Wise Women -feminine (un)canny knowledge
In a development of content from my thesis, and having been involved in many conversations with women artists and academics in the past few months, I am begining to put together a project of conversations with women involved in live and performance art and to discuss the ways in which women operate and are treated in this seeming left-field sector. I am reflecting on what kind of work or labour is carried out by women artists and fascilitators, whose work is visible or not and how that contribution to our ‘industry’ is acknowleddged and historicised. How to we celebrate our uncanny canniness? If you are interested in this project please get in touch.
I am thinking about how the word ‘uncanny’ encapsulates the familiar, familial regional vernacular word ‘canny’ Canniness comes from ‘can’ – to be able, in the way human beings makes sense of or respond to the environment, something associated with cleverness or craft. Overt canniness could be considered especially uncanny, something historically applied with suspicion to knowing or knowledgeable women. A Guardian newspaper article ‘From Circes to Clinton: Why Powerful Women are Cast as Witches’ discusses how women with (what is considered by the men around them to be) ‘extraordinary’ or superior knowledge, have been categorised as actual or metaphoric witches – their ‘canniness’ seeming so un-usual, unnatural and un-fitting with the feminine that it is considered to be uncanny and or supernatural (Miller, 2018). Surgical and somatic researcher Fiona K. O’Neill talks about a bodily or embodied uncanny/canny knowledge in relation to her familiar and unfamiliar experience of wearing a prosthetic breast after a mastectomy. She usefully reminds us:
Having a canny knack is not about book learning but the way in which the human body, as much as the mind, is skilled in certain activities. Such activities do not lend themselves to verbal explanation and are generally acquired or grasped, as Wittgenstein (1969) notes through hands-on practice. This echoes Mauss’ discussion of body technique, [or] as he says ‘The English notion of ‘craft’ or ‘cleverness’ (1979 [1950] 108: see also Crossley, 2007). Historically, blacksmithing and midwifery (the canny wife) are exemplary canny crafts. Such overt canniness, however, can be considered distinctly uncanny, as if supernatural: this perception played its part in the prosecution of the witch hunts (O’Neill, 2009, p. 222).