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[genderassignment]

Picking Up the Scent: Chicago Art Luminaries Share Their Relationships to Fragrance

by Gender Assignment Guest Blogger, Matt Morris

View of Matt Morris’ studio wall arranged with perfume advertisements and other ephemera discovered in drawers of his father’s office desk.

The art world has, it seems, always smelled of perfume. Across the past century, ‘visual art’ came under comment in key moments where art practices came to involve smell or at the very least employ conceptual language about scent in objects, text works, and immersive installations. Artists like Leonor Fini and Salvadore Dali designed flacons for the Surrealism-inspired Elsa Schiaparelli: Fini’s flowering bodice design held the 1936 Shocking; Dali’s baccarat crystal sunrise encased in a gold seashell was made for the 1946 release of Le Roy Soleil. Years later in 1983, Dali would release his first perfume under his own brand. There are now a honking sixty-nine different fragrances from the Dali brand that has outlived its namesake. Other celebrity artists like Andy Warhol and Niki de Saint Phalle have lent their names and aesthetics to signature scents.

In this way, the distinctions between artist and perfumer have blurred so that designers in niche houses like Serge Lutens, D.S. & Durga, Régime des Fleurs, or Blackbird are generally thought of as artists in their own right. Meanwhile, there have been artists whose conceptual practices have led them to the use of scent in galleries. Among the technologically experimental research projects by British artist Paul Etienne Lincoln, in 1985 he produced In Tribute to Madame Pompadour and the Court of Louis XV (Perfume Set), which included vials of perfume and honey. Glasgow-based Canadian artist Clara Ursitti pioneered artists working with perfume chemistry that had previously been mostly arcane, protected knowledge of major fragrance manufacturers: in 1993 she made Eau Claire, a small bottle of scent produced from the artist’s own bodily secretions. Artists like Brian Goeltzenleuchter and organizations like the Institute for Art and Olfaction continue to explore the potential for the olfactory as a meaningful dimension of artistic experience.

Installation view of "Falling for You" Act 1: Joel Parsons' arrangement of Catherine Sullivan's work.

At the level of Chicago, no one could be said to be doing more to enrich the discourse around scent and art than Debra Parr, Professor of Art and Art History at Columbia College. Parr deserves her own full articles about her research, curating, and teaching around scent; she deserves many such articles. In 2015, she curated Volatile!, an exhibition at the Poetry Foundation on the intersection of poetry and scent. Last year, the inimitable Kate Sierzputowski and Mary Eleanor Wallace organized Dinner Party at Tusk in Logan Square; I was honored to be included among a group of artists who presented “courses” of olfactory artworks in four seatings across two days. Then in December 2017, Falling for You saw Memphis-based Joel Parsons intervene in an installation by Catherine Sullivan, organized by Triumph in Pilsen. Parsons embellished Sullivan’s tableau with caps and lids from his collection of mostly vintage perfume bottles, elements that read as miniature pink-and-metallic post-minimalist sculptures.

Throughout these cultural shifts around art and perfume, I’ve had occasion to chat with a number of artists and arts workers in Chicago’s community who share my enthusiasm for the possibilities for profundity that perfume carries. For this piece of writing I circled back and reached out to them to see if they would respond to a questionnaire about their personal relationships to wearing fragrance, in the spirit of fashion magazines sidebars, chunky September issues in anticipation of fall styles, and alternative points of access for what these creatives do. There were so many more folks than had time to participate in this round or could fit in a digestible essay like this; I think this is the first of more such collections of responses to sketch out more thoughtfully the ways that what we’re smelling fits into our identities, memories, and visions for artistic thriving.

–MM

Io Carrión is an artist and  curator originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico.  She obtained a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania with a concentration in photography.  She has also attended the Grasse Institute for Perfumery (GIP) in southern France and ISIPCA in Versailles for her perfumery studies.  She is a multidisciplinary artist who uses personal narratives to inform her work.  Recent curatorial endeavors include  “The Way In” a survey of contemporary Puerto Rican art since the 1990’s at Popular Center in Puerto Rico and “Los Turistas” at Diablo Rosso Gallery in Panama.

When did you start wearing fragrance?

As a kid I loved to get a spray of my mom’s perfume and my grandmother would always give me a splash of cologne after a bath. I purchased my first perfumes as a teenager.

Why do you think you're interested in personal scent?

I’m drawn to its powerful link to memory. And response. Smell is more directly in contact with the emotional regions of the brain than any of the other senses. So we first respond emotionally to an odor then we identify it. I also think it is fascinating that each of us has a unique odor identity, like a fingerprint.

What are your favorite notes or ingredients to wear?

Light and fresh. More drawn to clean citrusy scents. Neroli is a particular favorite. I like crisp sparkly notes, nothing too heavy.

How might your preferences for fragrance reflect your tendencies as an artist?

The avoidance of heaviness perhaps. Like scent, some things don’t need to be heavy to be profound. There’s meaning in light and playful too.

Mutual friends have told me that you've been making fragrances too. I'd love to hear about what you're working on.

I am actually working on the bottles now so I am really enjoying how scent has made me experiment with form. It has allowed me to play with different materials, which in turn inspires new scents.

We're headed toward the start of fall: do you have favorite scents that you wear as the weather starts to cool?

I am originally from Puerto Rico so the colder weather allows me to experiment with bolder scents I wouldn’t normally wear. I noticed quite a few of the new perfumes launched in the fall have ginger notes so it will be interesting to try some spicier scents.

Photo credit: Stephanie Bassos

Jaime DeGroot founded the corporate and private art consulting firm, DeGroot Fine Art, in 2016 after more than a decade working in arts advising and administration. Utilizing her Master’s degree in Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Jaime strives to create meaningful connections between her clients and local network of artists, galleries, and vendors. To learn more about her business visit www.degrootfineart.com. She lives in Chicago with her artist husband, Geoffrey Todd Smith, who mostly wears Les Exclusifs de Chanel "Sycomore."

When did you start wearing fragrance?

Like many little girls of the early '80s, my first scent was probably Love's "Baby Soft" which will forever hold a place in my heart along with the smell of Cabbage Patch Kid dolls, but the ground shifted for me when I got a bottle of Debbie Gibson's "Electric Youth" perfume later that decade. I wore so much of it my older brother complained and I was banned from wearing it until that Halloween when I came up with the idea of dressing as a skunk-- who would smell like "Electric Youth," naturally.

Why do you think you're interested in personal scent?

I wear very modest amounts of perfume to the point that I am usually the only one who can smell it, making it almost entirely personal. That said, I love helping people navigate their interest in it. I've had a lot of discussions with artists about the connections between perfume and fine art. Reading about it is a large part of my interest as well. My freshman year of college I read Diane Ackerman's "A Natural History of the Senses," and was astounded at the idea of someone crying at a piece of sulfur because of its exquisite shade of yellow, that you could tag butterflies in a eucalyptus field somewhere, or visit a laboratory where they had test tubes of "kitty litter" fragrance. I wanted to travel for sensory experiences like her and have spent a lot of time since then in places like New York, Paris, and Amsterdam meeting with perfume houses and the perfumers themselves, hearing wonderful stories and meeting some exceptional personalities. When I can't get my fix on the road, I also enjoy reading perfume reviews on the Internet. These tiny critiques, ranging from hilariously snarky to passionate, are truly one of life's little delights.

How might your preferences for fragrance reflect your tendencies as an artist?

I am not an artist myself, but rather someone who has formally learned to appreciate it. As an art consultant, I share my experience with my clients using vocabulary I have built up around my sensory experiences. When I started training my eyes to make connections between art and life, my world lit up, and I love illuminating it for others in this way. I equate fragrance to art often, in that learning to connect what you smell to your brain is very similar to learning art history. I read once that everyone's nose is equipped similarly and to have a "good nose" essentially means you have taken the time to equate what you know already to what you smell. Learning about fragrance is like putting a monocle up to your sniffer-- your world can become that much more electric with this sense being brought into focus, making food and alcohol taste more interesting and certainly adding a heightened awareness to your perception of the arts.

We're headed toward the start of fall: do you have favorite scents that you wear as the weather starts to cool?

Autumn is a terrific smell season in Chicago, with its singed leaves and petrichor (earthy scent produced when rain falls on dry soil). I chose this time of year to get married a few years ago in part so that its associated smells and the perfume I wore could always be connected to the love it brings. We held our reception at an old dive bar, The California Clipper, which is known for being haunted by a woman wearing white and smelling of perfume. For my wedding day, I wanted to subtly evoke the mystical feeling of a ghost from another era and chose Santa Maria Novella's "Marescialla" to finish off my look. This mace-forward fragrance was created in the 1600s to scent the gloves of a Countess who was later burned at the stake on suspicions of witchcraft. It is one of the original scents of the famous Italian apothecary, and indeed smells like an old medicine cabinet with top notes of nutmeg and citrus followed up with woods. I wear new perfumes every year, but will always circle back to this for our anniversary.

Photo credit: Stephanie Jensen

Rosé is a multidisciplinary performance artist living in Chicago. Their work is in direct conjunction with their spiritual practice as a Reiki healer, spiritualist and initiate of Ifa and Lucumi, an Afro-diasporic religion.

When did you start wearing fragrance?

I guess you can say I started wearing fragrance sometime around the age of 8 or so. I used to spend a lot of my time with my grandmother and she had a dazzling vanity set along with a fabulous collection of perfume bottles. I was always captivated by the ones that were up on the high shelf. The bottles were like architecture. Some of my favorites at the time were Elizabeth Taylor's Passion, Christian Dior's Poison, and of course Chanel No. 5. I was hypnotized by there powdery scents and learned properly from my grandmother that you must "walk into the scent" so that it graces your body. My grandmother always had the finest taste even when she didn't have the most money. Thinking back now, I learned much about escape from my grandmother. She always wanted to have the best of everything.

Why do you think you're interested in personal scent?

It's one of the first things I notice about someone and the sexiest thing a person can do. I still use scent as a form of seduction. There is something desirable about being seduced by something that you can't see that really turns me on. Scent lets you know how aggressive some can be or how soft someone's touch is. Sometimes your scent can linger in a room. It lingers like a shadow and people still think of you. Having a scent commands a sort of attention and it gives you a following. That person will always remember you.

What are your favorite notes or ingredients to wear?

I am attracted to earthier scents like tree sap, grass, smashed wood, swamp blooms, and tobacco leaf. I also adore muted floral notes like ylang-ylang and touches of jasmine. I am also a sucker for white musk, sandalwood, myrrh, and Peruvian amber.

How might your preferences for fragrance reflect your tendencies as an artist?

Since scent really triggers memory I often think of certain things while building performance and installations, burning incense prior to the start of a performance or even during. I often use materials such a wet dirt or cover my body in mud, pools of water strewn with hibiscus leaves and orange linger. Pieces of metal and iron linger around space treated with rainwater. Using or thinking about the scent in a performance or installation creates much more of an environment or a site. An environment that is captivating and holds you, prisoner,

We're headed toward the start of fall: do you have favorite scents that you wear as the weather starts to cool?

Oh yes, when the weather starts to cool I prefer spicier notes to wear that are much more warming such as black pepper, cinnamon, and red musk. Even bergamot which I find can be a peppery citrus. I like my fragrance during the cooler and colder months to really pierce the skin.

Photo courtesy of Joshua Kent

Joshua Kent is an artist working in writing, sculpture, and performance. Situated in the attic of St. Francis House, a grass-roots community when they live and work, Kent’s practice explores the embodied dynamic of an immersive life practice. More about Joshua’s work can be found here: Joshuajjkent.com

When did you start wearing fragrance? When I was young I read in a children’s rainy day activity book that one could brew perfume with flowers from the backyard. I marveled that such alchemy could occur with an empty salt shaker, rubbing alcohol and lilacs stolen from neighbors. As I waited for the scent to cure, I dreamt of how I would soon dab the essence of spring behind each lobe. Of course, my recipe flopped, and upon my return, I was greeted with the aromatic failure of brown, rotting matter—perhaps an apt metaphor for my relationship to scent, or a foretelling of how I would orient my aspiration towards elegance, a vehicle by which I might transcend my class and gender. We're headed toward the start of fall: do you have favorite scents that you wear as the weather starts to cool? I tend to stick with one scent, and only recently have begun to combine fragrances through the day. I always wear dark, muskier smells with heavy base notes. As we enter the colder months I find myself yearning for a touch of citrus, or some quality of airiness. This is remedied by fresh flowers (tuber roses, jasmine plants)—smells I would detest on my body for long period, yet which I adore when appointed in a room. Why do you think you're interested in personal scent? I think of Babe Paley wearing a blood red dress by Charles James. Swaths of fabric gather and are stitched at the side, giving the impression that the wearer is forever lifting the hem off the ground, revealing endless folds of off-white pleats. I think of perfume as I think of this image. The impossible moment: the alchemical yearning bottled and held. A careful orchestration of contrasts: she is always entering but never spoilt. Muybridge reduced to a single vessel. A blossom long past, one might still hold. How might your preferences for fragrance reflect your tendencies as an artist? My work explores instances of bounty amidst professed scarcity. Informed by a desire to democratize aesthetic experiences, I create images in the world that hold together seemingly incongruous class signifiers. And so I pile the donated roses atop the compost heap at the shelter where I live and work. I light a scented candle in the bathroom of our crumbling halfway house for eighteen: in memory of that which is small, (and too often feminized and dismissed) but could be called a mutual longing for something more, a rose-scented sublime amidst the brutal neglect of the world.

Jessie Mott. Serpent Twins, 2017 Pen, watercolor, acrylic marker on paper, 24” x18”

Jessie Mott, based in Chicago, IL  is an emerging social worker and visual artist best known for watercolor animal drawings and collaborative animations with the artist Steve Reinke. Mott’s work explores themes of queerness, eroticism, power, and vulnerability. More about Jessie’s work can be found here: jessiemott.com

When did you start wearing fragrance?

80s pop star Debbie Gibson created a fragrance called Electric Youth, of which I was overjoyed to receive on my 9th birthday. A neon pink spring floated diagonally within the champagne-y liquid.  It was a sticky July afternoon and I immediately sprayed it on my neck. It was sweet with a sensationally immature fruitiness that somehow managed to not be cloying. I remember the way it changed on my skin, mixing with my child sweat through the end of the birthday night reverie. When I choose fragrances now, I tend to steer clear of the fruit, but I recently made an exception for Byredo’s Pulp, on the opposite spectrum. It verges on souring plums, apple flesh funk, damp fur, jammy candies.

I dabbled with other drugstore perfumes in my youth but the real desire for scent emerged when I read in a fashion magazine, circa 1994, that Madonna wore a particular tuberose. My heart exploded with this news, a tangible way to connect with my idol. My father kindly tracked down the perfume for me at some fancy store in Manhattan and brought me a sample. I was quaking with excitement, thinking I was about to be one with Madonna. Unfortunately, however, the headiness of white flowers with something sharply synthetic--I don't know, gasoline?--was an olfactory assault. I was not ready. I felt distressed that I could not attach, but I dropped it on my pulse points anyway.

Why do you think you're interested in personal scent?

I mostly wear scents that I’m interested in, more so than for another person. It is a form of self-expression, but also a way of feeling grounded. It elevates my mood. There is something thrilling about experiencing the changing of a fragrance throughout the day. It may start out cardamom in the morning but end up leather by evening.

I like to associate times in my life with particular scents. It is amazing how you can smell something and be transported so viscerally back to another world. I remember smelling the floral heart of Anais Anais on my mother’s coat when I was little, and feeling so comforted by it.

Choosing scents can create opportunity to forge new identities, conjure old memories and create new ones. A portal to new desire, a resurrection of haunting love. When the right alchemy emerges you get the tingles.

How might your preferences for fragrance reflect your tendencies as an artist?

The animal features prominently in my work and as it happens, I have an affinity for animalic scents.

Most often, I am making drawings/watercolors. There is always vacillation between structure and all out violence/bleeding of color. The tension between control and fantasy is something I am interested in, and there is a similar dynamic in fragrances as well. I have a collection that ranges from sophistication to a certain skank - a refined chypre iris to an aggressive damp pelt. You never know what you will need for a day’s work.  Art and scent are both experienced in a primal way, deep in the lizard brain. I prefer engaging with scent and art making that is rooted in the marrow. Arousal of all the senses. There is enough disappointment. We need pink peppercorn, tangy smoke, beaver sacs (synthetic, obviously), felled trees, vetiver. Color choice and scent linked by intuitive processes.

We're headed toward the start of fall: do you have favorite scents that you wear as the weather starts to cool?

My go-to cool weather fragrance has been, for over 12 years, Heeley’s Cardinal. I am a bit obsessed with it. It is an incense scent that has a chill to it. My favorite feature of it is a frankincense note, but it also has a bright element that is hard to identify. Some say linden, but I am unconvinced. It is refreshing for a gothic church. I have many happy memories associated with it, so I can’t  give it up. I also have a sample of MEMO’s African Leather that I am toying with at the moment. It has soulful leathery warmth and spice that is kind of intoxicating. The bottle is so beautiful, with a cartoony cheetah on it; I am a sucker.

Willy Smart. Page 18, The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore. The Centenary Edition. London, 1878. 2018 Etched mirror, blush, flower waters

Willy Smart is an artist and writer who works in presentational and propositional forms. Willy makes lectures, sculpture, and publications that propose extended modes and objects of reading and recording. Willy directs the conceptual record label Fake Music (fakemusic.org) as well as a personal website (willysmart.com)

When did you start wearing fragrance?

Fairly recently — maybe two years ago. Though I’ve enjoyed the quiet loft of florals for a lot longer.

Why do you think you're interested in personal scent?

I like the repeatability of perfume, and I like the misdirection a fragrance affords. I like flowers without flowers.

