From Love to Complaint: Haunted Archive of a Clown-Mother-Buffoon in the Ivory Tower

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17561/rtc.extra.12.10138

Keywords:

Arts-based research , Complaint, Feminist Killjoy, Clown-Bouffon, Haunted Archive, Poetic Inquiry, Radical Tenderness

Abstract

This paper performs an autoethnographic and arts-based inquiry into what it means to teach, mother, clown and persist within the university — a space where the embodied pedagogies of care described by bell hooks collide with institutional hierarchies that shape who is allowed to belong. Drawing from eight years of teaching in an Arts School, the work unfolds as a feminist poetic critique in which the clown-mother-buffoon becomes the keeper of a haunted archive, storing the affects, violences, erasures, and relational labours that institutional documents fail to capture.

Guided by Sara Ahmed’s theorization of complaint as feminist survival, bell hooks’s politics of love, and Derrida’s hauntology, the paper reframes clowning, vulnerability, and radical tenderness as embodied archival practices that give form to what institutions work hard to forget. Following Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters, the work understands the university as a haunted structure — one whose “ghosts” of coloniality, gendered labour, and epistemic injustice continue to shape the present. Bringing Gordon’s insights into conversation with arts-based inquiry, the paper argues for a decolonial re-imagining of the Ivory Tower: an institutional exorcism in which spectral memories, silenced voices, and subaltern pedagogies demand recognition, repair, and transformation.

Through contemplative witnessing and spectral memory, the work explores how failure, laughter, and complaint become insurgent modes of survival — and how the clown-mother-buffoon keeps alive an archive that refuses to disappear.

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Author Biography

  • Melissa Lima Caminha, Investigadora independiente

    Artista, investigadora y educadora especializada en artes escénicas, pedagogías feministas y metodologías de investigación basadas en las artes. Graduada en Derecho (2001) y en Artes Escénicas (2006). Doctora en Artes y Educación (2016) por la Universidad de Barcelona. Su trayectoria docente incluye más de ocho años de enseñanza universitaria en artes escénicas, gestión cultural, estética y teoría del arte. Su obra artística y performativa dialoga con estudios feministas, queer y decoloniales, explorando la vulnerabilidad, la risa, la maternidad y la resistencia como modalidades de conocimiento encarnado. Actualmente amplía su investigación a través del Máster TAE – Terapia de Artes Expresivas, Trauma y Embodiment del Instituto Poiesis (Barcelona), donde profundiza en enfoques terapéuticos que integran cuerpo, trauma, creatividad y prácticas intermodales.

References

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Published

2026-10-01

Issue

No. extra12: Extraordinary Monographic XII. Folds of In-Betweenness: Thinking and Doing Artistic Research and Arts-Based Research

Section

Artículos temáticos del número

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Copyright (c) 2026 Melissa Lima Caminha

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How to Cite

Lima Caminha, M. (2026) “From Love to Complaint: Haunted Archive of a Clown-Mother-Buffoon in the Ivory Tower”, Tercio Creciente, (extra12), pp. 83–102. doi:10.17561/rtc.extra.12.10138.