In this paper I propose to debate the concept of the "frame" and its subsequent "unframings" in different contexts. First, in relation to the contemporary debates within Feminism and its differing notions of alter-Feminisms (Postfeminism, Queer Feminism, Postcolonial Feminism, Eco-Feminism, ...). Secondly, I want to concentrate on two case-studies: first, the work of some contemporary women visual artists from the Middle-East and the various "unframings" they enact in their work (aesthetic, political, social), through the appropriation of the hegemonic discourses of History and Tradition and their subsequent decoding and transgression of the models and genres that typify them. On a second moment, I wish to concentrate on the writing of one of the major contemporary Portuguese women writers, Maria Velho da Costa, namely her latest novel, Myra (2008) and approach it with identical tools, so as to analyse its challenging representation of social, political and gender violence in our so called 'global societies'.

​My purpose in this analysis is to debate these various "unframings" as radical modes of resistance, which problematise essentialist readings of women and the world, and offer instead unsettling ways of "seeing differently".

Prof Ana Gabriela Macedo, English & American Studies, University of Minho