I recently read Alain Corbain's great book on scent in the French cultural imagination. In one chapter, he chronicles the shift in 17th century as the vogue for musky scents was overcome by a new proclivity for florals. Corbain explains this floral ascendance as a symptom of a bourgeois mode of seduction, which consists of ‘setting the mood.’ A musky scent—essentially a poopy scent—draws attention to the body of its bearer; while a floral whiff, obviously not of the body, draws attention to the wearer’s surroundings: this room, this curtain, this slant of moonlight. I don’t really think I wear fragrances for ‘seduction’ purposes but I do like the way a floral allows me a kind of dispersed presence. Or maybe the floral is about a fantasy of a entirely different body: she wants her body the body of the bloom.

How might your preferences for fragrance reflect your tendencies as an artist?

There is something surfacey about fragrances — both in the way perfume is often imagined as frivolous and of course in the literal application of a fragrance to my skin’s surface. I’m attracted to similar aesthetic moves: using materials or that operate on the level of suggestion rather than of definition; or working in depth with ’superficial’ forms of language like wordplay and description. I think I am learning as much for my practice from reading perfume reviews than I am from wearing them and I certainly do more of the former anyway.

We're headed toward the start of fall: do you have favorite scents that you wear as the weather starts to cool?

Annick Goutal’s Ninfeo Mio!

Michelle Wasson. November Rain, 2017 acrylic on raw canvas, 95” x 74”

Michelle Wasson is an internationally exhibiting artist based in Chicago, IL. Her work has recently been included in exhibitions at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, REFUSALON in San Francisco, and Brand Library Art Center in Glendale, CA.  She received her MFA from Washington University in 2001, and has served as faculty at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago and The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She currently co-directs Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago. More about Michelle’s work can be found here: Michellewasson.com

When did you start wearing fragrance?

It was the year I realized that I would be an artist. In 1985 Christian Dior released their mysterious perfume Poison. Scent and memory are so indelibly linked that when I recall that iconic purple bottle on my childhood dresser, I hear Purple Rain on the turntable and feel my favorite grey parachute pants on my skin. I was developing an enduring love of color, epic guitar solos and dance.

Why do you think you're interested in personal scent?

Scent can set or correct the mood of my day. Fragrance has the power to set an intention, evoke a strong memory or recall a place of safety or comfort.

How might your preferences for fragrance reflect your tendencies as an artist?

Some works in progress have been simmering for more than a decade. It’s rare for me to make a painting—like a single note perfume--in one sitting. I would rather have a few concoctions go awry than stick to the same, safe scent everyday. If a subject, process, or sensorial experience becomes comfortable, it’s time to move on. I’m drawn to complexity and not at all concerned with creating a signature scent for myself—nor do I subscribe to a singular camp of painting. I find binary scents for men and women boring so I experiment with samples and trade bottles with friends—just as I prefer to layer paint to create complex color or texture.

We're headed toward the start of fall: do you have favorite scents that you wear as the weather starts to cool?

I escape from the harsh Chicago winter to a fantastic imaginary Middle Eastern souk. My husband and I share Myrrh & Tonka Cologne created by Mathilde Bijaoui for Jo Malone. It’s an incredibly warm and lush scent with a top note of hay lavender, a middle layer of myrrh and a base of vanilla, tonka and almond.

Roland Miller, co-director of Julius Caesar, applying one of the four parfum that comprise’s Matt Morris’ Copycat Killer, 2017

Matt Morris is a piece of marzipan. He has wanted to be Germaine Cellier for quite some time, both nationally and internationally. He is a contributor to a foundation that the artist set up to raise money for the purchases of future additions of perfumes to a growing archive. He is educated, and now works as an educator. He’s a Fairyologist. More about Matt’s work can be found here: http://www.mattmorrisworks.com

When did you start wearing fragrance?

There was a white wicker shelf with several bottles of fragrance that my father and mother wore when I was growing up. I remember Cool Water, 1988, by Davidoff, its minty marine notes, how they would smell of my father’s skin, and the ways a sweeter amber facet would come forward on me when I would put it on.

Why do you think you're interested in personal scent?

I’m interested in nascent forms of becoming ourselves, those ways of sensing and expressing something understandable about a person in ways that aren’t visual. I want to think about the ways that we are marked and sometimes mark ourselves. I’m obsessed with art historical precedents for disrupting identity signifiers with perfume, such as Duchamp’s Rrose Sélavy and her signature scent Belle Haleine eau de Voilette, 1921. While scent as a means of attraction is certainly always at play, my wearing perfume is first of all a form of self care by which I make a space for my own fantasies, cast protection spells on myself, and dare to attempt the very treacherous work of remembering.

What are your favorite notes or ingredients to wear?

Orris (the root of iris), very creamy sandalwood notes, rubber and plastic and anything that signals artifice in intelligent ways, milk, ambrette, mimosa, heliotrope, saffron, peaches and apicots, a thoughtfully developed violet, galbanum, tuberose. I also have a soft, sweet spot for notes of marshmallow, Play-Doh, cola, waxiness, powdery cosmetics….

How might your preferences for fragrance reflect your tendencies as an artist?

I broke a bottle of perfume in the gallery where I had my first solo exhibition after completing my BFA (on purpose). Henceforth, there have often been olfactory dimensions in my art. Last year I made Copycat Killer, a set of four hand-blended parfum based on the fragrances my sibling, my parents, and I wear. The four directors of Julius Caesar (and sometimes substitutes for them) graciously sat in the gallery space wearing those fragrances, layering the notes of the original perfumes references and my memories of those smells changing on our skin, which mingled into the body smells of Kate, Josh, Roland, and Tony.

We're headed toward the start of fall: do you have favorite scents that you wear as the weather starts to cool?

When I want to sparkle, Bois des Iles by Chanel. When I want wooden spikes, Santal Majuscule by Serge Lutens. When I’m re-watching Buffy, Hemlock Shade by Lvnea. When I want to smell like cement and clay and southern mourning and childhood trauma, Only Children Weep by Sixteen92. Most autumn days, I will want to smell like Iris Silver Mist by Serge Lutens.

[genderassignment]

Dad spelled backwards is drag

We are so pleased to welcome you to our fall edition. In our last issue, our contributors offered a searing analysis of the gender and racial inequalities within art academic spaces. One correspondent sat down with Chicago’s own The Vixen, recent contestant on the reality TV competition RuPaul’s Drag Race to debrief on some of her most inciting moments on the show and the ways she called attention to the racialized biases produced as a ‘narrative’ in so-called ‘reality formats.’  And who can forget that substantial piece about Maria Grazia Chiuri, the first female designer at Dior in the label’s seventy year history? Our thanks to the estate of Florine Stettheimer for allowing us to reproduce a number of her paintings as illustrations for the languid, depleting heat one was made to endure this summer.

For this issue we visit a pit. Throbbing. Deep. Edged in green velvet. Edged in lattice. Dark as if dipped in black plastic.

Read ahead in this issue to find an report on the latest in gender studies pedagogy, Miss Satin’s tips for parenting, and one of our publication’s trademarked POWER LISTS compiled by distinguished poet Stephane Mallarmé about his favorite drag performers to have appeared on television to date. In particular, we ask readers to extend a welcome to our newest contributor Donafella Versace, who reviews a recently released celebrity endorsed perfume from LA house Xyrena.

In coalition with your bravery, the Editorial Staff

The first slide shown in Wanting Bodies

#firstdayfirstimage

1.

Last year the class Wanting Bodies: Articulating Gender and Sexuality Through Abstraction was offered to incoming first year students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Its curriculum was made up of sex education, post-minimalism, institutional critique, comics, perfume reviews, and other experimental attempts at rendering sensible some of the tendencies and behaviors—personal, societal—by which identities are produced, categorized, and contained.

An incomplete list of artists whose work was shown and discussed in Wanting Bodies includes: Nina Chanel Abney, Laura Aguilar, Lisa Alvarado, Candida Alvarez, Claire Arctander, Claire Ashley, Naama Arad, Lise Haller Baggesen, Lynda Benglis, James Bidgood, Melanie Bonajo, Louise Bourgeois, Mark Bradford, Nancy Brooks Brody, AA Bronson, Cecily Brown, Scott Burton, James Lee Byars, Claude Cahun, Bradley Callahan (BCALLA), Jessica Campbell, Nick Cave, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Judy Chicago, Lygia Clark, Bethany Collins, Hanne Darboven, Vaginal Davis, Abigail DeVille, Torkwase Dyson, Liz Ensz, Bracha Ettinger, Valie Export, Angela Davis Fegan, Andrea Fraser, Tracy Featherstone, Louise Fishman, Gelitin, Jeff Gibson, Sam Gilliam, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Magalie Guérin, Marcia Hafif, Harmony Hammond, Jesse Harrod, Gordon Hall, Maren Hassinger, Micol Hebron, Eva Hesse, Leslie Hewitt, Rebecca Horn, Jennifer Chen-su Huang, Juliana Huxtable, Ariel Jackson, E. Jane, Steffani Jemison, Jennie C. Jones, Kapwani Kiwanga, Ellsworth Kelly, Caroline Kent, Hilma af Klint, Terence Koh, Suzanne Lacy, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Lazaros, Judy Ledgerwood, David Leggett, Zoe Leonard, Ivan Lozano, Lee Lozano, Bonnie Lucas, Sarah Lucas, Isabelle McGuire, Jill Magid, Teresa Margolles, Agnes Martin, Yvette Mayorga, Ana Mendieta, Adam Milner, Allyson Mitchell, Ayanah Moor, Carrie Moyer, Ulrike Müller, Zoe Nelson, Senga Nengudi, Louise Nevelson, Hương Ngô, Hélio Oiticica, Yoko Ono, Kira O’Reilly, Orlan, Sabina Ott, Amelia Peláez, Sheila Pepe, Howardena Pindell, Adrian Piper, Pope.L, Puppies Puppies, Lisi Raskin, Macon Reed, Jimmy Robert, Oli Rodriguez, Kellie Romany, Barbara Rossi, Zilia Sanchez, Carolee Schneemann, Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp), Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Aram Han Sifuentes, Amy Sillman, Xaviera Simmons, Diane Simpson, Shinique Smith, Edra Soto, Joan Snyder, Annie Sprinkle, Anna Showers-Cruser, Sturtevant, Emma Sulkowicz, Martine Syms, Alica Tippit, Toxic Titties, Anne Truitt, Clara Ursitti, Gillian Wearing, Lindsey Whittle, Hannah Wilke, Lisa Williamson, Anicka Yi, Brenna Youngblood, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung….

Don’t lose heart. Alternative canons are being constructed, contested, and used for experimentation counter to dominant, patriarchal art historical narratives. There’s much work ahead, but this was the art history learned by a group of a dozen or so brand new art students. A matter of weeks into a semester that began with showing Laura Aguilar’s work, the LA-based photographer passed away. During the class period that followed her passing, the responsibilities of this younger generation of artists were made clear: these are their stories to carry, to remember, to share. Often analyses of Aguilar’s photographs consider her self-objectification. She placed her body in ways that disoriented its legibility in the camera’s image capture, at least in terms of male gaze conventions, instead situating herself as continuous with the outdoor landscape in which many of her artworks were produced.

In the way of assignments, the class challenged traditions and formal preconceptions about what constitutes a self portrait, an olfactory artwork, a prosthetic, a drag transformation, and abstraction as a methodology.

Hannah Marguerite Klepper. Donnafella Versace, April 15th, 2018 Digital photograph, 13.4" X 8.9"

Hannah Klepper, one of the students in Wanting Bodies, presented a set of photographs documenting her collaboration with her father to transpose her usual routine of cosmetics into a gender transformation that resulted in the invention of her dad’s drag alter ego, Donafella Versace. Just look at her! There is another way. This is not as easy a gesture as it is to describe. Cross-identification, translation, disarmament, play, an upset of the stakes assigned the roles performed within family and social structures. A father accepts his daughter’s face, the spread of her desire and aesthetic sensibilities, invites her marking him with a ritual by which she brings herself into focus, looking into a mirror. Now looking through the camera to her father. It’s not known if the process of making these images was awkward or challenging. But what is shown in the image here is a changeling figure that proposes a detachment of father from patriarch. It’s rather hopeful, no?

–Maddie Fraser

2.

I feel a jolt of panic that my father as I knew him has departed, but Father in a broader scope seems to be consolidating power. He died

suddenly this summer. One evening in Baton Rouge, I was a puddle. There were frogs singing outside, thrumming madly. I croaked out that I didn’t know how to reconcile the decimation that I seek of patriarchy as a system with the terrible pain of loving and losing my father. One might wonder if the two have anything to do with one another, and awkwardly, they do. That sensitive person, passionate, full of thoughts and opinions, loving and abrupt and stubborn, self-protective and vulnerable… that man that I loved. But also the system of paternity, the structure of the nuclear family as it’s enforced, the particularly Biblical roles for husband and wife, father and mother and children, that permeated our home, the roles into which we acted. Yes. Of course patriarchy ran through how I knew and loved my father. Like a slippery vein of metal ore that amidst my grief, I find myself mining, or at least scratching into.

In what felt like moments after grades were filed from my spring semester of teaching, my mother called me to say that my father had passed away suddenly, in the night, at the age of sixty. I immediately left for Louisiana to bury my dead and to begin the insane, disorienting process of understanding a world without my dad still in it. Even writing this… if you could see my process, so upset from my usual approach to crafting words, is more collage, hoping that describing the events as I remember them, repeating what I think I’ve believed at least until this summer, before this crucible in which all I feel is doubt looming behind loss.

In a patriarchal symbolism, without a father is lawlessness, and damn it, that’s what I’m pursuing semester in and semester out, to test what assumptions we depend on in order to direct our choices. To banish sky gods and old straight white men lawmakers, to see them forgotten, or maybe to see their infantile screams, unaddressed childhood traumas that, still wounded, they sublimate onto our country through outrageously xenophobic, anti-woman, only superficially self-serving chaos. Ah there’s the thought:

the law was always chaos. Smash the patriarchy.

This struggle could be characterized all kinds of ways, but my psychoanalytic leanings bring up patriarchy as the object of my resistance—a symbolic structure of relationships embedded in capitalism, colonialism, and what other troubling tides flood over our present age. Law, as a concept, upheld by and in the name of ______, reinforces rigidities not only around the understandability of gender and sexuality, but also distributions of power, rights, and the authority to be represented within cultural narratives and histories. Subjecthood as it is bandied about across a couple of centuries of theory, is itself a means of characterizing individuality—bounded, discrete monoliths of self-consciousness. But in this social script, for subjects to perform as such, someone (patriarchal construct) provides the authority for such existing.

My father taught me the names of flowers, and the correct pronunciation of the words ‘haute couture.’ He wore colorful patterned socks every day to work and to church. Sometimes he would yell, and once I told him that if he could look at himself he would see he was acting out the parts of his own father that left him wounded and traumatized, that he was reproducing him. Another time, he trembled and rocked back and forth in front of me, muttering “Don’t you ever try to analyze me.”

–Miss Satin

3.

Stéphane Mallarmé’s favorite queens to have ever competed on RuPaul’s Drag Race:

Stacy Layne Matthews Jasmine Masters Nicole Paige Brooks Monique Heart Mariah Ongina Shea Coulee Kim Chi Joslyn Fox Tatianna

4.

Xyrena perfumes

Plastic by Trixie Mattel To consider a signature fragrance for a drag queen celebrity, one allows for how artifice and irony may be laden onto the entire enterprise of wearing scent. This ramble could veer into gender studies easily enough, and the ways identity is performed or rendered sensible through dress and personal expression. It could also be a meditation on the recursivity of scent as a product tie-in to a public brand, a much more popular vehicle for harnessing tastes and fandoms a decade ago, but persists even now with more recent releases such as those from 2018 by Kim Kardashian West under the label KKW Fragrance. Trixie Mattel is a drag performer who has appeared on (and, spoiler, gone onto win a season of) the reality television competition RuPaul’s Drag Race. Plastic by Trixie Mattel, 2017—her collaboration with Xyrena—joins others the perfume house has done with drag queens Pearl (Flazéda by Pearl, 2015), Willam (Scented by Willam, 2017), and Tatianna (Choices by Tatianna, 2018). Xyrena, founded by Killian Wells, notably established itself with the release of Aaliyah, a signature fragrance launched fourteen years after the performer’s passing, produced by Xyrena with the R&B singer’s surviving relatives Diane and Rashad Haughton. Plastic by Trixie Mattel shares many of the core notes that recur across a number of scents in the Xyrena line: a powdery, effusive lavender; a fruit punch-style of citrus; a dry down phase of vanilla, amber, and a surfacey take on sandalwood. This underlying structure gets lambasted with giant bubblegum aspects and tropical fruits of the saccharine sort that would be found in brightly-hued beachside cocktails and scented children’s toys. These notes are blended to be intense and penetrating: Xyrena’s perfumes last as long as one could wish, with boldly wafting sillage.

It’s only the lavender among Wells’ go-to notes that feels the most out of place here. Lavender, lauded for its relaxing qualities in aromatherapy, also figures prominently in the fascinating historical category of perfume the fougère, which are abstract fantasies for what a fern might smell like if it smelled of anything at all. Classically, the fougère opens with lavender. Traditionally, fougère fragrances have been popular in defining masculinity within scent. So perhaps the offbeat placement of lavender among Plastic’s opening is intended as a playful send-up to the gender-bending potential of drag as performance and perfume as product.

