A Virginia pergunta:
Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
I'm such a good lover because I practice a lot on my own.
PROPAGANDA TENDENCIOSA
- A Outra Mão Pode Ajudar-te!!
- Bata Palmas Sempre!
- Comunicado Certa Tendência
- Do Uso da Máquina
- Inteligência e Intuição (parte I)
- Inteligência e Intuição (parte II)
- Mãos Versus Dedos
- O NOSSO MANIFESTO
- O Poder da Verdade!
- Prossiga seu caminho desejando Afecto!
- Sobre o Carnaval e o uso da máscara
- Todos em Coimbra Revelaram UMa Certa Tendência
ARQUIVO
- março 2008 (7)
- fevereiro 2008 (5)
- dezembro 2007 (11)
- novembro 2007 (12)
- outubro 2007 (11)
- julho 2007 (9)
- junho 2007 (47)
- maio 2007 (23)
- abril 2007 (26)
- março 2007 (17)
- fevereiro 2007 (14)
- janeiro 2007 (24)
- dezembro 2006 (48)
37 comentários:
em homenagem, amanhã vou comprar cuecas novas.
A Outra Mão deixa-me feliz todos os dias!
Porque as mulheres é que são interessantes. Os homens no fundo queriam ser mulheres, e viver num mundo de fufas. Viva o clitóris! Abaixo o pénis!
eu curto mais o teu pénis para cima!
porque é que as mãos não se comem “uma” à “outra”? Honestamente, sinceramente, acrescento, e definitivamente, comam-se.
As mulheres podem ser muito desinteressantes...
sim tem razão, as pessoas são interessantes...e desinteressantes....sejam homem ou mulher. A pergunta da Virginia é completamente tendenciosa.
As mãos não só se lavam uma a outra como generosamente se oferecem para lavar todos os queridos amigos mais ou menos ressabiados que por aqui andam. Sejam felizes! Yeah!
E vivam as vaginas tendenciosas!
e as virginias tendenciosas!
eu se fosse uma menina lambia-me todinha!
não conhecia este blog, vim cá dar sem querer, sou tão anónima como vocês pra mim. Foi uma opinião, assim não se faz nada, ou quem tem essa actitude na vida real não necessitará de um blog para o fazer. Acho que devem ter muitos problemas por resolver..
Porque é que uma pessoa que veio dar cá sem querer acha que há mais do que uma mão aqui? Tem graça...
:-) realmente, e ainda por cima fogem do assunto! as mulheres são sem dúvida mais interessantes que os homens e muito mais. Eu ando absolutamente apaixonada, admirada, fascinada pelas mulheres, principalmente em colectivo. Não imagino nada melhor que mulheres e as minhas amigas
Caras catarina e carla, esquecem que na apresentação do blogg existe "o nosso manifesto", uma espécie de entrevista a "mão esquerda" e "mão direita"?
Não fugi a assunto nenhum, lá por "terem" um encantamento pelas mulheres não quer dizer que elas são interessantes, pois não? Acho que podem ser tão ou mais desinteressantes que os homens, e isso de facto não interessa desenvolver. Concordo com o outro quando diz que as "pessoas" podem ser ou não interessantes, para quê insistir na questão do género? Isso já não está resolvido? Ou pelo menos encaminhado no pensamento/construção mental híbrida? Não será que ao insistir na demarcação se contribui para a constituição de pólos tipo mestre/escravo, bom/mau, etc.? ou seja, para relações efectivas de poder?
Não foram antes vocês que fugiram ao assunto do primeiro comentário?
Ora bem...
Em primeiro lugar, acho que dentro do universo das pessoas em geral, há as que são interessantes e as que não são;
Em segundo lugar, tenho a certeza que no universo anteriormente definido as mulheres sempre se destacaram;
Em terceiro lugar, seria melhor se cada um falasse por si...e eu falo por mim quando digo que as mulheres sempre me levaram a melhor!
Em quarto lugar, parece que há aqui alguém com medo do lobo mau na versão big dyke! Afinal as lésbicas são como as bruxas, ninguém acredita que elas existam (enquanto sexualidade, ainda há quem desconfie se aquilo é sexo mesmo do duro ou festinhas e carícias inocentes),...mas que as há,...há!
Em quinto e ultimo, bolas já tardava alguém aparecer assustado/a com a velocidade deste blog!
