Critical Conversation with Valerie Mainz, Emma Rushton and Alan Forrest

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“The parts assigned to women generally belong not to the field of conflict, but to what the recruit is forced to leave behind in the pursuit of his military calling. These gender divisions serve to bring out underlaying mentalities in which the arts of peace were allied to the caring and procreative abundance of the feminine and opposed to the negative and destructive acts of masculine warfare. While only men, at least in principle, perpetrated the punitive, destructive effects of warfare, the exercise of political virtue within the expanding spaces of critical reasoning had also come to be confined just to men. Thus the granting of political rights for the good of all at the time of the Revolution set up a masculine-engendered Republicanism, opposed to an aristocratic, effeminised past and to later counter-revolutionary, privatised self-interests, conceived as effeminate and enervating.”
Valerie Mainz, Days of Glory? Imaging Military Recruitment and the French Revolution (published by Palgrave Macmillan)

In this seminar, Valerie Mainz, Emma Rushton and Professor Alan Forrest (University of York) will be making observations about the role of women as described within Days of Glory and alongside conflict, referencing contemporary military recruitment, and also making comparisons to the way certain contemporary artists take from and relook at historical events.

The venue is Room 2.09 in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University Road, University of Leeds. See here for a campus map.
The event is free and all are welcome. It is organised by the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies as part of our critical conversation series.

Images courtesy of Emma Rushton.