Plastic plays up the synthetic qualities of its ingredients, calling to mind the long list of unpronounceables printed on the backside of candy packaging. Where elsewhere this might be distracting, here it makes sense, given not only its namesake’s fictive femininity, but in particular the outlandishly proportioned references to Barbies and girlish affectations in Mattel’s style. But there also seems to be a missed opportunity to play up a satisfying rubbery or plastic quality in the fragrance. Think of the weirdly unreal Eden, 1994, by Cacharel or some of the offbeat oddities in Comme des Garçons’ 2004 Synthetic line. If I fantasize replacing the lavender in Plastic with, say, the bouncy-banana jasmine in Etat Libre d’Orange’s Jasmin et Cigarette, the whole composition shifts into the kind of intelligence that is always behind really good comedy. Trixie Mattel’s bright wit, dark sense of humor, and flirtation with taboo all contribute to making her a brilliant performer. Much of what carries Plastic is the audacity of having made it. Were it to take cues from some of perfumery’s best bad girls (Fracas, 1948, by Germaine Cellier for Robert Piguet; My Sin, 1924, by Madame Zed for Lanvin; or any number of the Schiaparelli scents of the ‘30s and ‘40s), Plastic could achieve both punchiness and profundity for those who wish to play as dolls.

–Donafella Versace, Resident Perfume Critic

Michael Reece. Objectify Young Fathers, 2015 Digital text work

5.

“The primary function of gender identity as a political concept—and, increasingly, a legal one—is to bracket, if not to totally deny, the role of desire in the thing we call gender.” –Chu, Andrea Long. “On Liking Women.” n+1. Issue 30: Motherland, Winter 2018. Accessed 14 September 2018. <https://nplusonemag.com/issue-30/essays/on-liking-women>

“What becomes visible in this drag is not people, individuals, subjects or identities, but rather assemblages; indeed those that do not work at any ‘doing gender/sexuality/race’, but instead an ‘undoing’…But at the same time, drag is a way to organize a set of effective, laborious, partially friendly and partially aggressive methods to produce distance to these norms, for instance to the two-gender system, to being-white, to being-able, and to heteronormativity. In so doing, drag proposes images in which the future can be lived.” –Lorenz, Renate. “Drag – Radical, Transtemporal, Abstract.” Section of introduction. Queer Art: A Freak Theory, trans. Daniel Hendrickson. New Brunswick: Transaction, 2012. Print, 20–23.

“[Joop!] was one of the very first global releases to liberate boys from the dictat [sic] that they should only wear aftershaves with ‘manly’ aromas, ergo citrus fruits, ferns and marines. Joop!, instead, was all about the vanilla and honey. Carry out a blind test and many people would assume this to be a young women’s perfume…there is both an emphatic suggestion of the hetero-normative, yet also a strong homoerotic subtext….” –Ostrom, Lizze. Perfume: A Century of Scents. New York: Pegasus Books, 2016. Print, pp. 296-297.

“…[I]f the object is external, then the object is destroyed by the subject…after ‘subject relates to object’ comes ‘subject destroys object’ (as it becomes external); and then may come ‘object survives destruction by the subject’, But there may or may not be survival. A new feature thus arrives in the theory of object-relating. The subject says to the object: ‘I destroyed you,’ and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: ‘Hullo object!’ ‘I destroyed you.’ ‘I love you.’ ‘You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.’ ‘While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy.’” –Winnicott, D.W. “The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identification.” Playing and Reality. New York: Basic Books, 1971. Print, p. 90.

There was a pit aforementioned. It gapes, opening precisely upon the tautological fact of subjectivity. Pick a system in which this occurs: patriarchy, gender, private property, capitalism, racism, law enforcement and incarceration. Watch where the assumption of a conscious point of view alternates with the necessity of its controllable object. Watch where that gets us, the unevenness of that path, the desperation for some sort of continuation beyond death as an eventuality. But also, sense, even smell, what happens when a conception of such a system, its power, an idea of the power of the actors within that network of relations, is disturbed by the fallout of a moment, rather the end of a moment, like the death of a parent. Sure, there is a symbolic hole floating across the field of these thoughts; it pierces the rhetoric of ‘the way things are’ that extends seemingly endlessly in all directions. In this way, drag is a matter of game recognize game, a means of signaling that we understand that, however compulsory, these orders of domination that exact meaning and affix pretenses of certainty, are constructions, as delicately fleeting as a fragrance most volatile. Drag is productive disillusionment, by which one might parse between the signs of father and man, between man and person, subject and form, in between instances of being that are made to hold together as intelligible POV, performed as cohesive enough to identify as something or other. A paradox here is that to notice the place that a system turns out not to totalize—to critique its failure—is also somehow to participate. Somehow, though I can hardly fathom, because I’m barely here, this empty spot binds together a condition and the rebellion from that condition. Drag, I believe, depends on the perforations that cut through the desires it critiques and the desires it demonstrates.

That is the pit that occurs in fantasy, one that can’t help to be both, always. Perhaps the same may prove to be true of this memory. I am oriented to a gash in the earth, one in which my father’s body was placed. It was yellow-brown; its sides were clawed rough with the marks of a backhoe’s digging. This pit, darkening in its depths, was its own perfume, a stink of clay, a flash of plastic, the heady damp aroma of the previous day’s rain. The sense of this non-place stays, caught in my throat, repellent and persistent, disruptive insofar as wherever I seem to be, whatever capacity or role in which I appear to be serving, I am, instead, falling through, down my windpipes, down a hole where a person was, and where an idea replaces him.

Joop! continues desperately beyond death as an eventuality, comprised as it is of such powerful synthetics that it penetrates not only skin and fabric but time itself, luxuriating in its lasting potency to propose in expansive proportions its own virility as a crossover between sexualities and assumptions around gender norms. Joop! was also among my father’s preferred fragrances. When a product is chemically composed, marketed, and sold for decades at prices so affordable it makes appearances even at Wal-Mart, can that be called democratization? Inclusive of orientations, classes, and clashes across gender conventions, did my father smell like a burgeoning counter-narrative to patriarchy, or is this a late-capitalist nightmare within which all positionalities are absorbed, all signs and identities commodified? The smell stains my studio either way. And probably Joop! is itself an indicator of simultaneous, contradictory desires—a sub-plot of commerce that incidentally holds space for more than profit, and yet still profit too.

Drag and Joop! and becoming fatherless are all trenchant reminders that one’s a crowd. Dare to punk your local apparatuses of control. Be the catfish you want to see in the world. The loved and destroyed object will not always say ‘hullo’ back; “there may or may not be survival.” Remember Laura Aguilar, who made what could be described as the facts of her having been here into a series of breaches in the regulations of heteronormativity, humanity, embodiment. She became like a rock, and I become the space from which rocks are displaced, suspended in an incomplete burial, plush and velvet along the edges of a new emptiness that cuts up men, from their lifespans and the fragility of their roleplay.

[genderassignment]

Beyond the Roma Caravan (2) / Suzana Milevska’s Testimony: Meet Lynn Hutchinson Lee and Hedina Sijerčić

Canada Without Shadows: I am a Romani Woman - Kanada Bizo Uchalipe: Me Sem Romni is a small 24-page book featuring the testimonies and artwork of five Hungarian Romani women.

The very brilliant Suzana Milevska shares her second installment of Beyond The Roma Caravan with Gender Assignment! She writes at the intersection of feminist and Roma issues, which are so under-represented and yet have so much to bring to a conversation on the inherent nomadicism in geopolitical and climate crisis. “In the wake of the new global political conundrums...this project reveals how the ongoing policy of displacement and deportation of Roma refugees and immigrants is easily “smuggled” under the label of nomadic history and culture of Roma.”

I first met Lynn Hutchinson Lee and Hedina Sijerčić in Skopje, back in May 2010. The context of my first encounter with the artists was the first curatorial meeting with the short-listed artists for the Roma Pavilion 2011 which took place after the first round of the selection of applications (collected through an international call that was issued in February 2010). It’s been more than eight years since then, and in meanwhile we’ve met just a couple of times. However our first meeting was highly inspiring for me: it profoundly informed and affected my theoretical research and curatorial practice. Recently I was reminded to their artistic collaboration and was motivated to include their project in this series of posts because of the pertinent refugee crisis in Europe that also heavily affected the condition of Roma refugees in Canada – their project in my view was in a way anticipatory and still highly resonates with the current political situation of Roma across the world.

During our first meeting Lynn and Hedina presented themselves as two Romani woman artists comprising the artist collective chirikli. At that time they were working on their joint project Canada Without Shadows / Kanada Bizo Uchalipe. The project was not yet completed, but was definitely a proposal that attracted the attention of the international jury and was one of the projects that was selected unanimously during the first round. Canada without Shadows was however not a project that one could easily anticipate and grasp in its entirety and complexity without knowing much about its authors’ cultural and ethnic background.

Whilst Lynn was a descendent of Romanichal Lee travellers from Great Britain and was living and working in Toronto, Canada, Hedina was from Bosnia and Herzegovina, at that time living and working in Germany. Lynn is mainly a visual artist, and Hedina was first better known (at least until then) as a writer, journalist and educator. It was therefore not easy to understand how the two artists met and decided to form the collective and how they managed and would manage to continue the collaboration on joint projects despite the distance - most of the time they were based in different continents. Meeting the artists in person and discussing directly with them their artistic interests and collaborative research methods helped the confirmation of the decision to commission, produce and present their collaborative project at, then, forthcoming Venice Biennale in 2011.

The general meeting in Skopje focused on the ongoing issues of Roma  in Europe. Particularly relevant were the debates about the goals and results of the Decade of Roma inclusion (2005-2015) and how the differences and contradictions between different Roma groups across the world – their different languages, cultures, customs, religious beliefs and political aspirations reflect (and should reflect) in arts. We talked about the restrictive laws (both in Europe and Canada) regarding the free movement of Roma, about the difficult conditions of the deported and expulsed Roma as a result of these restrictive laws, and about specificity of Romani internal courts and laws. We talked about the difference between the cultural background and political situation of Romani Travellers and Balkan Roma.

We also talked about Ronald Lee, one of the most renowned and influential Romani Canadian writer, linguist and activist based in Toronto, who was granted an honorary degree in 2014 by Queens University. We talked about his significant contribution towards the development of a critical political discourse regarding Roma (e.g. his participation in the 1971 First Romani World Congress in Orpington and the historical and political decision to use “Roma” as an umbrella term used to encompass different Romani communities), about his participation in the Kris Romani (Romani internal judicial assembly), or about his theoretical contribution to the reader Gypsy Law, the book that inspired Call the Witness project.

What became clear is the need for solidarity of Roma and with Roma vs. the clash within Roma communities regarding the differences in understanding ongoing political, identitarian and gender issues. The tensions between the traditional and conservative values to which most of the Romani communities currently still subscribe and the effect of such politics on women was already then one of the most relevant issues discussed during the internal three-day meeting with the present artists and activists.

Aside from the socio-political context of Roma the project proposals that used different media, genres and artistic strategies while reflecting on such urgent topics was addressed as one of the major departures for the panel discussions. Lynn and Hedina were some of the most active participants in the general discussion who contributed a lot to the gradual shaping of the overall project’s concept with the carefully articulated questions and arguments (although the project was already titled and had a general theoretical concept it still depended on different artistic practices for its completion).

Hungary, in Practice, Lynn Hutchinson Lee, paper, konnyaku paste, rice paste, block print

We were also discussing (particularly during the slots with the individual artists and teams) how to present the content of their own complex research and oral history project in a form of art installation, and how to contextualize their collective’s project in the general frame of the curatorial concept of Call the Witness. After the long discussion about how to combine the content and form, the artistic research with the poetic and the political aspects of the work, Canada Without Shadows was gradually developed into a 4-channel sound-art installation Canada Without Shadows).

Most importantly their project had nothing to do with the usual stereotypes of Roma as nomadic people moving around in caravans and settling only temporarily in various cities’ outskirts. Their professional collaboration and friendship took place on the backdrop of the war in ex-Yugoslavia and was motivated and informed by the displacements, deportations, and exile of Roma (both in Europe and Canada) in the 1990s and 2000s. More precisely both Lynn and Hedina were invested in researching the contradictions stemming from the continuous pursuit of collective identity of Roma groups that are paralleled with the quest of new subjectivity and individual positions of Romani women within their conservative communities and families. Thus the form of urban and natural soundscapes used in Canada Without Shadows consisting of overlaying poetry verses, written and spoken by the artists, and spoken testimonies of five displaced Hungarian Roma women who fled Europe to seek refuge in Canada, turned to be the most appropriate for the artists’ aims. A result of this was 'The Witness Project', a small book of testimonies of five Hungarian Romani women in Canada.  

According to the artists the title of the project was linked with the assumption of the Roma refugees that Canada had no “shadows,” and thus it had attracted many Roma families to settle there (as did Lynn’s father long ago). However it soon became clear that the new legal hurdles prevented and still prevent many Roma from receiving the desired refugee status. In the wake of the new global political conundrums I feel that the Roma issues today resonate with the anticipatory results of this artistic research project and felt compelled to revisit it in this context exactly because this project reveals how the ongoing policy of displacement and deportation of Roma refugees and immigrants is easily “smuggled” under the label of nomadic history and culture of Roma. Canada Without Shadows went far beyond the stereotype of caravan.

NOTES

Lynn Hutchinson Lee (artist, Canada) (born 1946) and Hedina Tahirović Sijerčić (born 1960) together formed the chirikli collective (http://chiriklicollective.com/about-the-artists/). Hutchinson Lee is a painter, muralist, and multimedia artist based in Toronto. As a member of the artist collective Red Tree she has worked on various interdisciplinary, socially engaged, and cross-cultural projects: Scouring City, Brushing Sky (2009 – 2010), Shukar Lulugi (Beautiful Flower, 2007), and Loki Gili (Song of Sorrow, Song of Hope, 2006). She is also a member of Roma Community Centre. Hedina Tahirović Sijerčić is a writer, journalist, and educator. She previously worked as a journalist and producer for radio and TV in Sarajevo. Recent publications include: English-Romani/Romani-English dictionary, 2011 (forward Roland Lee); Romani-Bosnian/Bosnian-Romani dictionary (published by the Federal Ministry of Education and Science, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2010); and Listen, feel pain/Ašun, haćar dukh (2007), a collection of poems.

Sigal Samuel, “There Is a Perception That Canada Is Being Invaded”, The Atlantic, 26.05. 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/05/theres-a-perception-that-canada-is-being-invaded/561032/

Lynn Hutchinson Lee (artist, Canada) & Hedina Tahirović Sijerčić (artist, Bosnia and Herzegovina / Germany), Canada Without Shadows / Kanada Bizo Uchalipe, 2010–2011, 4-part sound installation, total running time 25:07 min., presented at Call the Witness-Roma Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2011.

According to Lynn’s account of the beginning of their collaboration they first met in 1999 in Toronto, Canada. “Hedina had arrived here some months before we met, and had contacted Roma Community Centre. I was already on the board of directors of RCC. Hedina began to work on two projects right away: she was editor of our newsletter Romano Lil, the first Romani newsletter in Canada, and also edited Romane Mirikle (Romani Pearls, 1999), an anthology of poetry by Roma in Canada. I did the cover illustration for the book. She later used an image of mine for her subsequent anthology, Saro Paj/Like Water, 2009.” Quoted from a recent correspondence with Lynn Hutchinson Lee, 02 August, 2018.

Roland Lee, “The Rom-Vlach Gypsies and the Kris-Romani”, in Gypsy Law: Romani Legal Traditions and Culture, Berkeley, Walter O. Weyrauch, Ed. CA: University of California Press; 2001, pp. 188-230. 

“The project eventually presented the results of the complex research in which the artists archived and juxtaposed various found and created sounds. The “whispering” voices convey the poetic transpositions of the promised imaginary land, Canada, starting from different subjective experiences of memories, cultural and ethnic displacement, precariousness, family joys and laments, and testimonies of shame. The sounds of the turning wheels of Lee’s family vardo (caravan) are intertwined with Sijerčić’s “dreams” of Romani children’s laughter, footsteps corresponding to elements in her poetry, and the sounds of bombs in the Bosnian Roma ghetto.” Suzana Milevska, Call the Witness (brochure), BAK: Utrecht, 2011.  

“Hedina held written word workshops in which the women wrote their stories, and read them; I held printmaking workshops in which the women drew images and made block prints. From this work, we produced a small book. Our next project, proposed by Hedina, was the making of women's skirts. With a Toronto Arts Council grant, we held more writing and printmaking workshops with school children and Romani refugee women, and made a series of skirts from both paper (in Canada) and fabric (in Sarajevo.) The project, titled "Musaj te Dzav/ I Must Leave" was exhibited in Toronto in 2015 as part of the Opre Roma Festival.” Quoted from a recent correspondence with Lynn Hutchinson Lee, 02 August, 2018.

[genderassignment]

Feminist Social Practice: A Manifesto | Review by W. Perry Epes

poet and writer, W. Perry Epes, uncle of the author

I have the tremendous good fortune of coming from a family of artists, readers, teachers, thinkers, and debaters who informed my youth, and ultimately, my choice of vocation and practice. My mother’s brother, W. Perry Epes is among them. A poet who taught English for decades at the Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, Perry and I recently reignited a conversation about both of our practices. I sent a copy of my forthcoming, Feminist Social Practice: A Manifesto co-authored with Neysa Page-Lieberman, appearing in the Summer ASAP Journal.

What follows is an intensely generous and illuminating review of our Manifesto by Perry. It is a humbling reminder to read, think, and engage more. I designed a version of our Manifesto, which will be available for distribution shortly.

Appreciation for “Feminist Social Practice: A Manifesto”

23 July 2018

Dear Melissa,

Thank you so much for sending me both your Feminist Social Practice Manifesto and your “Mergerug” for your Serbian project, with timelines for you, Mother, and Zejna S.  The latter is particularly beautiful and interesting, and I’d like to ask you many more questions about it in due course, but for the present I want to concentrate on your Manifesto, which I have read with great interest and pleasure.

I was struck with the theoretical clarity and consequential weight of the first section defining terms of Feminist Social Practice, and then quite moved by the emotional force of the particular examples you explicated from the Revolution at Point Zero exhibition that you and Neysa Page-Lieberman co-curated in Chicago in the spring of 2017.