Mãozinhas queridas, vocês correm que nem umas loucas, com uma força invejável...estavam à espera de quem?
hummm!?! Não percebeste...e tornás-te a fugir ao assunto.
1: estou a falar por mim, e o que disse é dentro da minha perspectiva, que não é a tua, e que também não vou explicar aqui.
2: podes me tratar por "a", sou do sexo feminino. Mas não me importo que me trates por "o", parece mais generalista e honesto.
3: já comi coisas de todos os géneros, não vale a pena especificar.
4: as lésbicas são como as bruxas?!? Ou é isso que querem ser? Conheço alguns casais de lésbicas e homossexuais...estou sempre a ver bissexualidade e homossexualidade na rua...dêem beijos e sejam felizes...sem ser preciso contar ao mundo, contem fazendo.
5: a rua parece um espaço mais efectivo, em vez do discurso.
Rapariga estás confusa!
Alista-te!
O exercito será melhor que nada.
Os Gajos deste blog devem deliciar-se com estas cenas!
Se são quem penso, que se fodam! Andavam a mercer! Bota prá frente!
Ah! Claro... é isso mesmo. Não parece/m estar muito habituada/s a propostas e questões, ou a conversas, oposições, etc.
Assim n interessa
até à próxima...
nada de confusões...já disse que sou mulher, não sejam injustos a culpar outros.
Fim de comunicação
xxxxx
isto anda animado! já era tempo de se começarem a sentirem-se provocados!
vocês é que já não se lembram de ser provocados! Não se tentem auto-legitimar, só porque alguém deu conversa, não é esse o objectivo real, pois não?
Mas ao menos a animação parece melhor que nos outros comments.
é...é...vá lá...sejamos realistas quantos anónimos e vatemens e coisas do género estão atentos à discussão! Vá lá...
Já agora a menina anónima se já comeu de tudo anda empanturrada! verdade?
Não faço ideia, estamos na www, ou não? Olha eu vim cá parar e fiz discussão.
Que já se provou tudo, não quer dizer, depressa e à pressa, numa ou duas horas, num dia ou dois dias, etc.
Slowly, e quando se deseja....não é assim? mas porquê tanto interesse nisso, Mrs. Vat ou Mr.Vatmen?
Ou alguma vez te sentiste empanturrada/o de sexo?
Xau....
Mua...pssssttt...
kero mais!!!
Mas alguém percebeu o que é que a menina veio aqui discutir?
E com essa cena do slowly e com gosto e tal, sem pressas, eu até estava a fim!
Pssst! : Afinal este blog serve-te que nem uma luva!
eu percebi a menina anónima! tb acho k a menina vet anda a fugir das verdadeiras questões.
isto agora é um chat?
sim há aí uma certa tendência para tudo isto ser muito...CHATO!!
É chato mas não sais de cá!
Não, este blog não me serve, e é tão irritante que resolvi intervir. E estou de facto a ser irónica e a gozar com isto tudo, como já perceberam alguns. Mas antes tentei fazer questões sérias.
Mas as questões não tiveram de facto resposta, é certo, o que prova que isto é mesmo uma palhaçada.
Quanto à honestidade e sinceridade, ainda pior, então porque é que as meninas não assumem quem são nas respostas no projecto "sincero e honesto"? E porque é que se auto-legitimam constantemente, em vez de estarem abertas à discussão?
Obrigada Mr. Wacky pelo apoio, e visão!
Foi incrível perceber que de repente suspeitaram de um grupo de homens x, que nem sei quem são, nem quero saber. Que sentido de perseguição, é que se calhar ninguém liga mesmo, já pensaram nisto? Foi uma atitude muito feia.
Não costumo vir cá muito, nem se quer sou muito simpatizante de blogs, mas desta vez resolvi intervir. E agora assumir quem sou.
Boa Páscoa a todas,
Aida
Olé!!
eheheheheheheheheheheheh
eheheheheheheheheheheheh
eheheheheheheheheheheheh
AH, FEMINISM
A plethora of feminist-related arts activity in 2007 begs the question – why now?
