored with the following combination of search terms (or part of it), to find (scholarly) literature on:
feminist French street art (or French street art by women): (feminis* OR femme* OR woman OR women) AND (france OR francais* OR french) AND (“street art*” OR graffiti* OR collag*)
French street art: (france OR francais* OR french) AND (“street art*” OR graffiti* OR collag*)
feminist street art (or street art by women): (feminis* OR femme* OR woman OR women) AND (“street art*” OR graffiti* OR collag*)
At Google Scholar – first check its search options at the Library333 post Google Scholar: bias, settings, advanced search, alerts – you can use strings such as (“street art” OR graffiti OR collage OR collagisme) “féminisme” (mind féminisme’s grave accent and quotation marks) or (“street art” OR graffiti OR collage) women: compare the results when changing language, both of the search terms and of Scholar‘s interface (see screenshot below for an example).
Language specific resources (the use of French terms is recommended) for finding more literature include among others Cairn, OpenEdition journals and Persée: Portail de revues scientifiques en sciences humaines et sociales, all of them accessible via the UvA Library. Check their ‘Help’ section for specific search options.
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