For me, your opening Declaration accomplishes two big theoretical steps simultaneously: 1) to liberate socially relevant art from the old “aesthetic” bias against whatever is didactic (the bias I was raised on in literary study, whether the New Criticism or Chicago Aristotelian Criticism, both of which try to elevate the “autonomous” work of “great art” to some notion of “universal” human relevance rather than any particular “real world” social or political realm—the catch being, as I learned best from Judith Fetterly’s feminist literary criticism, that we were all supposed to assume that white male European cultural standards were universal for everyone, not noticing that they might be meaningless to the invisible “other,” whether gendered or colonized); and 2) to recover and highlight the centrality of feminist social practice from the 1970s on as a source of examples and principles for all contemporary socially active art.  I will quote with renewed pleasure two key sentences from your Declaration: “We reject the prevailing art world’s bias toward revolutionary feminist tactics as didactic, narcissistic, irrelevant, anti-aesthetic, or otherwise lesser than ‘great art.’  We believe this narrative of trivialization, however subtle or obvious in its deployment, directly contributes to the erasure of the feminist legacy from the past, present, and future of socially engaged art.”  You go on to call on “curators, artists, art workers, scholars, and audiences to locate the legacy of feminism in all contemporary artworks, especially community and socially engaged practices.”

In your statement of Criteria for feminist social practice, I appreciated your call for an ending of emphasis on single, authoritative authorship (an “ideal” so perfectly expressive of male ego) and an end to privileging the finished, “perfected” object over process (bedrock of earlier aestheticist theories) in order to recognize how the process of collaboration and shared authorship so enhances the impact of socially engaged art, marked by inclusivity and outreach.  So much kinder and more respectful of the audience!  

I especially relished your criterion “Resists white, male, cis-dominant narratives.”  I’ve not encountered the term “cis-dominant” in my own critical reading, but I associated it in my mind with a phrase from reading Caesar’s Gallic Wars in 10th-grade Latin, when he refers to the region of the Northern Italy as “cis-Alpine Gaul,” on this side of the Alps, the near side from the perspective of Rome.  What an epitome Rome is of white male colonializing domination!  And so “cis-dominant” is on this side of liberation of the feminist other, this side of the revolution releasing the human spirit, “this side of Paradise,” to borrow Fitzgerald’s title.  (And a biography of him is titled The Far Side of Paradise, so maybe that’s where we’re headed.  The Far Side!  Or maybe waiting for such a reach of enlightenment that the far side becomes the next near side.  Anyway, I just loved the play of ideas that your writing sparked in my mind.)

Continuing in the section on the history of Feminist Social Practice, I really chimed to the concept of Judy Chicago’s attacking the pernicious modernist fallacy that “alienation is the natural human condition”; she exposes the existentialist premise that “real human contact is unattainable” as a fallacy to be obviated by collective and engaged artistic endeavor.  You quote Brodsky and Olin: “Feminist artists challenged the romantic constructions of the artist qua solitary genius, emphasizing collective dimensions of artistic production” (p. 337 in your text).  You go on to say that “The ‘power of feminist art,’ literally, was its ability to transform a society” (p. 338), and then quote Rita May Brown’s 1972 manifesto: “our art must be more than personal narrative; it must contain a vision for the future where no group rapes another, where force is not the heart of politics and egotism is not the mind of art.”  In the next key sentence for me, you outline the broadening link of feminism with all classes of social activism as “Women of color responded with intersectional approaches to what had first been a predominantly white feminist movement, demanding that the structural oppressions of class division, institutional racism, and compulsory heterosexuality be acknowledged even within the feminist movement itself.”  What an emulatable example of self-criticism, of privilege coming to recognize itself and the necessity of “[shifting] feminism’s trajectory to embrace a more inclusive spectrum of identities” (p. 338).

And so to the central thesis of your manifesto: “Given these strides of 1970s (and subsequent feminisms), and their irreversible impact on the art world, it is all the more unacceptable that feminism is regularly purged from art historical and philosophical accounts of aesthetic radicalism” (p. 338).  After giving clear and commensurate credit for background inspiration to Silvia Federici’s influential text Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, a series of Marxist feminist essays by the leader of the Wages for Housework movement in the 1970s (p. 339), the rest of your manifesto goes on to illustrate this thesis with specific examples from the exhibition you co-curated in Chicago in the spring of 2017, Revolution at Point Zero.  “The exhibition was the first of its kind to claim feminism as a primary influence on socially engaged art.  Revolution at Point Zero was developed as a test-drive for the Feminist Social Practice Manifesto, an example of putting theory into practice” (p. 340).

And it is in this practical side, the topically specific and emotionally-powerful imagery of the five individual exhibits, that your manifesto builds to its most vivid and memorable moments of supporting evidence.  We are truly moved to persuasion and conviction by the quality of the art.  The first exhibit, Laura Henderson Barbata’s Julia Pastrana, A Homecoming, grips us with the shock of this 19th-century Mexican Indigenous woman’s exploitation at the hands of her manager-husband, who exhibited her around the world and billed her as “The Ugliest Woman in  the World” (p. 341).  Beyond the shock of outrage, the artist’s truly extraordinary efforts to locate Pastrana’s remains in Norway and repatriate them for burial in Mexico is inspirational.

Marisa Moran Jahn’s suite of works, The CareForce, including public performance, videos and animation, and works on paper, transfigures the invisible care-giving and domestic labor produced by women into an upbeat, collectively choreographed Disco dance.  The setting of the exhibit, at Jane Addams Hull House, emphasized its social relevance with post-performance networking, while the beauty of the choreography lived even more widely in the audience participation (p. 342).

Megan Young’s performance-based series, The Longest Walk, “entails a group motion of walking forward and backward, and it enacts the slow pace of sustained progress” (p. 343).  The doing/undoing of the movement gives an emotional urgency bordering on anger and despair, but the works on paper carried during the walk, inviting participants to finish the sentence “We Hold This Space For . . . ,” complemented the action of walking with support through thought as much as vice versa.

The Puerto Rico-based Las Nietas de Nono’s Ilustraciones de la Mecanica shocks with enactments of medical research as experiments torturing vulnerable female bodies yet preserves the image of traditional curative remedies such as SCOBY, the symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast that is the basis of kombucha.  Your final sentence captures the power of this work: “Las Nietas brilliantly wove together themes of revelation and resistance by honoring women who have endured violence and humiliation at the hands of powerful entities while at the same time promoting the marginalized narratives of traditional healers of Puerto Rico” (p. 345).

It is fitting to conclude your explication of the exhibition with Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Work Ballets, since “her work engages feminism and socially engaged art equally and seamlessly in an unwavering long-term engagement with the politics of women’s work, the environment, and invisible labor” (p. 345).  The seamlessness of beauty in both work and art is inherent to the very title of her piece, and the video of her final ballet, Snow Workers’ Ballet, dramatically culminates the way her “complicated and stirring performances transform skilled labor into interpretive art for public audiences, and reveal the inherent complexities and artistry of everyday necessary actions” (p. 346).  In my retirement I am amazed at seeing how hard everyone works, and now I might add, how beautifully, too.

And so your manifesto ends by inviting us in to participate in the great work on the long road ahead.  “The very foundation of the feminist movement teaches us that only collective action across intersecting determinations of race, class, and sexuality can transform our history and culture” (p. 347).  I can’t overstate how stirring and welcoming I have found this invitation, with its clear theoretical basis and strong purpose which far transcends any whiff or limitation of dogmatism.  Thank you for this focused beam on a key turning point in the past of art history and the resulting broad insight into the future of art.

[genderassignment]

Borderland Creatures: Lise Haller Baggesen & Iris Bernblum at Goldfinch

Installation view of I am the horse, Goldfinch, Chicago. Photo credit: Daniel Hojnacki. Left: Iris Bernblum. Pretty baby 3, 2018, spray paint on photo. Right: Iris Bernblum. Pour, 2018, paint on wall, dimensions variable.

Gender Assignment Guest Blogger, Matt Morris

This is a story of biopower and biosociality…those bitches insisted on the history of companion species, a very mundane and ongoing sort of tale, one full of misunderstandings, achievements, crimes, and renewable hopes. (1)

To begin, rest assured that in my epigraph above, Donna Haraway writes ‘bitches’ in reference to dogs designed to service breeding and the interests of humans. However, it occurs to me how language demonstrates its potential to transmigrate across species (a system that is itself, language), and marks out a contentious zone in which femininity is denigrated, and the fact of our animal-ness is charged with a capacity for social abuse and enforced disparities across gender and race. Language is appropriated, and then reappropriated in common parlance, how one might clap back, confirming, ‘Yes, I’m that bitch.’ One wonders, and the wondering is overwhelming, at the intricacies of how language and organism and the institution of gender have been made to conspire in obfuscating life’s interdependencies. Haraway goes on to remind readers that to consider companion species is not only to account for pets, but also the plant- and animal-based foods we consume, cellular genetic modifications, products with less obvious origins among the living (horses, glue, etc.), and techno-hybrid aspects of contemporary life. The challenge to grasp either the particulars or scope of this paradigm is certainly an (intentional) effect of power. That artists Lise Haller Baggesen and Iris Bernblum succeed at finding starting points to contemplate these entanglements by revisiting the much-maligned genre of ‘horse art’ mostly relegated to the sphere of female adolescence is both novel and moving. In the years I’ve known both artists’ practices, I’ve come to trust that neither are squeamish around topics that are often avoided as much because of how easily they are dismissed as for how problematic they prove to be in their deconstruction. Motherhood, passé disco, unicorns, bucolic landscapes: both artists brave themes that even many other feminists avoid. Their exhibition I Am the Horse now on view at Goldfinch in Garfield Park proves to be écriture feminine (2) équestre par excellence.

If we reside in an oft-unacknowledged natureculture system, Baggesen and Bernblum’s art manifests naturecultureculture, at turns instinctively poetic, strategically conceptual, activist, collaborative, whimsical, and stark. Through paintings (on canvas, on photographs), photographic documentation of playful activations of sculptures (objects that are themselves also on view elsewhere in the space), projected video, drawing, and two audio soundtracks, both artists weave Borromean knots through Lacan’s imaginary and real.

(Why would I invoke such an old model of describing experience and consciousness as Lacan, when Baudrillard’s postulations decades ago of a madness of simulations detached from the real seem to be reaching new climaxes of surreal if not unbearable proportions in our present day? I’ll admit, I’m desperate to find means of surviving even thriving, and it’s in my personal bias that I find Lacan useful. It’s certainly a mere mirage of organization, but as with the ‘horse art’ I’m pondering here, it offers me some manageability with which to encounter immense entanglements with which I am otherwise inundated. I am struggling with being in the world, sometimes struggling to even face exhibition openings like this one about which I write. I’m searching for how to be—ethically, aesthetically, politically.)  

Lise Haller Baggesen. Refusenik on the beach, 2018, Photographic transparency, lightbox. Image courtesy of the artist

It’s in this present state that I feel such affinity for Baggesen’s Refuseniks, a series of costumes that propose hybridity for their wearers (across individuals, across species), by combining structural aspects of jockey shirts and horse blankets, often with multiplied arm holes and equine-shaped hoods. Refusenik (double wearable), 2017, is a melancholic confection draped in the gallery space, possessing all the pluralism of Rei Kawakubo and the lightly floral palette of Dirk Van Saene. In the accompanying photographs, we see these garments not only worn by people and horses alike, but also behaving architectonically, pitched into tents redolent of the Snoezelen-room-inspired immersive installations of Baggesen’s earlier work.

Make. Believe. Dress. Up. Pause to consider these words and phrases while observing Baggesen’s photographs of Refuseniks in the wild. The lightbox Refusenik on the Beach, 2018, shows a figure swimming offshore like an island-bound pony or a mermaid. These scenarios are acted out as conscious performative disengagements from dominant narratives that taxonomize and restrict across gender, age, and species. These works are efforts in conscious play, what psychoanalyst Ernst Kris termed ‘regression in the service of the ego,’ following on the pronouncement of becoming that names the exhibition. I am the horse.

Installation view of I am the horse, Goldfinch, Chicago. Photo credit: Daniel Hojnacki

What’s regrettable and even misguided within the literature that expounds on the bonds between women and horses—and by this, I’m speaking of a body of discourse inclusive not only of psychoanalysis and other modern modes of theory production, but also more expansive treatments of mythology and lore—is that these relationships are nearly always supposed as a substitution for women oriented toward men. The method of using a virgin to attract a unicorn so it may be caught and its horn severed and used for its healing properties is all misdirection: it seems clear to me that this narrative mostly prepares young women to be penetrated by virile conquests. The unfounded rumors of Catherine the Great’s lust for equine copulation follows on her wresting control of the Russian empire from her mentally ill husband. In her case, her strength of will that surpassed the men with whom she was attached and surrounded had to be distorted into bestial proportions in order to maintain a culture organized around male domination. A nebula of dildonic hobby horses, penis envy, the introduction of women riding side-saddle as early as the 14th century as a means of protecting their virginity if not also their decency—horses gallop through all sorts of conceptualizations that would portray women’s sexuality as vulnerable and in need of protection, and also a site of lack, a cavity designed to be filled. It would seem that across the literature that characterizes women’s relationships to horses, men can’t help but recast these attachments as metaphoric pussy grabbing of a most intimate order, territorializing the horse’s body as a prosthetic extension of their own desire and dread and anger (read: misogyny) to control women and their object choices, erotic or otherwise. This is a consuming violence further materialized by the litany of ways that the unchecked, unexamined, privileged marker of ‘men’ is scripted with an entitlement to possess whatever the holder of that sign wishes to possess, to possess and then destroy, and the absolute conviction held within that position that any alternative narratives produced within the culture is metaphoric to them.

It is against this violence and the symbolic order that reifies it that Bernblum and Baggesen act. Upon entering the exhibition, Baggesen’s audio piece, Stallion, 2018, is played on white headphones beneath one of several lightbox photographs in the exhibition that show her piecework Refusenik garments used in tropical landscapes. The sound piece is a sort of audio guide, as if a didactic for a museum collection—a format for working that recurs across Baggesen’s oeuvre and shows how her research operates across writing and studio production. The audio speaks to The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries in Paris’ Musée de Cluny, noting possible symbols for virginity, chastity, and maternity within the textiles’ imagery, with frequent departures into lullaby-like singing and theoretical proposals such as: “’Our selves’ are not located within ‘ourselves’…but are a function of it and vice versa, and personhood is acquired, along with ‘soul,’ gradually and suddenly….” From the start, the logic of this exhibition proceeds counter to any linear theory of development in which a monolithic subject is constituted.

Iris Bernblum. Pretty baby 2, 2018, spray paint on photo. Image courtesy of the artist and Aspect/Ratio Gallery, Chicago

Also from the start, the titular horse in both artists’ projects is haunted by a spectral unicorn. In Bernblum’s Pretty baby 3, 2018, a mottled horse is photographed in black and white. Where a unicorn’s horn might emerge from its head, the artist has sprayed the print with a hazy, glowing pink paint. Is this the body from which her ten-foot-tall unicorn horn-cum-lightning rod Struck, 2016, was removed? While the image conjures fantasies both telepathic and amputating, the action of it as an object—the spray of paint that Bernblum repeats across numerous works—belongs to a nouveau réaliste mode of painting that recalls Niki de Saint Phalle’s Shooting Pictures of the 1960s. The pigment dispersions and drips in Bernblum’s paintings—on photographs, paper, and for Pour, 2018, down the gallery wall itself—are jouissance gestures held at an ambiguous point of rupture, appearing to spill forth, but understood as applied onto the bodies (of horses, of gallery-institution) depicted. This, I have come to feel, is the zone in which Bernblum and her audiences are held—threshold spaces, subtle but provocatively suspenseful, with all the erotic, energetic potential of bodies together pressing into the moment of her artwork. She commands an art herstory that swells from Benglis’ ejaculated spills and Judy Chicago’s spray-painted ‘flesh gates,’ ‘cunts,’ and ‘Great Ladies’ works. Here is one of the linkages between artistic praxis and the horse bodies that roam through the exhibition: these painterly forerunners pushed past pictorial illusionism into the expressive potential of material itself, understood simultaneously through being looked upon (imaginary) and acted with (real). So too, it would seem, do horses. History of science scholar Laurel Braitman notes in her research of how animals are thought about within human culture, "Horses and…unicorns—these are all borderland creatures; gateway animals to other worlds," she says. "They help us imagine wonderful other ways of being in the world,” of harnessing one’s own power and potential for transformation. (3)

Lise Haller Baggesen. Grown up Refusenik, Copenhagen, October 2017, 2017. Photographic transparency, lightbox. Image courtesy of the artist

The efforts of these two artists sensitize their audiences to the means by which such transformative tools are restricted from use by their situation into early periods of development that are made difficult to access, through stigmas of some sort of arrested adolescence and the assigned roles and responsibilities of adulthood. The assembled artworks, the excursions they document, and the desires they manifest act against capitalist time, the work shift of the laborer, the demands on the time of mothers and working mothers, the imposition of a before and after of sexual awakening. Baggesen’s Grown-up Refusenik, Copenhagen, October 2017, 2017, shows an upright figure standing beside a clear-eyed horse named Nellie. One sees a graying beard along the jawline of the figure, whose head is otherwise masked by a pink horse hood. If not for this fanciful headpiece, this image might recall the other tradition in horse art, the status-symbol equestrian portrait that came to prominence in the 16th–18th centuries of European painting. As it is, one is left to quietly rethink the conceptual divisions upon which our political, economic, and ideological systems depend. What if the hierarchies of speciesism are toppled, and with them, the metaphors that would organize all women’s attachments as preludes or parallels to their being dominated by men? What it the right-wing accelerationism’s tenuous reliance on regulated, linear time might be disrupted in order to gain access to modes of play and being that have been restricted to childhood? What if we breathe, as Bernblum’s two-channel video work breathes, or we make space to catch our breath amidst what feels like a world on fire? What if we explore unbridled, libidinal release that transgresses borderlands? Because, interestingly, Baggesen and Bernblum work into and from facets of écriture féminine that are not essentialist in defining a category of womanhood, but even, as Wittig proposes would “destroy the sexes as a sociological reality if we want to start to exist.” Optimistically, she invites forms of becoming beyond a binary: “To refuse to be a woman, however, does not mean that one has to become a man.” What if, in refusal, we become unicorns?