by Polly Staple
At a feminist symposium in Utrecht last spring a member of the audience asked: ‘Why is Feminism suddenly so hip right now?’ The question is, of course, faintly ludicrous, but it was a serious – and a disgruntled – one, suggesting as it did that ‘Feminism’ was just another faddish topic of discussion (placed somewhere between ‘the political’ and ‘on beauty’ perhaps). Yet surely ‘Feminism’, in all its forms – from a critical approach informing a range of academic discourses to advocacy for women’s rights – is ever-present. Looking at the plethora of feminist-related arts activity coming up in 2007 – conferences, symposia and exhibitions ranging from the academic to the more free-form and experimental – the question is understandable. It is now around 50 years since the burgeoning of the second phase of the international women’s movement; perhaps this current interest has to do with enough time passing to make possible an atmosphere of celebration, combined with the fuzzy, bohemian nostalgia that pervades the art world, as much as it has to do with the daughters and sons of the movement coming of age – especially the daughters, particularly in the West. These are women who have experienced a feminist-informed system of education and now reached positions of power: women who are able not just to look back, make connections and reappraise but also to green-light the exhibitions and projects that explore these very themes.
The aforementioned symposium in Utrecht was one stage in the ongoing research platform/conference/exhibition/publication entitled ‘If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution … Feminist Legacies and Potentials in Contemporary Art Practice’, curated by Frederique Bergholtz and Annie Fletcher. The project has now been running for a year or so, and has been manifested in different forms and locations across the Netherlands. The ‘edition’ I witnessed included presentations, or rather ‘performative papers’, by art historians and critics Jan Verwoert and Dorothea von Hantelmann, artists The Otolith Group, Karl Holmqvist and Frances Stark, a round-table discussion chaired by Fletcher, a screening of Vera Chytilová’s film Sedmikrásky (Daisies, 1966) and a programme of films by Yvonne Rainer. Circling around ideas of agency, change and difference, previous and subsequent editions have included explorations of global feminisms and performativity through connections between different generations, and non-didactic positions that resist easy categorization. Through a combination of clear direction and an openness to engage with new content and form, ‘If I Can’t Dance’ raises the bar in terms of how to structure a research project or schedule a symposium as much as in facilitating ongoing constructive dialogue and connections for participants and audience alike. Conference organizers of 2007, take note.
During the symposium that I attended there was much discussion of whether Feminism is a given in everyday life and how this may or may not inform artistic practice and identity – artist Eva Rothschild, for example, posed the question: ‘If I consider myself a feminist, does that then mean I make feminist art?’ Also articulated by Von Hantelmann, discussing the relation of Feminism and performativity as read through Judith Butler, was the desire to address the legacy of Feminism as a theoretical achievement, one that reshapes and renegotiates the idea of transformation in relation to society, politics and art and to elevate discussion beyond engendered body politics and, by extension, the activities of lobby groups. Von Hantelmann’s point did indeed raise the discussion to a more sophisticated level beyond that of the binary oppositions and counter-positioning engendered in so much feminist discussion. What’s important to remember, though, is that this cerebral break is possible only through the ongoing achievements of a self-consciously active feminist ethics.
A highlight, then, was Frances Stark telephoning her presentation in from Los Angeles. She read a text she had prepared that discussed the dilemma she had faced in deciding whether or not she would be able to attend the conference – how flying from Los Angeles would impact on her work and being with her young son, who could be heard, during her eloquent deliberation, demanding Stark’s attention. In one stroke Stark deftly elucidated the dilemma of being a working woman and a mother while attempting to explore the subjective reality of a given situation. In other words, she was smart and funny, created her own framework for her contribution and proposed, like so many women before her, another way of simply getting things done.
Polly Staple is editor at large of frieze.
www.frieze.com
Women on the Move
-----------------
Roland Kapferer talks to sociologist Saskia Sassen about the role of women today – from cleaners and mothers, to professionals and politicians – in newly emergent social structures, from the US to Japan and Dubai.
Saskia Sassen thinks big. Her project is nothing less than to grasp our own epochal transformation – the end of one historical period in human history and the radically uncertain and complex emergence of another. For the past 25 years she has charted the unbundling of the nation state system and the bifurcation of social, political and economic processes leading to the global turbulence we are experiencing today. Her chief effort has been to recover a politics among the dispossessed and, with her concept of the ‘global city’, locate the key sites where the practices and processes of our epochal shift materialize.
Roland Kapferer: Are the hard-won rights women have attained over the last century or so at risk in the new ‘risk society’?
