Rising from cancellation – Woman Create 2025

Here is the transcript and a video of my talk (online) at Women Create International 2025

(The video is not the actual talk but a filmed practice run 😛 Enjoy!)

This talk was part of the amazing Women Create International event – May 2025 London – Organised by Victoria Gugenheim and curated by Victoria Gugenheim and Claudia Clare More info here

“Rising From Cancellation: Preserving Freedom in the Arts

Cancel Culture: Let’s Clarify

The term cancel culture gets thrown around to describe a wide range of phenomena, many of which have little in common. In fact, some are in direct opposition to one another.

Let’s see how Wikipedia defines it:

Cancel culture is a cultural phenomenon in which an individual thought to have acted or spoken in an unacceptable manner is ostracised, boycotted, shunned, or fired, often aided by social media. This shunning may extend to social or professional circles, with most high-profile incidents involving celebrities. Those subject to this ostracism are said to have been “canceled.”

On one hand, cancel culture refers to the calling out of sexually predatory men in the entertainment industry, often led by the courageous women of the #MeToo movement. Survivors speaking up. Victims finally naming names.

Sometimes—rarely—these brave acts lead to consequences: lost sponsors, lost visibility, lost power. And even more rarely, jail time. (Think Harvey Weinstein—an exception in a sea of predators who will never face consequences for their actions.)

But curiously, cancel culture is also used to describe something else entirely: the silencing of women whose views are deemed unacceptable by patriarchy.
This is what this panel is covering.

Think of women denying the concept of gender identity.
Think of victims speaking up against male violence.
Think of any woman exposing any male systems of oppression.

In these cases, no crime has been committed. No harm has been done. And yet, women can be stripped of their platforms, their visibility, and their institutional support—regardless of their talent, hard work, or accomplishments.

Celebrity Culture as Patriarchal Control

The theory of celebrity culture teaches us that, to be accepted, promoted, and celebrated in patriarchal media, individuals must embody the hegemonic values of the time.
Fame is conditional. Celebrities are not random—they are curated. Their visibility serves as a form of social control, modelling what is acceptable.

People who are handpicked to become celebrities must represent a significant degree of systemic compliance—or they don’t rise at all.

So what happens when a woman steps out of line?
What happens if she develops a feminist consciousness after reaching recognition?
Or what if her radical side had simply gone unnoticed—until now?

That’s when women get cancelled.

Blurring the Lines Between Victims and Perpetrators

And here lies the irony: we use the term cancel culture for both perpetrators and victims. We conflate speaking up about violence with committing violence.

That’s why we’ve seen trans rights activists claim J.K. Rowling is the female version of Andrew Tate.

Let’s be clear:

• Speaking up about the violence of transactivists,
• Denouncing the harm done to young girls by the Big Pharma transitioning industry,
• Creating women-only spaces for rape survivors,
• And defending lesbian rights to exclude males from our sexual lives

is not the same as grooming, trafficking, raping, or prostituting women and girls.

Equating the two is not just dishonest—it’s profoundly misogynistic.
It is also a gaslighting strategy in pure DARVO style: it implies that women who are silenced and cancelled deserve their cancellation.

And What of the Majority?

This model leaves us with a problem. Celebrities and famous women artists are, after all, a minority.

What about everyone else?

Patriarchy didn’t wait for trans ideology to cancel women from its platforms.
It has always done so—across class, culture, and time.
Art is no exception.

In fact, patriarchy never gave most women a platform in the first place. And it fought very hard against the women who tried to make it as artists.

Anyone familiar with the history of art knows that women have been systematically excluded from the art world and erased from art history.
Only through the painstaking work of feminist scholars and researchers have our contributions begun to resurface.
As Jackie Fleming puts it: “recovering women from the dustbin of history.”

Many feminist scholars, curators or artists—like Adrienne Rich, Dale Spender, Tabitha Barber, Griselda Pollock, the Guerrilla Girls, Linda Nochlin—have asked the question about women’s art in history and wondered:
WHY HAVE THERE BEEN NO GREAT WOMEN ARTISTS?
The answer: there have been. Of course.

Women’s studies, women’s history, the feminist study of women’s literature, and women’s art are all disciplines that no longer exist in academia.
They were initially created to provide a spotlight not only to women’s work itself, but to the systematic erasure it has been subjected to.

The cancel culture we experience today exists in a system that already pretends women’s creative work is irrelevant and non-existent.
Today’s cancel culture exists within a systematic silencing, ignoring, dismissing, and obstructing of women’s creative work:
the non-archiving, the pretending it never happened, the relegating of women’s art to an inferior discipline, to craft,
a practice that patriarchy has decided can never be “great art.”
A culture where women’s ideas are stolen, their works passed off as male genius. or when they are transitioned after their death.

This is cancel culture too.
A cancel culture that’s not viral or flashy, but systematic, quiet, and relentless.

Like workplace discrimination, most cancel culture in the arts today is silent, unnoticed, and unchallengeable.
They won’t tell you why they don’t let you in. But the net result is that radical women’s voices aren’t there.

The filtering happens at every art submission that favours queer artists over feminist ones, at every funding application that gets turned down because it challenges the accepted narratives.

The obstacles women face in the art world are complex and interconnected.
They mutually reinforce each other, creating layers of cancellations:

From structural and economic issues—
like not having a room of our own, not being able to afford childcare, being systematically refused studio space or being too poor to afford one,
being banned by social media platforms for expressing so-called unacceptable opinions.
struggling to access women’s visual and artistic culture, facing the class barrier of struggling to apply for funding,
plain old impostor syndrome,
never having one’s work picked up for exhibition, no gallery representation,
 

To the new phenomenon of being cancelled once, and if we ever make it.

Conclusion

As someone who’s never been platformed, I relate to what Audre Lorde and Janice Raymond understood:

Women are, by definition, outside.
Our starting point is at the margins of dominant systems.

And with that marginality comes both vulnerability and freedom.

Freedom is an incredible strength

The freedom to say what cannot be said.
The freedom to imagine new worlds, not recycle or reform old, unworkable ones.
The freedom to create art that’s not digestible or decorative or consumerist, but radical.
Art that’s meant to wake people up, not help them sleep, not brainwash them, but promote Critical thinking

So my advice for women who have been cancelled?

What do you have to lose now?

Go for it, be outrageous, speak your mind, express your rage! think beyond the realm of what the oppressive regime deems acceptable, uncensor yourself, be the most radical version of yourself

This is the kind of work I do.
And this is why—and how—we keep going.