End Note: I’ve decided that for my series of contributions to Gender Assignment, I want to attach to each essay a selected perfume that I’ve worn through most or all of the drafting of these texts. This can be traced back to my use of perfume in my own art practice, as well as conversations around sensitivity and wellness related to scent that I’ve shared with my host and editor here, Mel Potter, as well as the artists and subjects of this and other forthcoming texts. For this first essay, I have written within a cloud of Mon Musc a Moi, released in 2015 by A Lab on Fire, designed by Dominique Ropion. This scent opens with quick bursts of bergamot and peach blossom before wrapping a sugary heliotrope-vanilla in wet-fur musks. The perfume house recently renamed the scent Messy SexyTM Just Rolled Out of Bed, and it strikes me that the former name possesses an introspection and reticence that is perhaps in keeping with this exhibition, while its updated moniker casts the scent into a narrative tinged with male-gazey sexual-objecthood that may be more salable, but belies some of the poetry of the scent.

Matt Morris is an artist, writer, and sometimes curator based in Chicago. He analyzes forms of attachment and intimacy through painting, perfume, photography, and institutional critique. He has presented artwork at Adds Donna, The Bike Room, Gallery 400, The Franklin, peregrineprogram, Queer Thoughts, Sector 2337, and Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago, IL; The Mary + Leigh Block Museum of Art in Evanston, IL; The Elmhurst Art Museum in Elmhurst, IL; Fjord and Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA; The Contemporary Arts Center, U·turn Art Space, Aisle, and semantics in Cincinnati, OH; Clough-Hanson Gallery and Beige in Memphis, TN; Permanent.Collection in Austin, TX; Cherry + Lucic in Portland, OR; The Poor Farm in Manawa, WI; with additional projects in Reims, France; Greencastle, IN; Lincoln, NE; and Baton Rouge, LA. Morris is a transplant from southern Louisiana who holds a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and earned an MFA in Art Theory + Practice from Northwestern University, as well as a Certificate in Gender + Sexuality Studies. In Summer 2017 he earned a Certification in Fairyology from Doreen Virtue, PhD. He is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a contributor to Artforum.com, ARTnews, Art Papers, Flash Art, Pelican Bomb, and Sculpture; and his writing appears in numerous exhibition catalogues and artist monographs.

1. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007. Print, p. 5.

2. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Écriture_féminine>

3.  Quoted in Davia Nelson and Niiki Silva’s “Why Do Girls Love Horses, Unicorns and Dolphins?” All Things Considered. National Public Radio, February 9, 2011. <https://www.npr.org/2011/02/09/133600424/why-do-girls-love-horses-unicorns-and-dolphins> 

[genderassignment]

Beyond the Roma Caravan: A Series on Roma Women Creatives, by Suzana Milevska

Roma Pregnancy Rap, by Mihaela Drăgan

I had several different ideas for the content and format of my first feminist “assignment” after Melissa Potter’s kind invitation to contribute to her feminist blog-project Gender Assignment. I’ve never met Melissa in person and although we communicated for several years already it wasn’t easy to decide how to contribute and meet her high expectations. While I was still contemplating which direction to take I attended Mihaela Drăgan’s presentation at District in Berlin and my dilemma has been resolved in a very spontaneous way. And not only did this encounter helped my decision about the first post, it also motivated me to conceptualise my “gender assignments.” 

Beyond the Roma Caravan is going to be a series of portraits of Roma women and a discussion about the potential impact of their work on contemporary Roma communities and European societal and political attitudes towards Romany women in Europe. In my four posts I’ll focus on Roma women who continuously contribute towards dismantling the patriarchy and the conservative gender relations, both inside and outside of Roma communities. Moreover in conditions of risen anti-Roma racism in Eastern and Western Europe I find extremely important to focus on positive examples of feminist agency. In my view these women’s work is ground-breaking in different fields: visual arts, social theatre, performance, video, film, curating, and most importantly their artistic practice goes far beyond the stereotypical folkloric representation of Roma communities as only nomadic, conservative, and uneducated.                                                                                                           

Beyond the Roma Caravan: Meet Mihaela Drăgan

The first post is not an interview, nor is an essay. It’s also not a formal review of an art event. I just want to share my first impressions after an exciting encounter. Hence here I enclose my written portrait of Mihaela Drăgan, an actress and playwright of Roma descent living and working in Bucharest, the capital of Romania. 1

I decided to write about my first encounter with Mihaela Drăgan and to dedicate my first post to her work as a kind of recommendation to others who might not know much about Giuvlipen - the first Roma feminist theatre company formed by professional actresses of Roma origins in Bucharest. Moreover not only did this meeting helped me to decide what to address in my first blog, but also it incited me for the future three contributions to think in a similar direction: to share this space with several strong Roma women (artists, activists, curators actresses) from my region that I had opportunity to meet during the last ten years. 

In the short announcement about Mihaela Drăgan’ talk in Berlin it was announced that “she will cover the discourse around Roma art practice, which has developed parallel to the escalation of anti-Gypsyism and increasing stereotypification of Roma women.” She did much more. 

She talked about the spontaneous formation of the unique feminist theatre collective Giuvlipen in Bucharest in 2014. 

She talked about the meaning of the name Giuvlipen (Romani: feminism) and the difficulty of translating the term in Romanese. 2

She talked about the organisational and working strategies in the theatre as collaborative and about theatre’s structure as “sisterhood”.

She talked about not having a proper space for rehearsing and performing, so it was made clear the theatre is not nomadic by choice (they perform in different theatres, open public spaces, and galleries).

She talked about their play Gadjo-Dildo (Not-Roma Dildo), about how humour helps them to address the most contentious topics as racism, sexism, body, sexuality, conservativism within Roma community towards LGBT.

She talked about patriarchy and self-empowerment, again with lot of humour and wit…

She talked about the limited budget, often amounting to “0” - particularly at the beginning...

She talked about the participatory performances that took place in public spaces or in galleries. Yet she made a distinction between theatre performances and art performance not claiming the later...

She talked about the unexpected local and international success (recently she’s been nominated for The Gilder/Coigney International Theatre Award, granted by New York’s Women’s Professional Theater League.)

She talked about the surprise of the audience that the Romani actresses were professionally educated and trained… 

She talked about the issues with language because not all actresses working in the theatre, although Roma by descent, know Romani language, but they always try to insert some sentences or words as political statements.

She talked about the paradoxes in the conditions of Roma in Romania during the previous, socialist times and now: how some rights were lost and anti-Roma racism escalated, although Roma in Romania had been officially recognised as ethnic minority only after Ceausescu. 

She talked about the failed (fortunately) political initiative of the Romanian Government to bring back the term Tigani, Romanian citizens and to avoid the homonymy between “Roma” and “Romanian” 3 

She talked about Giuvlipen’s interest in addressing many taboos and stereotypes regarding Roma untimely marriages (Del Duma), as well as about more recent neoliberal phenomenon of forced eviction (La Harneală). She stressed on her documentary, research, and biopic approach towards playwriting although the final plays’ versions are fictionalised. 

She talked, although very shortly, with me. After her invigorating presentation and the long Q&A session I wanted to talk more, but we were all very tired. I just managed to tell her that I wish I knew more about her and the theatre Giuvlipen before, while I curated several exhibitions focusing on Roma issues or when I’ve written the text “Women Bear Witness”.  I am often criticised for over-theorising so I’ll just stop here hoping that theory will come anyway, as a critical friend and companion who inevitably joins us when so much has been done in feminist practice of Roma women that yet needs to be reflected.  

NOTES

1. I am not a theatre expert, but I followed Mihaela’s confident presentation in the context of the event “Producing Roma Feminist Art” with a great interest because of my long-term involvement in researching Romani artists and my curatorial projects dedicated to their art practice.  

2. In their own words: “Our performances are made by, about and for Roma women, with the goal of contributing to the empowerment of Roma women in their living communities. Our group creates theatre performances based on life stories of Roma women, about their difficulties living between a traditional patriarchal community and a demanded integration into the dominant (often racist) Romanian community.” Giuvlipen Theatre Company, Romania, East European Performing Platform

3. The strengthening of racist right-wing politics across Europe was particularly revealed and even fortified the anti-Romaism and racism in the case of the official Romanian Government’s initiative from 2010 for reversing the established name Roma to Tigan. Fortunately the Parliament didn’t accept the proposal. See: Rupert Wolfe Murray, “Romania's Government Moves to Rename the Roma”, Time, Bucharest Wednesday, Dec. 08, 2010 Last Accessed 10.04.2018

4. Milevska, Suzana. ‘Women Bear Witness’, n-paradoxa, Vol. 28, 2011: 58-64.

Bio

Suzana Milevska (born 1961, Bitola, Macedonia) is an art theorist and curator with degrees in Art History from “St. Cyrill and Methodius” University in Skopje and in Philosophy and History of Art and Architecture from Central European University in Prague. She holds a  PhD from Goldsmiths College in the UK. She has published many essays since the early nineties in magazines such as Kinopis, Kulturen zhivot, Golemoto staklo, Siksi, Index, Nu, Springerin, Flash Art, Afterimage, Curare, Blesok, and has also curated over 70 exhibitions and international projects in Skopje (Little Big Stories 1998, Always Already Apocalypse 1999, Words-Objects-Acts 2000, Capital and Gender 2001), Istanbul (Writing and Difference 1992, Self and Other 1994, Desiring Machines 1997, Always Already Apocalypse 1999), Providence-USA (Liquor Amnii II 1997), Stockholm (Little Big Stories 1998), Berlin, Stuttgart and Bonn (Correspondences 2001), Utrecht (Call the Witness, 2011), Vienna (Roma Protocol 2011, To One's Name, 2013), Ljubljana (The Renaming Machine, 2010, Inside Out-Not So White Cube, 2015). Her book Gender Difference in the Balkans was published in 2010. She was the curator of the Open Graphic Art Studio of the Museum of the City of Skopje for seven years. She was a professor of art history and theory at the Faculty of Fine Arts (2010-2012) in Skopje, and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (2013-2015). Currently is a Principal Researcher at Polytechnic University in Milan.

[genderassignment]

Purple Passions & Proclivities

Gender Assignment Guest Blogger, Felicia Holman

Dedicated to the memories of Betty Holman & Prince Rogers Nelson (and to the future of Kendyl Holman)

“Sex isn’t all I think about, it’s all I think about U.”--’Shhh (Break It Down)’, Prince Rogers Nelson

An Origin Story

First, big thanks to Melissa Potter for inviting me to be a guest blogger for Gender Assignment. I am writing this essay (my first of four) on April 21, 2018---the second anniversary of the sudden death of my artistic and sexual muse, Prince Rogers Nelson. Today, I’m simultaneously elated and bereft; elated to be writing, bereft of both my Purple dearly beloved and the person who got me into him in the first place: My mother, Betty.

My mother, Betty / She was seeing me off on my first international flight...to Jamaica. This was '96 so she was actually with me at the boarding gate, even though I was traveling solo!

This month also marks the 10th anniversary of my mother's memorial service. As a single Black mother raising and homeschooling 2 kids on Chicago's Southside in the 1980’s, Mom was pretty unconventional. She was a working-class artist/ public intellectual/ entrepreneur/ urban gardener/ Columbia College film student/ championship-winning boys’ Little League coach/ etc... I’ll never forget how she championed my auditioning for the male lead in my 8th grade play because the female lead was too wispy (though I was ultimately cast as the female lead). Though strictly heteronormative in her own gender and sexual expression, Mom was sex-positive. She was my primary sex ed teacher and feminine wiles coach. *For Christmas during my freshman year in high school, Mom bought me my first lacy lingerie set; explaining “this is the type of underwear a young lady buys.”* Mom was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and as a result, devoutly nurtured her only daughter's sexual agency and empowerment. One of her no-nonsense metaphor resonates to this day: “You don't need anyone else to scratch your own itch!” *Which I knew to be true, ever since I’d learned how to covertly rub one out on the edge of my chair in Kindergarten.*

Erotic City, Come Alive

In a two-fold effort to break me out of my bubble gum “Michael Jackson phase” & put me on to something more subversive and avant-garde, Mom formally introduced me to Prince when she brought home the 12” 1999 double album and explained to me that Prince played all the instruments. However, it was actually the combination of seeing the Little Red Corvette video and then learning that he and I share the same birthday that cemented him as #foreverinmylife...Whereas Prince was contraband in the homes of most of my Gen X peers, those of us with “cool" parents /guardians were exposed to the crucially impactful carnal knowledge of His Purple Majesty during our tweens. *I’ve often described Prince’s cultural impact & influence as a result of his artistry grabbing us by the root and crown chakras (as his lyrics on ‘Sexuality’ clearly illustrate)!* “Little Girl Heat" (LGH) is a term I coined a few years ago during a generative rehearsal with Honey Pot Performance. I find LGH succinctly / viscerally encapsulates the phenomenon of tingling sensations and rise in core temperature I’d feel while listening to Automatic, Let’s Pretend We’re Married, Lady Cab Driver, etc. To this day, I still experience LGH when I’m overcome with desire...trust & BELIEVE!

Here & Now

As a grown-ass-woman-for-real, I am both looking back and ahead at my sexcapades. Sex has always been a ‘Quality (v. Quantity) of Life’ issue for me, but even more so for me in recent years...more on that in future posts. The candid memoirs of living legends Diahann Carroll, Grace Jones and Jenifer Lewis line my shelves as both salve and motivation. *Can’t WAIT for fellow Gen X-er Tracee Ellis Ross to grace us with hers!* Though I’m not a mom, I am a doting auntie who is determined to give my 8 y.o. niece (Kendyl) the gifts of real talk and agency that her paternal grandmother gave to me. Conversations with my niece have recently begun to include her questions about puberty as well as my ‘leading’ questions to find out what she does/doesn't already know. I find that sex ed resources tailor-made for little Black girls are still few and far between in this post-Obama 21st century, so my anecdotes and advice will be some of her primary resources. She knows that Prince is my favorite musician/entertainer/artist and that I wear a tribute button everyday since he passed. But I haven't formally introduced her to Prince music yet. I think his 2006 Golden Globe award-winning Song of the Heart (from the animated film ‘Happy Feet’) will be our entry point...it’s still years before her time.

*Bonus: If you haven't already, check out the just-released tribute video for Prince's original recording of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’...#lghonfleek

Bio: Lifelong Chicagoan, artist and Prince fan Felicia Holman is a co-founder of both the Art Leaders of Color Network ('ALCN') and Honey Pot Performance (‘HPP’). She is also Communication Director at Chicago's venerable Links Hall. Felicia creates, presents and supports original interdisciplinary performance which engages audience and inspires community. In May 2017, Felicia traveled to Manchester England and proudly presented on Prince and Blackness at the first Purple Reign Interdisciplinary Conference "on the life and legacy of Prince Rogers Nelson" (co-produced by the University of Salford and Middle Tennessee State University). In June, Felicia co-produced the ALCN's monthlong P.O.W.E.R Project at Logan Square's Comfort Station. November 2017 saw Felicia's groups thrive: HPP's debut artist book 'Ma(s)king Her' was published by Candor Arts, Links Hall went to Japan for the Kyoto Experiment Performance Festival and the ALCN received a 2018 Joyce Foundation grant to "develop membership and programming capacity". In December 2017, Felicia presented her first commissioned solo performance ("Wassup w/That YAC?!" @ MCA Chicago) and starred in 'Hair Story' -- OpenTV's latest pilot, which Felicia also co-wrote (premiering Spring 2018). Felicia relishes her dynamic artrepreneurial life and sums it up in 3 words—'Creator, Connector, Conduit'.

[genderassignment]

Fools, Fellas, Feminism and Oprah: An Interview with Stephanie Graham

Fella #3, Stephanie Graham

I got to meet Stephanie Graham at the BING Reading Room for the Chicago on My Mind afterparty, thanks to connector extraordinare, Sabina Ott. We swung it out and I felt great in her presence. Graham says “Oprah is a girlfriend and I want to be that to my subjects”, which feels 100% true spending even five minutes with her. It makes for some extraordinary artwork—from the loving, hilarious, and incredibly absorbing interviews in So This One Guy, to #NEWGLOBALMATRIARCHY, her project with Maya Mackrandilal slaying sexism for all.

Enjoy this irresistible interview!

First of all, I am crazy about your work from a lot of perspectives. I really enjoy the performance strategies, the inclusion of many voices—even when they are all your own. Let’s start with Fellas Project, a series of re-enactments and photographs staging relationship events. I would love to hear more about your choice to use yourself as all the characters! As well, I’d love to hear what you’ve uncovered in the process.

YAY! That makes me so happy to hear you enjoy the work! Thanks for interviewing me too! I'm really honored!! Shout out to Sabina Ott for connecting us! I'm very thankful!

So the FELLA Project was a personal project I wanted to create after I felt like I was just getting into these ridiculous situations with guys I was dating, and I was over it! I was over them, and I was over myself for putting myself in these situations with FOOLS. I mean complete FOOLS! I don't know if they are Fools or just the situations but anyway. Since these were my stories, I wanted to participate in them. I don't think it would have worked the other way.  Dudes would be like "ooh are you going to do a photo on me?" I'm like um…this is not a celebratory thing boo boo this is real life LOL.

Others have wanted me to photograph them as their past relationships, I thought that was interesting, but then it also felt gimmicky like I was running a Groupon and that's not the goal of the work.  FELLAS is a project of how I saw the situation.