Saskia Sassen: This is a question that matters to me in two ways. One is that, yes, women are losing rights; the other is that women are also emerging as critical political actors. The loss of rights through the new fundamentalism in the US works its way formally through the law and informally through activist anti-abortion politics. But beyond these extreme cases, there is a less visible loss of rights actively pushed or supported by the government that affects all citizens. It is less visible because it operates through specialized technical domains. If you are rich you do not notice it, but if you are poor, and a woman, you feel it. For instance, credit card companies pushed the legislature in the US to expand their rights to go after whatever money debtors may have. It used to be that when you declared bankruptcy, a sort of invisible wall went up protecting you from losing everything, so you could keep on feeding your kids and trying to rebuild your life. Not anymore: now the credit card companies can go after the last dollar you have, the money for the baby’s milk so to speak. Insofar as the largest share of the poor in the US are women and children, this new law disproportionately hits women and children. Within the formal political systems, women who achieve high rank tend to function as ‘masculine’ subjects. Rarely do they function as a subject that subverts these binaries. Mary Robinson did, Gro Harlem Brundtland did. I doubt that Hillary Clinton will, despite the talk about children and villages. The more significant force that women represent is coming through informal venues. There are multiple invisible political histories made and enacted by women all over the world. Sometimes these histories become visible. Thus the women who recently have won Nobel Peace Prizes – Wangari Maathai from Kenya and Shirin Ebadi from Iran, and further back in 1997, Jody Williams, the key organizer of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) – worked outside the formal state apparatus. Similarly, I see immigrants as informal agents making history. Their numbers are small, their powers almost nil, yet whole state apparatuses re-gear to address their presence, to control them. They are also agents that make certain very complex processes visible, not through their power, say, to bomb a country, but through their mobility, their wounds and the death of their bodies. Women are becoming a particularly significant factor. Over half of all immigrants are estimated to be women, and they are a vanguard in the struggle for survival. These are informal actors that unsettle existing formal arrangements.
RK: When you say that even women who achieve high office fail to subvert traditional binaries, I’m reminded of the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, who made a related point in his book Masculine Domination (2001). He claims that masculine domination is a universal constant and criticizes feminists for attributing women’s anxiety about their bodies to the ‘fashion beauty complex’ rather than explicating the deeper structures, categories and institutional forms from which the beauty complex stems.
SS: Sure, and to an extent he is getting at something. But there are two analytic operations that open up a range of possibilities. One is to focus on feminine and masculine subjects (in some cultures women get to be the masculine subject and men the feminine subject, as per western notions). This then means that it is critical to understand that systemic positioning can trump biology and cultural gendering, and that gendering (a term that I find increasingly insufficiently able to capture critical dimensions) is not enough to understand what is going on with men and women. The monarch who was a woman in past European kingdoms was clearly a masculine subject, so was Cleopatra. Today’s immigrant men working long days in factories, become domesticated subjects, the feminized subject as per our western historico-cultural notions. Secondly I think that inequality, discrimination and power are made. We need to understand the making of these binaries.
RK: I think a point that sets you apart from a number of feminists is your focus on larger systemic and global concerns. Not that gender isn’t an important question – it’s critical – it’s just that the focus needs to be expanded in view of complex emergent globalizing conditions. Could you perhaps say a little more about what you mean by strategic gendering?
SS: One example: strategic gendering in the global city occurs both through the sphere of paid work (production) and that of the household (social re-production). The critical background variable is that these cities are a crucial infrastructure for the specialized management of global economic processes. It means that the key components of this infrastructure need to function like clockwork. One such component is the professional workforce. I like the notion of the professional household without a ‘wife’, whether that household is a man and a woman, or a same-sex couple, or a single professional man or woman – the point is that the historic figure of the ‘wife’ is absent. The demands placed on the top-level professional and managerial workforce are such that the usual modes of handling household tasks and lifestyle are inadequate. As a consequence we are seeing the return of the so-called ‘serving classes’, made up largely of immigrant and migrant women. Insofar as these households are critical for the functioning of leading economic sectors in global cities, the nannies, the cleaners, the housekeepers, are not only exploited workers, as they are usually seen. They are actually a strategic infrastructure for the work-lives of those professional men and women, and hence, indirectly, for their firms. The notion of ‘strategic gendering’ allows me to go beyond unequal earnings or occupational conditions of women and their victimhood, and capture the ways in which gendering is one constitutive element in the formation and functioning of a system, including a complex system. Another instance of professional women as cultural brokers in leading financial sectors. Gendering here is strategic for globalizing firms that enter new terrains and introduce major innovations in financial practice. Professional women are emerging as a key type of worker insofar as they are considered good at building trust across cultural boundaries and differences. The globalizing of a firm’s or a market’s operations entails opening up domains (sectors, countries, the world of consumers) to new kinds of businesses, practices, and norms. This kind of cultural brokering is critical, especially given the mistrust and the resistances that had to be overcome to implement economic globalization.
