Always soft, Always strong

Always soft, Always strong continues Dr Karike Ashworth’s exploration of the Feminine Bravery Construct through her parodic persona, Brave Girl. Brave Girl is inspired by cosplay and comic strip characters and is clad in mock super-hero battle costume. When Brave Girl performs, she does so as an exaggerated embodiment of what it means to be an empowered brave woman in the neoliberal context.

The conceptual starting point for Always soft, Always strong was the celebrity subject, Rose McGowan, who was instrumental in exposing Harvey Weinstein as a sexual predator of the worst kind. McGowan’s revelations that she was raped by Weinstein in 1997 were first published in The New Yorker in late 2017. Following this, she published her autobiography titled ‘Brave’ in early 2018 where she goes into detail about the rape. To better understand the expectations of feminine bravery in the contemporary context, the research explores how, in her public interview appearances between January 2018 and March 2019, McGowan is expected to live up to—and defend—her self-described brave label. The interviews reveal the public’s obsession with the visibility of the ideal, brave, postfeminist woman; and vis-à-vis their objection to (and fear of) her other. McGowan’s eventual, obligatory public containment has been an attempt to control—even extinguish—her revolutionary potency.

Dr Karike Ashworth is a multidisciplinary artist-researcher-teacher living and working in Brisbane. Her experimental research practice consists of performance, time-based media, text, objects and installations. Her practice employs the strategies of mutual implication, ambiguity and humour—specifically, what the application of these strategies in contemporary practice can reveal about power structures. Karike was awarded her a PhD in Visual Arts from QUT in 2019, which is when her ‘Brave Girl’ persona emerged. She has recently won the AAANZ ‘Research in Focus’ prize for this research. Karike has exhibited widely and is part of the artistic collaboration The KACA Projects.