FELLAS was also a project where I learned that I was being seen as a performance artist and I didn't like that because I always saw performance art as black leotards and being weird but now I see that its not ALWAYS black leotards and I'm getting better at accepting the medium for myself now.

Laura, So This One Guy Project

So This One Guy explores similar themes, but from the perspective of diverse, dating women. I love the inclusion of your laughter and feedback in the interviews, it has an intimacy. These have a conversational, but storytelling quality and reveal a lot about gender dynamics. How do you think your various strategies uncovered new narratives? What was your process of interviewee selection?

Thank you! I love hearing peoples’ experiences it's my favorite thing to listen to a great story. I'm also very nosy so I like to ask questions to find out how someone got to a certain point. I'm trying to be Oprah in my interview strategy, Oprah is a girlfriend I want to be that to my subjects. Also sometimes feminism stuff can be so structured, I can be mad feminist but homeboy still needs to pay the bill WTF! 

My process for finding interviewees was anyone who felt comfortable sharing a story where they can have a good sense of humor. I never know the stories the ladies are going to share, unless they have several stories and just need help picking one, and then I look at the following:

1. Is this funny;

2. Will the dude bother my subject after this story is out there;

3. Does this show the woman in a good light?

#3 is interesting for me, and something I think about. I remember interviewing a woman that was a jerk about her situation; she used the man she was speaking about for free meals and jewelry! It was intriguing because that's not my life I've never dated someone to take me out to get jewelry but I'm not trying to have comments making fun of my subjects or putting them down, and that was what would have happened to her. Maybe I will change that in the future because dating has all sorts of levels but for now. I just want the ladies to be chill, look fly and tell a story that we can all chuckle at and find it relatable.

I'm always experimenting with different ways to get the stories because this is a project that I want to keep going but I want it to be visually interesting for the viewer.

I have learned that internet dating is a no go! I have tried it I know many finds success but damn...lots of the stories comes from dudes found on a website or app.

#NEWGLOBALMATRIARCHY Maya Mackrandilal, Stephanie Graham Photo: Doug McGoldrick

I am beyond excited you will be sharing #NEWGLOBALMATRIARCHY at our Revolution at Point Zero Feminist Social Practice Symposium April 21! As someone who grew up around goddess-worshiping feminists, I particularly love the strategies of performance of myth and radical rethinking of culture and our collective future. How did this project evolve, and what are your plans for new interventions?

Thanks! I'm excited also the line up you have is awesome its going to be a beautiful day! I'm curious which goddesses you grew up worshiping that's amazing!

Maya and I met at the HATCH Projects Residency at the Chicago Artists Coalition. Maya had been working on this project called "Bedtime Stories of White Supremacy" where she plays the Goddess Lakshmi and tells stories of slaying white supremacy with another performance collective FemMelanin.  I loved it, and Maya approached me about working together once. I said to her hmmm what if Lakshmi had a friend... 

So here comes Oya. If you look at the way media displays female friendships there is some sort of hierarchy where there is always one friend that is higher than the other, I always give the example of Oprah and Gayle, both successful but we all know Oprah is the big dog right? With Oya and Lakshmi, both of these goddesses can end the world on their own neither is bigger than the other they are seen and treat each other as equals. 

So together Oya and Lakshmi has come into Chicago creating mini-protests and letting the world know that we are not here for the patriarchal bullshit!! They are ruining everything, so we are here to fix it all, per usual everything is better when a woman takes care of it.

I think #NEWGLOBALMATRIARCHY is fun and approachable which is good because I like to create things that have an easy access point because once you've decided to go to the party the next step is talking to the people and the viewer gets to decide how deep they want to get in the work. Some people like to just take a protest button and post themselves wearing it, others want to go deeper and share their own experiences of and radical dreams and I'm here for all of that. 

Maya and I recently contributed an essay to Jessica Caprnigro's "Feminist Advice From the City of Broad Shoulders." That was a fantastic opportunity and challenge for me because I've never contributed an essay before so now not only am I performance artist( got dammit!) I'm an essayist. Maya on the other hand writes all the time and is an excellent writer.

Maya is currently living and working in Los Angeles which is great for expansion, we are brainstorming what’s next.

I am crazy for this quote from #NEWGLOBALMATRIARCHY: “What does it mean to be a strong woman with friends in a culture that can only imagine female sexual competition for the ever-elusive ‘good man’?” How do you two construct new mythologies and futures for women?

Well, I would hope at its most basic form it shows “see women can get along and love each other and slay the world all at the same damn time, we recognize each others strengths see each other as equals and get the job done”!

I get tired of the nit pick that women can bring or hearing women maybe having issue with another woman co worker or someone in management and its like okay.. if everyone would stop and work together everyone would have a lot less anxiety and a lot more could get done. Oya and Lakshmi both understand each other in a sense that they are both equally the bomb. You don’t want to mess with either goddess on there own but once you found out they are best girlfriends…look out world!!!! The Patriarchy should be afraid….

Sort of reminds me of a friend of mine that was shocked to find out a girl he once dated was one of my friends. He was like “oh i didn’t know y’all were friends’ well now you know buddy so WATCH OUT!!

I’m really interested in hearing how you see your mythical and fantasy-based work like #NEWGLOBALMATRIARCHY in conversation with the womanist tradition of artists like Walker and Morrison, and current artists like Cauleen Smith, Wagechi Mutu, Krista Franklin, and other artists who use Afrosurreal or AfroFuturist strategies to construct representations of women.

Oh man these are some heavy hitters that you have named here. It would be an honor to be grouped with any of these women I’m fans of them all, I think I am still discovering where my voice would lie with these women but what I do know is that I like to make work that has an easy entry point because art can be hard to get into, I want to make that easier because I think art should be enjoyed and talked about with everyone so it takes all kinds and all access points, and I think if you imagining with me that you are a goddess and it makes you slay your day and stand up to racism and patriarchal foolishness dope, if hearing a woman talk about a date makes you think…you know what EFF MY SITUATION or whatever that's good with me. I think my work is playful and humorous but still deals with real shit so its digestible...hmmm gee could I be the Key and Peele of the art world oh shit I don’t know if i like that…I’m new to the game so I’m still working on that.

Golden Kids, exhibition still. Photo: David Crewe

Some artists who come to mind I think share some your ideas include Ryan Trecartin, Nikki S. Lee, and Howardina Pindell--who are some of your inspirations?

Wow, thanks for the afternoon of learning of these artists, the only one out of this bunch that I heard of was Nikki S. Lee.  I love Carrie Mae Weems, Mickalene Thomas, Renee Cox and of course Cindy Sherman, Gary Wineogrand, Kerry James Marshall but most of all I really really love Anthony Gioceloa. 

Where can we see your work in the upcoming months?

I'm really working on organizing and making my studio great because I want to start having people over for conversations about my work, so after your symposium and Open Engagement are concluded I'm participating in the Petty Biennial curated by La Keisha Leek and Sadie Woods.  I'm exploring a new idea for that show though and that idea is investigating and celebrating the culture around a leather coat company called Pelle Pelle! I’m really excited about the show and it opens May 19th.

[genderassignment]

Children’s Reading List in Progress

Recent studies indicate children solidify their concepts of gender difference between the ages of 5 and 7, and they are reinforced among their peers as well as their caregiver/family units. At the same time, they are developing their concepts of race difference. I’ve often heard the “oh well” from my peer group, as though there is nothing we can really do to change it. Children learn gender and race difference from us, of course, but they also learn about it from their environment. When I realized my child’s classroom books featured almost entirely white boy protagonists--and that he spends far more time a day there than with me--I wanted to try a different approach. 

Thanks to the wonderful brain trust of Facebook, I’m building a list I hope to continue to add to here, and hope to share as many of these books with our daycare, and others, too.

Online Sources

The Reading Rainbow Skybrary

Barefoot Books Diversity Section

Diverse Kids Books

Muslim Kids as Heroes

Teaching Tolerance

American Indians in Children’s Literature 

A Mighty Girl

Ms. Marvel  (Kick ass, non-sexualized women and girl superheroes)

 Book Recommendations

Lost and Found Cat: The True Story of Kunkush's Incredible Journey

The true story about one cat’s journey to be reunited with his war-torn family has been seen by millions of people and is now a heartwarming picture book. When an Iraqi family is forced to flee their home, they can’t bear to leave their beloved cat, Kunkush, behind. So they carry him with them from Iraq to Greece, keeping their secret passenger hidden away. But during the crowded boat crossing to Greece, his carrier breaks and the frightened cat runs from the chaos. In one moment, he is gone. After an unsuccessful search, his family has to continue their journey, leaving brokenhearted. A few days later, aid workers in Greece find the lost cat. Knowing how much his family has sacrificed already, they are desperate to reunite them with the cat they love so much. A worldwide community comes together to spread the word on the Internet and in the news media, and after several months the impossible happens—Kunkush’s family is found, and they finally get their happy ending in their new home. This remarkable true story is told by the real people involved, with the full cooperation of Kunkush’s family.

Rebel Girls

Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls is a children's book packed with 100 bedtime stories about the life of 100 extraordinary women from the past and the present, illustrated by 60 female artists from all over the world.

Julis

When Maya's grandfather comes for a visit, he brings a surprise in a crate--something, he says, to teach her fun and sharing. Maya hopes it's a horse or a big brother. But instead it's Julius, a big, cool pig. Maya's parents see Julius as a slob, but Maya herself sees another Julius altogether. She sees a playmate, a protector, and sharer in all that's magical and wild. Full color.

The Barking Mouse

Mamá, Papá, Sister, and Brother Ratón go for a picnic on a beautiful day. After a delicious lunch, Mamá and Papá smooch--eeewww!--and Brother and Sister must find something to do. And what could be more fun than teasing the cat behind the fence?

Pippi Longstocking

Tommy and his sister Annika have a new neighbor, and her name is Pippi Longstocking. She has crazy red pigtails, no parents to tell her what to do, a horse that lives on her porch, and a flair for the outrageous that seems to lead to one adventure after another!

Ronia The Robber’s Daughter

On the night Ronia was born, a thunderstorm raged over the mountain, but in Matt's castle and among his band of robbers there was only joy - for Matt now had a spirited little black-haired daughter. Soon Ronia learns to dance and yell with the robbers, but it is alone in the forest that she feels truly at home. Then one day Ronia meets Birk, the son of Matt's arch-enemy. Soon after Ronia and Birk become friends the worst quarrel ever between the rival bands erupts, and Ronia and Berk are right in the middle.

Teresa Moure, Mamá, Ti Si Que Me Entendes! 

My Abuelita

With this life-affirming picture book, Johnston and Morales create a loving tribute to the special bond between grandparent and grandchild and to storytellers everywhere.

Red: A Crayon’s Story

Red has a bright red label, but he is, in fact, blue. His teacher tries to help him be red (let's draw strawberries!), his mother tries to help him be red by sending him out on a playdate with a yellow classmate (go draw a nice orange!), and the scissors try to help him be red by snipping his label so that he has room to breathe. But Red is miserable. He just can't be red, no matter how hard he tries! Finally, a brand-new friend offers a brand-new perspective, and Red discovers what readers have known all along. He's blue! This funny, heartwarming, colorful picture book about finding the courage to be true to your inner self can be read on multiple levels, and it offers something for everyone!

[genderassignment]

Blood and Honey: An Interview with Dr. Danica Anderson on Healing for Women War Trauma Survivors

Danica Anderson reading coffee grounds (tasseography) in Ahmica-Vitez, Bosnia

On a quest to connect my grandmother and Zejna, the Bosnian refugee we sponsored together in the 90s—I am sure not by accident—I discovered the work of Dr. Danica Anderson, author of Blood and Honey: The Secret Herstory of Women, South Slavic Women's Experiences in a World of Modern-day Territorial Warfare.  In this book, she explores war trauma experienced by women during the Balkan War. Through recipes, and cultural customs, Blood and Honey is a book of spells for these women to heal themselves through bioculinary* arts and biosemiotic** communication. In this beautiful interview, she brings me closer to Zejna and my grandmother, and reveals woman-centric secrets to understanding the rhythms of our subconscious. From coffee readings, to Marija Gimbutas you will love the magic, mystery and healing of this interview!

* Inscribed social memory working collectively with agriculture, herbs, food crops, animal husbandry to bee keeping that preserve South Slavic ancient Neolithic Practices.

**  (from the Greek bios meaning "life" and semeion meaning "sign") is a growing field of semiotics and biology that studies the production and interpretation of signs and codes in the biological realm.

First, I would like to ask how your family's trauma from former Yugoslavia was manifest in your life in Chicago. You mentioned that your mother didn't want to speak of it. Was silence part of the intergenerational trauma?

The killing silences are transgenerational in that the silences are passed to future generations. My mother was indoctrinated into killing silences by her mother and grandmother both who lived through world wars in former Yugoslavia. It was not until her late 80’s that my mother spoke of her WWII concentration camp experience to her granddaughter. I don’t think she had the words previously due to shame and guilt that was not hers.

 The way trauma ebbed and flowed in my childhood was seen with domestic violence and child abuse. I have early memories, which children who survive child abuse often have. Although the child or infant is preverbal, these memories are stored in the body and often unable to be given a vocabulary until the child’s development of language. This is how children are not aware their lives are violent and instead think it is normal. With the mother submissive and beaten into the killing silences where she has no one to tell, the child cannot gain a vocabulary for the trauma. Instead the killing silences are epigenetic (we are shaped by environment that influences our genome,) thus transgenerational trauma.

You also talk about the women in your Serb community and their bioculinary traditions and ethno-dance traditions, which were both healing, and the foundation of your book's philosophy. Can you describe how these traditions manifest away from one's country of origin? Did your family grow their own food, for instance?

To describe how oral memory traditions capacity for the transmission of human memory is best done when we realize it has been done with a cast of thousands of generations and continues to this day no matter where the geographic location. We are talking about millions upon millions of actors taking up their role in performing the enactment of memory-lived life experiences of our ancestors without external aid meaning no books, scripts to read from, youtube or modern day manuals. If anything, the oral memory traditions are exactly the data needed for study in long term memory and transmission of memory over the Ages with such a vast pool of actors.

What I have observed in the diaspora of not just the South Slavs, but all diverse groups of people is how they reach for their human memory storage triggered by geographic relocation. In one way this is how travelers experience their journeys, a triggering of human memory in their lineage of ancestors’ life experiences. The culture and corresponding oral memory traditions (a ritual science) contain the way of life and the adaptations to the environment. Fleeing the violence and aftermath of war, my parents immigrated through Ellis Island to Chicago. They brought with them their way of life. We had a small back yard for the garden of vegetable and plants. My father would trek to the Southside of Chicago to the train station each fall to buy crates of grapes for wine making. A wooden barrel with an iron press in our basement was arranged so that all my siblings and I would pick off the grapes and toss into the sink to wash and then into the barrel. This took days. Once done, since I was the littlest I was placed into the press to squash the grapes. I remember having stained purple feet and legs. My mother made everything from scratch. Her strudel called ‘pita’ was the finest of translucent phyllo dough she stretched over the kitchen table. The kitchen table was where I would crawl under and watch my older siblings dance the kolo (s)- Serbo-Croatian for folk round dance. The food and gardens are bioculinary practices found in oral memory traditions, a ritual science.

I never considered tasseography (tea or coffee readings) as such a powerful way to tap into the protolinguistic self and heal trauma. You describe "storied instructions" through "small acts", meaning, and the construction of new memories over traumas through mindful experience of the everyday. This is an essential aspect of your book, Blood and Honey Icons: Biosemiotics and Bioculinary and it also is incorporated into your trauma recovery work with Bosnian women war survivors. What kinds of transformations do you witness among women who have been subjected to gynocide and sexual trauma?

The small acts are often repeated and done daily or seasonally through thousands of generations into the present generation. The present generation layers over the oral memory traditions with their environment and life experiences. This is an extraordinary transformational process when you realize that what we live, feel and experience both biologically and even psychobiologically is heritable: transgenerational. Basically, how we live and our life experiences has far reaching social, cultural way of life implications.

The way of life for women is targeted by wars and violence for this very reason since we live in a phallocracy where the male dominates. Yet, women are the creators of culture since we are all born of a woman. Her domestic arts and child rearing are critical transgenerational intangible heritage that evolves our relations with our environment embodied with her life experiences. The Bosnian women war crimes and survivors cleaned up after each war that took place over a century. In doing so, her domestic labor and child rearing was one of survival not evolving thus thriving. Transformations were had by the women survivors who no longer could stand the survival mechanisms found in trauma. The critical juncture was ‘to ask do I need to survive or thrive’. What happened in the aftermath of the Balkan War was a return to what their grandmothers did to survive such as the beehived wood ovens, garden, weaving to dancing the round folk dances called kolo (s).

 What I am talking about is how the transformations came through when women regained their role as creators of culture and corresponding oral memory traditions- a ritual science containing prehistoric chants, songs, dance to bioculinary and all way of life before the modern conveniences. One Bosnian war survivor stated when she had nothing, she discovered she had everything with her house that had a field of crops and chickens. She said the farmer and those chickens saved humanity thus transforming humanity.

When survivors did not have an oral memory tradition to transform mostly sexual trauma and genocide, I was told to talk with those struggling. In my paper on Slavic Maternal Fright I wrote about a thin Bosnian-Herzegovinian pregnant woman in her late twenties had big dark circles under her eyes; her hands shook even at rest. When she began sharing her maternal fright, she released expressions that were formerly deliberately hidden and avoided. Her fear was that her husband’s loss of 18 family members at the village of Ahmica-Vitez, Bosnia on April 16, 1993 would flood into her fetus. You see story and metaphor heals only if we author our life experiences. Since trauma is primarily about extraordinary experiences in the personal lives of individuals with women and children the majority facing such impossible circumstances, what occurs is an explosive quality because change is immediate. Thus, her stories are excluded. Women, 51% of world population suffer greater trauma and she is removed from restructuring a self-identity.  In the end women cannot reestablish their place in the broader scheme of human affairs and history.  Without women’s authored stories and metaphor, we do not have culture. We cannot access healing methods.  Instead what is claimed as culture is in reality violence normalized and nationalized with a host of memorials and monuments.    