RK: Indeed! The concern with trust was a major factor at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos. An urgent question for today’s corporate leaders is how to gain the public’s trust and how to engage increasingly fragmented populations.
SS: Certainly the necessity of building networks and new systems of trust is a key factor for informal actors in the global economy, who, don’t forget, are not just disadvantaged or powerless people – they can be large corporations too!
RK Mike Davis makes the point about the new servile classes very well in a recent article about the Filipina maids working in wealthy homes in Dubai. Following the architect, George Katodrytis, he draws attention to the ‘post-global city’ – a nomadic city built around a consumerist ethic and an indentured labour force. A prosthetic, isolated city no longer about dense urbanity but simply designed to stimulate appetites.
SS: Davis is very good. But I want to make a different point. The condition of being a migrant woman emerges as crucial to the formation of novel economic arrangements in global cities – emergent alternative political economies. Most of the research on immigrant women has focused on the poor working conditions, exploitation and multiple vulnerabilities of these household workers. These are facts. We know this. However, I’m not satisfied with simply describing other people’s misery; I want to dig and complicate things. Analytically speaking, what also matters is the strategic importance of well-functioning professional households for the leading globalized sectors in these cities, and hence the importance of this new type of ‘serving class’. For a variety of reasons, immigrant and minoritized women are a favoured source for this type of work. Theirs is a mode of economic incorporation that makes their crucial role invisible and hence they can be paid very little. Being an immigrant or minoritized citizen facilitates breaking the nexus between being workers with an important function in the global information economy – that is to say, in leading industries – and the opportunity to become an empowered workforce, as has historically been the case in industrialized economies. In this sense the category ‘immigrant women’ emerges as the systemic equivalent of the offshore proletariat. (That is, the low-wage workers in Global South countries doing the outsourced jobs of the rich countries). There is a further complication in this analysis: insofar as they are strategic these women become a masculine subject (as historico-culturally shaped and understood). Immigrant men tend to become a feminized subject – invisible, systemically marginal and often redundant. All of these gender intersections show the extent to which the binary man-woman is not very useful to address some of these issues.
RK: Recently some feminists have become concerned about the ways in which their discourse has been used as an alibi for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. George Bush and other political leaders have portrayed themselves as liberators of women imprisoned behind the burka. What do you think about the former British Home Secretary Jack Straw’s recent insistence that Muslim women remove their veils in his office? Is the veil worn by Muslim women sexist?
SS: It seems that politicians such as Bush and Tony Blair stop at nothing to make their bad decisions seem just. What we need to do is to explore, de-liberate and puzzle out the complex issues that diversity is throwing on the historical agenda in a way we have not seen for along time. We have become used to the embedded liberalism of the Keynesian state – its project, no matter how imperfect, of incorporation and standardization across religion, income, education. This is clearly not enough. There are deeper, intractable issues that are coming out, for which there are no clear solutions. I do not have answers to these questions about Muslim women vis a vis their own Muslim cultures. There is such great variability that it is difficult to generalize. But it is clear that not all Muslim women find the veil confining; on the contrary, for some it
is liberating.
RK: In a different critique of multiculturalism, Wendy Brown has made the point that multiculturalist politics, claims about new hybrid identities, emergent subjectivities and the foregrounding of gender, preserve neo-liberal capitalism and increasing global inequities from serious critique. What is needed today, she says, is a thorough reconsideration of class. What do you think about this?
SS: I am inclined to agree, with two very large caveats. One is that class often works through these other segmentations. The other is that class is no longer the category it was when Marx developed it. Todays multiple systems of power operate through technical systems and do not involve people as in traditional notions of class. The workplace as a strategic site where class gets articulated is but one site of a growing range of sites – the community, the household and novel techno-economic systems. In my own work I try to get at these other sites.
RK: What kinds of ‘novel techno-economic systems’? What other sites?
SS: Well, for example, lately I have been researching cyberspace and new digital practices. And women are critical in this – as has been shown by Baghdad Burning, the famous girl blog from Iraq, or the use of the Internet by Afghani women under the Taliban and countless other examples.
RK: But surely these Afghani women were part of a small elite? Many women in Afghanistan are still illiterate.
