Phoebe Martin

Phoebe Martin is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of York on the project ‘The Comfort Women and the Silence Breakers: Memorialising Sexual Violence as Feminist Politics’. In this work she engages with work on memory, feminist politics, and sexual violence. She recently completed her PhD on ‘Visual and Embodied Politics: Activism and the Contemporary Feminist Movement in Peru’ at the Institute of the Americas, UCL. She was also an affiliate PhD student in the Department of International Development at King’s College London.

Her doctoral research looked at how feminist activists in Peru use creative interventions around gender violence and reproductive justice. These actions, including art, performance and audiovisual media, target cultural and societal change. It argued that these practices are critical for sustaining and developing social movements in the face of the growing backlash against feminism in Latin America and elsewhere. She is interested in the global responses to threats to reproductive and bodily autonomy, particular in the Americas in the context of the repeal of Roe v Wade in June 2022.

She is a co-editor of the blog Feminist Perspectives (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/feminist-perspectives) which focuses on publishing research-based work and art-based projects that use gender as a category of analysis or explore it as part of a creative process. Her research interests include the role of protest in international development, social movements, artistic activism, and the feminist politics of representation and visibility.

‘The Comfort Women and the Silence Breakers: Memorialising Sexual Violence as Feminist Politics’ project webapage: https://gbv-memorials.org.uk/