For sixteen years, I have been working extensively with the Bosnian-Herzegovinian women war crimes and war survivors in the aftermath of the Balkan War (1991-1993). I have determined that maternal fright is the entrainment of transgenerational fear and trauma through the female neurobiological processes (Anderson, 2014, Christie, Pim, 2012). This pregnant woman took a green magic marker I brought with an art pad to her apartment. She took the marker and drew a spiral on her pregnant abdomen. When she was done she stated this new oral memory traditions would prevent the transgenerational transmission of trauma. She said she was transformed.  She became author of her own story which was excluded and not conforming to the norms of violence.

There are many more stories I write about in my book, Blood and Honey the Secret Herstory of Women: South Slavic Women's Experiences in a World of Modern-day Territorial Warfare. In the chapter of Salutogenesis, the promotion of health, I share the story of a Croat young woman who was sold into sex trafficking in the aftermath of war. Her transformation came more than a decade after I met her in Holland. I asked her to write her story for my book. She took eons to respond and when she did what she wrote was compelling. She told me that she could not retell the story since she is no longer that pain or that victim. In fact, she said her story was not her responsibility anymore and that it was mine now.

As I've shared with you, I recently reunited with a Bosnian Muslim woman my grandmother and I sponsored in the 90s. Her life is very simple, she was not traditionally educated, and she is now 80. She was also subjected to incredible war trauma, which I did not feel entitled to ask her about, even though she wrote me about it in her letters. How do you interact in your Kolo: Women's Cross Cultural Collaboration work with women from various backgrounds and ages? Are there common experiences and acts you found to bond women across these experiences?

Isn’t this the ‘killing silences’ when you and most women feel they are not entitled to ask for grandmothers, mothers and daughters’ life experiences. Yet, you moved forward. The transformation is there in your grandmother’s letters thus providing intimacy and bonding. Note how you were able to set up a space and place for your grandmother’s war stories and trauma. The common experiences and small acts that you performed for your grandmother are the same I invite in when I interact with women. To be sure there is diversity involved since their traumas and life experiences like fingerprints are not identical.

With the South Slavic kolo, the round folk dance or to be in a circle is a multi-dimensional space creating place for women to bond and heal. What I noted was when there is healing, there is bonding and a moment of female solidarity. Having a space and place to heal is the real hospital. Interesting in the word hospital since it originates from the meaning for guest and is the root word for hospice, hotel and hospitality. The key is the relation between guest and shelterer. As with my kolo trauma work and your grandmother’s letters the relations between us and them become one while accepting the diversity. When I faced the Bosnian women in the beginning of my work in Bosnia I knew I was in a room filled with my mother in everyone present. Something in what I felt opened up the space and place for us to bond and to heal. 

While daunting I was able to move through my grief with my mother and her WWII concentration camp experience became the common experiences from which women bond, learn and evolve.  I knew I had privatized my pain and suffering.  My mother privatized her pain and survivorship of Jasenovac concentration camp. Shock cascaded through me since the violence against women stats became a lived knowing.  What I mean is I realized the universal suffering and pain most women endure but we are not allowed to voice or speak our realities in a world of violence.  Isolation from each other occurs.  Women’s inhumanity to women  perpetuates endlessly.  When I danced the kolo with the women and men, we were all shoulder to shoulder although our feet were doing their diversity in dancing the same path.  The feelings of detachment and divorce from female solidarity erased in the shoulder to shoulder circle and dance.   Female solidarity flourishes once we include each of our stories and understand our pain and suffering is universal.  Privatizing smothers any opportunity to bond out of strength.   The movement to be in a circle or the kolo is non-verbal expression of female solidarity; bonding out of strength.  There is no bonding as a martyr or a victim. 

I love that you refer so often to Marija Gimbutas' scholarship, which I was so fascinated with in college. Her work on SE European goddess-worshipping culture is so profound, and highlights that region as such an important location for honoring the female. How did such a patriarchal, gynocidal culture evolve from one that was so in balance with the natural world of that region?

In the beginning my visits to Bosnia showed how penetrating trauma can be. How do I then work the trauma issue outside the patriarchal norms of authoritative institutions and the ethnic hatreds focused on women as targets? However, I knew the South Slavs in prehistory had a harmonious civilization with profound art in artifacts and their communities. The symbols in what Marija Gimbutas refers to as ‘Old Europe’ lasting until 1800 BCE guided a path to circumvent the patriarchy. What was striking in their kilms, needlework and beehive ovens was the Old Europe symbols. Imagine my awe when the women who used the Old Europe symbols knew the meaning without cracking any of the Marija Gimbutas’ books.

The kolo is Mesolithic in age and something all knew and often danced. In using Gimbutas’ materials and spinning through interdisciplinary fields I was able to excavate the balance of the natural world. When we did so there was great gnashing of teeth and horror. One elderly grandmother said aloud how she taught her children to hate and to hate women. Another woman questioned on the custom to revere the mother who has sons over one that has daughters. What spiraled was activism even if it was banging pots and/or marching the streets for garbage pickup. One woman stated life is better now after the war without the supermarkets, microwave since her small house with a field of crops brought her family together. She became the wise woman who know how to plant, ferment, cook, clean and organize into relations with the natural world and her family. 

If you can trace back to when women were forced to carry their father’s name you will see the erasure of women; the erasure of relations with the natural world and; erasure of honoring females. In an old Villa outside Paris is the archeological museum. I moved through the salons of time from dinosaurs to present day. When I walked through the exhibits in the prehistoric window about 80,000 BCE was the Siberian sleeping Goddess artifact. More art popped up, such as the Willendorf Goddess artifact, which is 33,000 years old. But then, the Iron Age appeared with axes, swords and violence. Yet, when I look at culture and oral memory traditions vestiges of old harmonious way of life I find that it is still repeated. This brings me to my work and research where we need to ask what culture is. Many cite violence as culture with ‘boys will be boys’. So we need to ask what violence is. Culture is the way of life centering on women and their female biology processes. Women raise the children. Women create culture. When women forget their creator role in culture or are dominated to not assume their creator role we will continue to be dominated and complicit in following patriarchal norms of violence, we will have the escalating violence.

Finally, I would like to ask you a personal question. I also mentioned that I sense I have been on a "homing" instinct with the former Yugoslavia, traveling back through the influences of my grandmother, who also knew the Balkans because she read Black Lamb, Grey Falcon by the feminist, Rebecca West. This process took me 16 years! Do we go back to the places of deep ancestral knowledge, and even trauma? And I also wonder, why is the process sometimes so long, and so unclear?

The birds do it.  The salmon in the oceans do it.  It’s called migration. Migration is not refugees fleeing from horrors and violence. Diaspora is not migratory process.  Not all species have the magnetic direction for migration. For instance cattle and deer will align themselves in the north-south direction of earth’s geomagnetic field.  Pigeons have microscopic balls of iron in their inner ears. How do the whales and dolphins know their way in the vast oceans when migrating? Perhaps, this is the homing instinct you talk of.

It took me 16 years to write Blood & Honey: The Secret Herstory of Women.  A very long migratory process and I am elementally changed due to it. I migrated back and forth to Bosnia throughout the years and many other war zones across the globe. My female tacit knowledge- the ‘more than we can tell’ intelligence looks at the epigenetic inheritance which is inseparable from our lived relations to our ecosphere and our cultural environments. I am reminded of that cast of thousands of generations and billions of main actors in the building of a continual process of learning and relearning. Hence, the definition of migration.   

All of this is stored in our genome. What we repeat is how our DNA replicates and repeats. This is called evolution. Our biology of perception and our human perception is embodied and literally enworlded.  When we learn or relearn we are migrating toward abundance- evolving not just ourselves but all of life. One research for bioculinary practice was about how chickens  become fuller in the breast and bigger since the 1500’s because we were eating them. 

I do not define trauma as a mental illness. If anything, trauma and the corresponding fright/flight neurological mechanism tell me it’s healthy. My definition of trauma is intensified learning. Yes, it is not something I would jump at to enroll in this beyond doctorate level learning. In fact, most would go kicking and screaming before succumbing to trauma events. Most likely, we relive the trauma over and over again due to the fright/flight mechanisms. Here we can introduce a question to ourselves; do we need to survive or do we need to thrive? That choice which is consciousness allows us to author which venue. Thriving is about the healing process and of course becoming authors of our own stories. The diversity of our stories like the diversity of the kolo dance steps offer up restructuring and reorganization of reality. We are consciously learning to relate to all our environments. Women, especially, learn the empowerment in the role of creator of culture. Men learn to preserve, support and protect culture and all environments. Together the prescience in relation to biological and social complexity- a social intelligence emerges.  

Being unclear is not about a lack of clarity since when we make a decision it is with clarity. I think the pattern of being unclear is about not being comfortable with ambiguity.  Pregnancy is a good example of being in ambiguity. Childhood not adulthood is a difficult endurance to neither be here or there since decisions release that tension effortlessly. Ambiguity is the state of being not doing. In our societies the fast paced and competitive demand to not fail  force us to conform to doing and productivity. More importantly, ambiguity is akin to the kolo in manifesting space and place in time. We need to create a space and place for deep ancestral knowledge.

Biography

Dr. Danica Borkovich Anderson’s interests remain consistent with exploring trauma’s impact as not a death sentence but an enrollment into intensive learning and growth.  As Danica points out, the essence is summed up in the concise, collaborative social justice and self-sustainability found in healing our own local communities and ourselves.  It’s about ennobling and empowering those who have suffered catastrophic violence and crisis.

 Working from a base as a forensic psychotherapist (Certified Clinical Criminal Justice Specialist #16713), a balance of her work has been abroad in Africa, Bosnia, India and Sri Lanka as well as in the United States.  While in the U.S., Danica’s experience and training began with the Siletz Indian Tribe in Oregon covering thirteen counties.  She served this area using her experience in the clinical field of sexual abuse and abuse issues for a number of years.  She has also worked in crisis care for corporations and insurance agencies since 2000.  

Danica’s  professional experiences delve deeply into “untamed” territory and explores possible engendered approaches that are healing, collaborative and are in sync with the environment presented.

She has conducted extraordinary in-depth work with Bosnian Muslim women war survivors and war crimes survivors. This work is enhanced by Danica’s bi-lingual capacity as a Serbo-Croatian.  A decade of work is completed and is now self-sustaining by the Bosnian women.  As a Serbian-American daughter of former Yugoslav immigrants whose mother survived concentration camps, Danica researches trauma and its impact identified by social studies that are significantly centered on the female, thus radiating out into both genders and the community at large.  

Danica’s consultancy work as a gender psycho-social victims’ expert with the International Criminal Court (The Hague, Netherlands), addresses the importance of a trauma treatment and training curriculum that is distinctive and responsive to the impact of catastrophe and disaster events.  Her work considers a wider set of relationships between trauma and environment in which trauma is situated or, alternatively, how the specific culture is perceived in the trauma exposure.  Fluid and adaptive across vastly differing and diverse penal and corrections/prison systems including those of military operations, the Kolo trauma treatment and training format has a much broader spatial scale of overall distribution, becoming self-sustainable via the affected population. Anderson’s service in the United Nations World Food Program for the largest humanitarian workforce on the planet in Sudan added profound insight to her research, allowing her to survey a substantive data base that further enhanced her Kolo format.  

Danica’s experience and specific skills include:

•          The ability to foster not just intellectual understanding but embodiment on topics that are elusive or difficult, cutting edge and innovative or very psychologically based.

•          International speaker, presenter/trainer.

•          The populations worked with range from:  1) Rebels, militia and war crimes perpetrators (Afghanistan, Africa-Chad, Congo, Sudan & Uganda) and victims of crimes; 2) In Oregon with the Siletz Indian Tribe providing services for 200 tribes and bands; 3) Interfacing and training with individuals and groups in Bosnia, India and Sri Lanka who are professionals in their native organizations as advocates, social workers, Buddhist priests and  directors of the agencies open to developing cross cultural collaborative skills in the field; 4) Corporate environments, universities/colleges and speaking engagements at various institutions.

•          As a grassroots non-profit, her The Kolo: Women’s Cross Cultural Collaboration work enables her to understand a depth and breadth of both human rights and female human rights especially honed to helping aid in real time and in stark truth positions. Crisis and disaster response protocols and crisis intervention/prevention development and implementation are a few of her in-depth skills.  Engendered training programs are few yet critically needed in corporate environments.

[genderassignment]

Waterboarding the Witch

Puck (Unsettled), corn from the 2016 Seeds InService pre-colonial garden, Maggie Puckett

Part 1 of 2 Seeds InService special feature on family feminist histories in the Papermaker’s Garden, by Maggie Puckett, interviewed by project collaborator, Melissa H Potter

While researching my genealogy this summer I discovered blood relations to at least 18 participants of the infamous Salem witch trials of 1692. Ranging from the executed to the “afflicted” accusers, from the clergy to the jury, my discovery inspired me to learn more about the events of that dark episode in colonial America. I am particularly interested in revisiting the period as it relates to a longer history of patriarchal oppression of women healers in the Old World and the genocide of indigenous populations in the New World. Through a feminist and anti-colonial lens, I’m now crafting a body of work using fibers from plants indigenous to North America and medicinal herbs traditionally used for women’s health in Europe and North America.

Below is a sampling of my relatives and the roles they played:

Accused / Executed

Susannah (North) Martin (bef. 1621 - 1692) was once called "one of the most impudent, scurrilous, wicked creatures of this world” by the Reverend Cotton Mather (also a relative). Having survived two accusations of witchcraft in her life, Susannah’s third trial proved fatal. Imagine this 70 year old woman, assaulted by men who stripped her naked to look for a “witch’s tit” from which she suckled her familiar. Even though this mark could be anything from an age spot to a birth mark, her captors didn’t find the evidence in this way: they did, however, notice that her breasts were full during the morning search but slack in the evening, and this was evidence enough for them that she had suckled her familiar between searches. She was hanged July 19, 1692. Susannah is my tenth great grandmother.

John Proctor Jr (abt. 1631 - 1692) was the first male to be accused of witchcraft in Salem. Against the trials from the start, he believed the afflicted girls were faking. As he was defending his wife against her charges, John himself was accused along with all his children and other family members. He was hanged August 19, 1692. His wife, pregnant at the time, was spared execution until after the baby was born--which luckily happened after the trials ended. John is my 10th great granduncle.

Accused / Survived

Sarah (Noyes) Hale (1655 - 1697) was the second wife of Reverend John Hale, one of Salem’s most influential ministers and enthusiastic supporter of the trials. Accusations against Sarah didn't occur until November, after many innocent women, some men, and a couple dogs had already been executed. For Reverend Hale, though, when the accusations hit close to home, he stop supporting the trials and they soon ended. Sarah’s life was spared. Sarah is my 14th cousin 8 times removed.

Afflicted / Accusers

Mercy (Lewis) Allen (1675) witnessed the revenge killing by Wabanaki natives of most of her family in Falmouth, Maine when she was 14. Traumatized and alone she ended up as a servant in the households of both George Burroughs (whom Mercy would eventually accuse; Burroughs is also a relative) and, later, Thomas Putnam (enthusiastic co-accuser). Mercy gave enthralling testimony of fantastical satanic experiences, probably enjoying her newly discovered power over men in a heavily misogynistic society. Her date and place of death are unknown. Mercy is my 8th cousin 9 times removed.

Clergy

Cotton Mather (1663 - 1728) and his father Increase may be responsible for the severity of the trials, given their beliefs and influence. Strict Puritan ministers they believed God's wrath took the form of adverse weather, conflict with native communities, illness and other undesirable events. Their fear of the devil together with their hatred of women, especially the old and life-weary, laid the groundwork for the events of 1692. Cotton never admitted any wrongdoing. Cotton is my 7th cousin 11 times removed.

Why do you think witches are back in fashion?

Because Feminism is back in fashion, or rather, taking center stage again. There is a reemergence of interest in understanding the oppression of women in historical contexts. When have women been considered powerful, or of holding a power that threatened patriarchy, or the Church, or science, or emerging capitalism? Certainly, looking back at witch hunts in colonial America, we see an intersection of all these power structures descending on the women (and some men) of Essex County, 1692. Today, activists are loudly condemning capitalism, sexism, and racism, building bridges between various people’s movements. In this context, we see a renewed interest in reviving suppressed cultures, thus we start to think about what so-called witchcraft was really all about.

Why were witches reviled?

In Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English provide a framework for understanding witch hunts through the 14th-17th century: “a ruling class campaign of terror directed against the female peasant population. Witches represented a political, religious and sexual threat to the Protestant and Catholic churches alike, as well as to the state.”

In their groundbreaking work, Ehrenreich and English explain how throughout western history “women have always been healers” but as these skills were increasingly seen as competition by emerging male-dominated medicine, the acts of healing were demonized.  

In The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England, Carol Karlsen highlights women who, after disrupting the patriarchal inheritance structure, found themselves accused of witchcraft. My tenth great-grandmother was Susannah North Martin, an outspoken and intelligent woman long involved in a legal dispute over her inheritance. She was accused of witchcraft, found guilty, and hanged on July 19, 1692.

It’s well worth revisiting this time period for a gender-, class-, and race- adjusted understanding of history.

As a descendent of witches, do you consider yourself a witch?

I don’t think being a witch is something you can inherit. But if a witch is a person who stands outside the dominant cultural ideology as determined by the ruling class, then I do have some witch in me, yes! But, since my relatives played all sides of the trials, I think about how I’m descended not just from the innocent victims, but from the cruel, oppressive state and church agents too.