SS: Yes of course. Many people don’t have access to the Internet. Class, but also struggle, is today articulated through digital space as well. There are many different ways of working with the Internet that are emerging and I’m interested in looking closely at these innovations. For instance, the ways in which certain offline women’s practices can be transformed in the online environment. For the particular question you ask, I am keen on pursuing a series of substantive political processes. We see here the potential transformation of actors ‘confined’ to domestic roles into actors in global networks, without having to leave their work and roles in their communities. They do not have to become cosmopolitan in this process, and yet they are participating in an emergent global politics. In many cases, cyberspace is a far more concrete space for social struggles than the national political system. It becomes a place where non-formal political actors can be part of the political scene in a way that is much more difficult in national political institutions.
RK: Nancy Pelosi has just been inaugurated as the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives in the United States. Alluding to her claim that she will rid US politics of corruption she said that ‘it takes a woman to clean House’. In your most recent book, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (2006), you argue that Japanese housewives are generating new political possibilities as housewives. Are you saying the same thing as Pelosi?
SS: Pelosi is invoking an image that functions as a trope. But in fact, the ‘housewife’ can also function as an informal political actor that is potentially powerful. One case is the (in)famous soccer moms of the US suburbs, who were seen as decisive for a candidate’s victory. They functioned as informal political actors; and they did so as mothers/housewifes. In other settings, housewives have a very specific type of political power precisely as housewives. This is the case with housewives in Japan’s dense city neighbourhoods. Their line is: ‘Oh, I don’t know anything about politics, but I do not like that candidate.’ Thereby they can kill that candidate, precisely because their evaluation is trusted. The figure of the ‘housewife’ varies greatly. American housewives are closely tied to the mass consumer apparatus. Japanese housewives command a fundamental respect related to their positioning in the dense suburban environments of Japan. Through their networks and public appeal they can easily destroy a politician’s career.
RK: What you are saying is almost a provocation – it seems a long way from the women’s lib ethic of, say, Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique (1963). Except of course she was talking about American housewives in the 1960s.
SS: I’m not engaging in abstract arguments about housewives in general. I’m speaking specifically about the Japanese situation and the Japanese housewife who is 100% a housewife, as a result of which she can go way past the household, even though it is the latter that gives her ‘standing’ as we might say. Nor am I romanticizing the role of the housewife. I am interested in seeing how traditional subordinate subjects can destabilize existing power hierarchies – more along the lines of a key subject in my research: the complexity of powerlessness. This is not about the desirability of women being housewives! This becomes clearer if we use the case of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires protesting their disappeared children. It was as mothers that they gained standing, and protections against state abuse. If they had protested simply as citizens of Argentina (the formal political actor) they would have been in conflict with the state and probably arrested. But as mothers they stepped outside the Hegelian master-servant dialectic. Of course, I’m not saying that Pelosi had all of this in mind! (Laughter)
Dr Saskia Sassen is the Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Her books have been translated into 13 languages. They include Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press, 2006) and Globalization and Its Discontents: Selected Essays 1984-1998 (New York, New Press, 1998).
Dr Roland Kapferer is a writer and musician based in London and Sydney. He has lectured in film and media at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is currently writing a book on new corporate-state systems and editing a collection on ecology.
Social Construction
--------------------
The opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is a landmark event – but without an acquisition programme, does it risk becoming simply another Women’s Studies department? by Jenni Sorkin
Five or so years ago I was asked to write an essay on the work of Tracey Emin for Parkett. It was agreed that my contribution would involve a feminist reading of the artist’s work. Pleased at the opportunity to situate Emin historically, I centred my piece on the following rhetorical question: what if Emin had been born a decade prior, in the seaside town of Venice, California, rather than Margate, England? What if she had escaped to Los Angeles rather than London, and still ended up in art college at the age of 20, but this time at CalArts rather than Maidstone?
In 1971 Emin would have stumbled into the short-lived but ground-breaking experiment known as the Feminist Art Program – an autonomous, all-female course that met off-campus, run by the artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. There she would have found 21 like-minded young women who came from assorted working- and middle-class backgrounds; young women who had survived equally traumatic domestic, educational and sexual experiences and, like Emin, were able to access some of this painful, difficult material and convert it into emotionally raw art objects, installations and performances.
As it turned out, Emin rejected my piece, on the grounds that she was not a feminist and did not wish to be identified with Feminism. At all. This lesson was a bitter one. It was painful to learn that women artists of more or less my own generation – even well-known ones, with nothing to lose – were loath to call themselves feminists. At the start of the 21st century, the word ‘feminist’ had somehow become taboo.
Everyone agrees that the opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum is a landmark event. If ‘feminist art’ is generally understood to be an art of protest, rooted in the gendered critique of social, political and domestic institutions, then everyone should also agree that this art has been misunderstood, attacked and otherwise distorted over the last 35 years. Through cultural patronage the Center seeks to rectify this and to restore dignity to this diverse set of visual practices, setting the stage for the revaluing of women’s contributions to history both ancient and modern.
At 8,300 square feet, the Center encompasses a gallery devoted to Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974–9), a biographical gallery to present exhibitions highlighting the women represented in The Dinner Party (spanning ancient to modern), a study area, a space for lectures and public programmes, a gallery for ‘the regular exhibition of feminist art’, and a curator: the art historian Maura Reilly. But something is missing. Where is its collection?
Just as Sigmund Freud surmised, this lack is a permanent void in Brooklyn, manifesting itself in the museum’s corpus – the empty space between its legs, so to speak. It stands to reason that the presence of the Sackler Center should inaugurate the Brooklyn Museum’s commitment to the collection and preservation of feminist art; and it seems to me that the best way to speak for this art is through the objects themselves. The filling of that void ought to be a front-and-centre objective. Without an active acquisition programme the Sackler Center risks becoming something akin to a Women’s Studies department that colonizes the other museum departments, as in the inaugural exhibition, ‘Pharaohs, Queens, and Goddesses’, which takes as its premise women’s contributions to ancient Egyptian art. While resourceful and pleasingly revisionist, it belongs in the Egyptian wing, not in a space for feminist art. Egyptian art can never be feminist. Neither can Pre-Columbian art, Colonial Mexican art, ancient Roman, Chinese or Oceanic art. Feminism is not a continuum. It did not originate in 2000 BC; it is a historically determined moment bound to Western European and Anglophone cultures, corresponding roughly to the dates 1968 to 1983, depending on the country and context and who’s counting. To my mind, anything prior is ‘proto-’; anything after is ‘post-’. (Obviously arguments can be made for a few years in either direction, as can similar arguments for seminal, liminal figures such as Eva Hesse, Lygia Clark and Francesca Woodman.)
That is not to say there are not now and will not continue to be post-feminist movements elsewhere – which is what Reilly and Linda Nochlin will seek to prove in their ‘Global Feminisms’ exhibition (which opens on March 23). Nor is this to negate women’s aesthetic contributions throughout history, which, as Chicago’s homage points out, have been grossly neglected and deserve serious scholarly reconsideration. However, the 1970s were a special moment fraught with intensive political activity, when there was a social and political framework for the term ‘feminist’, when there were national initiatives, protests, movements and agendas with limited international reciprocities, and when there was pride in calling yourself a ‘feminist’, versus the contemporary declaration: the wearing of a mini T-shirt emblazed with the logo ‘Bitch’ (or ‘Slut’ or ‘Princess’) in pink. Yes, it has come to this.
The Sackler Center is a fantastic occasion for the true patronage of a vastly uncollected era. Elizabeth Sackler has the opportunity to become the Virginia Dwan of feminist art. Or, given the family history (read: the Sackler galleries at Harvard and the Smithsonian), perhaps more of a Peggy Guggenheim. Maybe Tracey Emin (or Lisa Yuskavage or Elizabeth Peyton or Mariko Mori) will surprise me and agree to be in a group show at the Sackler Center for Feminist Art. If they were in the permanent collection, they wouldn’t have a choice. But given the option, I suspect it will probably be artists of lesser stature. Gender is a biological fact, but it is also a social construction. Bind an artist to gender only, and she is bound to be unhappy.
Jenni Sorkin is a PhD candidate in the History of Art at Yale University. From
2002–4, she was Research and Project Coordinator for ‘WACK! Art and the
Feminist Revolution’ at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
*****COMUNICADO*****
As mãos estiveram fora desta discussão mas acreditam na sinceridade das contribuições.
Embora estejam tendencialmente mais próximas e se sintam em completa sintonia apenas com algumas, respeitam as opiniões das outras.
As mãos não pedem explicações, nem se vão explicar.
Até à próxima!
Fiquem bem e tenham boas leituras!
Ass:. A mão esquerda.
obrigado a quem postou os textos dos links, sobretudo o da sassen, muito bons
Enviar um comentário