Of course Susannah herself was not a witch, but an innocent victim of the Puritanical hysteria that dreadful year. More than 300 years later, Susannah was, finally, officially exonerated by the state of Massachusetts.

Bibliography

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1973. Print.

Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: Norton, 1987. Print.

Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. Reprint ed. New York: HarperOne, 1990. Print.

Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Print.

[genderassignment]

Breaking the Silence, Ending the War on Women: Sarah Super’s Memorial for Rape Survivors

Image of Sarah Super

More than 26 million women and girls in the United States are victims of rape, and they constitute 85% of reported sexual violence cases. Rape remains a foundation of our culture, and yet no major movement to end it has ever taken place. After more than 20 years of activism in this arena, I am exhausted.

Activist Sarah Super restored my faith in victories for women. In this intelligent interview, I spoke with her about her experience as a survivor, and had a frank discussion about rape culture in our society. To break the silence and shame, she is doing something no one else has before: creating a memorial for survivors of rape.

Sarah, a wonderful colleague of mine, Celeste Regal who also wrote for Gender Assignment suggested in reach out to you on your extraordinary work creating a memorial for rape survivors. Can you tell us about this project and where you are with it? What was the inspiration, and what do you think it will do for survivors?

The memorial for rape survivors project was inspired by my own experience of being raped and then feeling the profound silence that surrounds sexual violence. I quickly learned that being sexually assaulted was shamed, silenced, and a source of great suffering that many people endure in secrecy. Despite its disturbingly pervasive existence, there is a profound lack of conversation, education, and truth-telling about the reality of sexual assault - let alone anything to honor the strength and courage of survivors who live on in the aftermath of this human rights abuse, most often without their perpetrators ever being held accountable. I wanted our community to take an active role in validating, supporting, and standing with survivors. I wanted to bring this conversation about the pain and suffering and strength of survivors into public space.

The memorial itself will be a circle of benches in a regional park along the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is designed to be a validating, beautiful space where people can sit down and talk, share their stories and experiences: a space for truth-telling and breaking the silence. I recently submitted my proposed location and concept design for review to the Minneapolis Parks & Recreation. I'm hoping to get the Park Board's approval in the next month or two.

What has been the response to that project? and to you telling your own story?

There has been an incredible outpouring of support, and within one year, I raised over $50,000 for the project. I think people are beginning to see the need for something like this. People are also curious about my use of the word "memorial." I chose to call it a memorial not because sexual violence is a thing of the past, but because we need to honor those who have already experienced it. We cannot solve a problem we do not talk about. This memorial grieves the horrific reality of sexual violence and creates a platform for conversation - the first step to social change.

Since telling my story publicly in the Minneapolis newspaper just weeks after being assaulted, I have experienced a lot of different responses: some hurtful, some healing. The best response I got was when people who saw the story reached out and said, "I'm so sorry that happened to you," and, "I stand with you." It was painful to know how many people saw the story and didn't say anything; in all honestly, it felt like apathy. It can be painful for me to run into someone I haven't seen in a while and they say, "I've been following your story..." At that point, I realize that my story has been consumed as entertainment, that they forgot I'm a real person and this really happened to me. When a survivor chooses to break the silence, a simple message or email can mean a lot.

I spent time in Bosnia last year researching women survivors of war-related rape crimes. I was struck by the finding that women want to talk about their experiences given the proper circumstances. That follows your philosophy, too. Can you talk about that?

I believe truth-telling is an essential part of justice. I don't mean this from an individual context (though that is certainly how it begins) but rather - telling the larger story of sexual violence. The truth is ugly, frightening, horrific, tragic...there are no words that completely define the pain...but we must know it and own it in order to move forward in both curing our culture of sexual violence and also healing those who have already been affected.

On an smaller scale, I think some survivors want to talk about their experiences and some do not. Those who wish to share may be willing to do so with a few people they know and trust, and some, like me, are willing to be very public about their experiences. It is sometimes easier for survivors whose perpetrators have been convicted to share publicly because no one questions if it happened in the first place. The courts have validated the story. While we should not depend on the courts' decisions in order to believe a survivor's story, this is, sadly, where our culture is in our understanding of sexual violence.

Why do you think rape is still so systemic in our society given the influence of feminism in the past few decades?

From my understanding, there are still seemingly very few feminist men. In the past few decades, women have made gains in education, athletics, healthcare, the workplace, etc. But despite the strides we've made in redefining femininity and what women are capable of, our culture still perpetuates a very toxic definition of masculinity - ultimately founded on the celebration of violence and the dehumanization of women. I think rape is primarily based in this concept of masculinity, and until we can change what it means to be a man, rape will continue to be pervasive.

Being a feminist man actually requires more than accepting the belief that women should be equals to men. To be a feminist man requires an active rejection of celebrating violence and dehumanizing women, awakening to the everyday words and actions that perpetuate the myth that women exist to please men, and actually doing something about it. Feminism can't be passive, and we are in desperate need of feminist men who are willing to stand up to their best friends and brothers and teammates when they comment on a woman's body or degrade a woman's humanity. We need to raise the bar of what it means to be a "good guy" from just a guy who doesn't rape. We should measure a man's goodness on how he treats women, not only in public space, but in the privacy of home.

What about the more recent concepts of rape culture? Where do you see rape culture in our every day lives, and where is it most insidious?

I see rape culture play out in a million ways - from locker room jokes to porn to the internalized sexism women embody. What I find most disturbing in the rare experiences when rape culture is actually named or called out by someone are the excuses that follow...like "You are too sensitive." "Take a joke!" "They didn't mean it that way." These dismissive, invalidating excuses are also rape culture. Rape culture isn't just about the fact that people are raped. Rape culture is also about the lack of accountability from the person who caused the harm and the desire for bystanders to rally around that person by refusing to believe they would ever do something wrong and hurtful.

How can we all participate in bringing an end to rape?

The opposite of rape is consent and integrity, so if you don't want to perpetuate an act of sexual violence, I suppose you can start there. You need to have someone's consent. Consent cannot be forced or constructed. It must be authentically and enthusiastically given. Don't be the guy that prides himself on sleeping with the most attractive females or the most women in general. Pride yourself on being a person that courageously stands against rape culture and treats women (and all people) with the dignity they deserve.

But rape is most often a deliberate act of viciousness and violence, not a miscommunication between sexual partners. We won't end rape by teaching kids about consent. I don't think rape will ever disappear without a massive change in the way we understand masculinity and the way boys are taught to be men. What we CAN all do is learn how to support survivors, to offer choices, to be trustworthy, predictable, people of integrity, people who are strong enough to stand with survivors and share the burden of their pain. While it will probably take us many years to eliminate sexual violence, we could become people who stand with survivors today.

What are your strategies for healing? Where do you think you are now in this process?

Healing from trauma is not a linear process, so it's hard to orient myself in any particular place. What I can say is that I was very fortunate to learn about psychological trauma years before I was raped. This meant that I understood that for healing to occur, a survivor needs people they can fully trust, people who will offer them choices and respect those choices, and some form of re-connection to noticing the body. Since my assault, I have worked to find those people, to teach people what I need, and to continue to move my body - most preferably in the forms of walking, dancing, and yoga.

What are your hopes for the future?

My hope is to create a community that validates, supports, and stands with survivors. I want to create a community where survivors feel safe to say their names and share their stories if they want to, knowing they will be met with the compassion and justice they deserve. I want to see men hold themselves to a higher standard of what it means to be a good guy and to become actively involved in raising better boys and building less violent communities. I hope that we are not as far away from these goals as it seems.

______________________________________________

In 2015, Sarah Super founded Break the Silence Day, a movement working to change the way we respond to sexual assault, and launched an initiative to create the first permanent memorial for survivor of sexual violence in the United States. Sarah works full-time as a Learning & Development consultant and is also the only Trauma Center certified trauma-sensitive yoga instructor in Minnesota. She earned a dual Bachelor of Arts in sociology and American studies as well as her Masters in Education in human resource development from the University of Minnesota.

[genderassignment]

Invisible Makers

Judy Chicago’s team for The Dinner Party

For the Kerry James Marshall exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago I was commissioned by Ann Meisinger and Rosie May to do a reinterpretation of Gardner’s Art Through The Ages. The books will be on display during the exhibition in the education lobby.

The project statement: “Collaborator, apprentice, assistant, fabricator, installer—these are some of the many terms referring to invisible labors which make art and architecture possible.  Historically, the work of mosaic workers, fresco painters, minaturists, quilters, printers and sculptors—just to name a few—is often, if not always, unrecorded. Gardner’s Art Through the Ages has a predictably complicated relationship to such hidden labors. For instance, though her work on Rodin’s sculptures is the stuff of legend, Camille Claudel is not mentioned in the brief section on his work. Japanese woodblock printers, though acknowledged as essential and highly skilled labor, are unnamed. In the two-page spread on feminism, Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party has no mention of the legions of women crafters who made the work possible, and the collaboration’s critical contribution to a discussion on feminist art practice.This project is an exploration of invisible art labor through the Marxist feminist perspective. This perspective considers these unacknowledged or unpaid labors in relationship to power, capital, accumulation and privatization. This research will be presented in a series of pink bookmark tip ins throughout the book as marginalia challenging our notions of authorship and artistic masterpiece. The wrap cover with the title is made from handmade paper I made with Miriam Schaer.”

Camille Claudel

Josephena De Obidos

Hildegard Von Bingen

Nicholas Hilliard

Vanessa Bell

[genderassignment]

I IN THE SKY: An Interview with Edra Soto

A family photo of the artist, Edra Soto, with her Abuela Elvira, circa 2005. Elvira was in many ways the inspiration for I IN THE SKY, Soto’s exhibition at Harold Washington College’s Pedestrian Project Gallery.

Over time, I’ve started to enjoy interviewing more than writing. Not a surprise: I’ve had the great fortune of stellar interviewees. I can think of no better way to start Gender Assignment’s 2016 roster than with Chicago-based artist, Edra Soto. A major influencer in the contemporary art world here and beyond, this interview is full of historical, cultural and personal references woven together in her knockout exhibition and performance, I IN THE SKY. Here she talks about the transformation of gender specific signifiers--like the house dresses her Abuela Elvira wore and Puerto Rican television culture--into a non-linear personal timeline featuring a glorious laugh track of liberation.

In your exhibition I IN THE SKY you feature a series of tapestry-like variations on the house dresses worn by women in Puerto Rico, and on a very personal level, your grandmother. I have a lot of questions about that symbol, because you created such a complex interweaving of ideas with it.

First, how do you think these dresses demarcate gender and class? What were they as a symbol for you of female experience?

Historically, these dresses have great significance because they are the outcome of female rebellions throughout history. Ironically, the direct descendent of theses house dresses is the Mother Hubbard dress, a loose-fitting gown meant to dress half-naked South Seas islander women, to configure to what was considered civilized in the 1800’s.

The house dress transgression was such that not only it became a symbol of comfort for Caribbean woman of the 20th century, it became emblematic of a generation. The Caribbean grandmother archetype wouldn’t be complete without this ordinary cotton dress.

Coco Chanel once said “I wanted to give a woman comfortable clothes that would flow with her body. A woman is closest to being naked when she is well-dressed.” I guess theres always that perpetual battle woman go through in life, of feeling admired by her looks and accepted by who she is. Perhaps is challenging for designers to provide clothing or garments that are socially acceptable and aesthetically pleasant.

Nowadays, these dresses are still visible but subject to ridicule and parody. In contemporary Puerto Rican comedy, is very common to find male comedians dressed as an old lady, using these dresses and a wig with big rollers to portrait a character.

My personal experience with the house dresses came into my life through my mother and grandmother. Both of them work from home after having children and spent most of their time at home. My mothers’ collection of house dresses consisted of sleeveless, lightweight cotton fabrics with a frontal zipper or buttons. The palette and patterns vary from bright to pale to floral and geometric shapes. To my grandmother, these dresses were everything. I remember taking a closer look at her closet after she pass away. Everything she ever wore was rooted in style from the house dress. Anything she wore to o out was exactly in that style. I don’t think she owned not even one pair of pants.

From the installation and performance, I IN THE SKY. Photo: Clare Britt.

You made a really interesting choice to print images of cultural and historical icons in the breast area of the dresses as a sort of loose-knit, non-linear timeline of your life. Could you tell us about your thoughts on breasts and sexuality, and how that relates to the house dress?

The sexualization of breasts in todays society is nonsense. I do however recognize that breasts’ sexuality can also be seen as a symbol of power, and I kind of love that about them.  I went through puberty experiencing big breasts and not feeling very comfortable with them. I remember feeling particularly uncomfortable about the male predatory stare. Now that I’m middle-aged, I am somewhat  acceptant of my appearance and perhaps grateful for what I have. I do however, never feel like flaunting publicly what I consider my private parts.

For the house dresses, I needed them to be gender specific. They signify a constructed woman character and for the purpose of the exhibition, they were complemented with “lady masks”, who are merely halloween masks that are transparent in appearance and have make-up painted on them; make-up being another way of customizing gender specificity. Ultimately, I created them as part of this self-reflection that connects me to the various relationships that made me who I am today: my relationship with my family; my geographical relationship; my relationship with the perceptual world. More precisely, how I recognize things and how the meanings of those recognitions has evolved throughout the years. The house dresses also provided an uncommon context for my symbolic historical icons.

Your grandmother is clearly such an important figure in your life. Can you tell us about her, and how she influenced your personal and artistic development?

I’m not quite sure if she has much to do with my personal and artistic development, but she was one of the oddest persons I met during my childhood. I remember feeling tremendous love for her and I was always intrigued by her dark, wrinkly skin. She was always happy to see me, but she wasn’t a lovey-dovey kind of woman, in fact, she was a bit of a bully. She lived with my mother’s sister and took care of my cousins. She was always doing house chores. She cooked the most amazing rice I’ve ever had and she lay on a hammock reading tv-guide type of magazines most of the time. And as I mentioned before, all she ever wore was house dresses. Perhaps those tv-guide type of magazines (titled Vea, Teve-guia and even one called Vanidades) that were around me all the time have to do something with my artistic development. On those you will find all the move stars idealized or characterized as the human they are, relatable, but superior looking. To this date, my mom treats the Vanidades magazine like a collectable piece. She did collect them and there’s still bookracks full of them at my house. To this date, my mother’s beauty standards are based on what those magazines and the television celebrities look like. Sadly, I am judged by her through that filter.

From the installation and performance, I IN THE SKY. Photo: Clare Britt.

One of the most interesting aspects of this show is the conflation of personal and cultural narratives through a selection of cultural influences that affected you. What I found particularly interesting is, some of them are Western (Streep, Schumer, Murphy), and some are very culturally specific (Iris Chacon). How did these influences rise and fall in your life? And how did they interact?

Puerto Rico is a colony ruled by the US government with US economy, and as such American mainstream culture is very much a part of the Puerto Rican lexicon. The mainstream culture filters into your life without guidelines that explain the context on which is portrayed. If you grew up like me, in a middle class family that was not exactly thinking about the deeper significance of all things filtered through the American mainstream, then you can relate to this situation. It only took me 30 years to figure this out. Of course, if you are living in Puerto Rico for at least half of your life and have nothing to compare it to, is virtually impossible to make informed comparisons. Moving to the States helped me understand the numerous amounts of existent genres and how one infuses it’s cultural education by experiencing them. It also helped me understand how different I am to an American that was born in the States.

All the characters are represented as adulterated versions of the Mexican Milagro (Mexico being another “outside world” fascination). The original ex-voto or dije, is used to worship and heal, and its symbolism is not universal. I choose the aspect of the Milagros to represent my pictures as a connector to an artifact that carries great meaning and explores human worshiping.

I start understanding what all of these character meant to me, including Puerto Rican vedette Iris Chacon, during my adulthood. What bonds them together?: they are artifices of a fabricated reality that comforted me for years, my preferred form of escapism. On a deeper level, and as to how I engage with some of these characters intellectually, I attribute their influence on my thoughts of culture, class and gender. But I also know they don’t resolve anything to anyone but myself, perhaps. They are as important and as unimportant as they can be.

I walked away from your show thinking over and over about laughter as liberation. I did a lot of research on this topic for my graduate thesis! I’m fascinated with the ways laughter amplifies our ideas and attitudes. The addition of laughter on records with your exhibition is lyrical, but I also think it is conceptually very deep! Please tell us more about your thoughts on that.

The laughter (or brightness, or loudness) of my upbringing comes from idiosyncratic aspects of Puerto Rican culture. The music, the wild abandon of nature, sun, fashion in the Caribbean and the colorful landscape. I don’t think of them as stereotypes because I perceive them as different, and physically louder in comparison to how I experienced these things in America.

I am no stranger to laughing out loud—it is one of my favorite things to experience that arises from natural circumstances. Friends and strangers have told me for many years how much they think about my laughter. At some point, motivated by expanding on the dual portrait titled Excess of Joy, I decided to create this recorded version. Being double sided, the record became the perfect format to present a dual laughter piece. To self-induce laughter in the most natural way possible, I decided to watch Delirious by Eddie Murphy. I used headphones to listened to Murphy and a mic to record myself throughout the hour special. Once all the laughter was generated (by me) I reformatted the order to create a type of melody, if you will, that made the sound piece effective in it’s progression.

For I In The Sky, the laughter serves as the installation soundtrack and denotes the absurdity of it’s parts. I think it also speaks to what extent I am willing to laugh at myself, but I also see the laughter as you describe it, a kind of liberation or acceptance. It is my way, my win.

From the installation and performance, I IN THE SKY. Photo: Clare Britt.

[genderassignment]

Evidence of Blood

Mary A. Blood and her lifelong colleague, Ida B. Riley founded the Chicago School of Oratory in the late 1800s. They opened the school in preparation for the Columbia Exhibition World’s Fair, hence the name of the school which lives today.

Blood’s life is poorly recorded. Riley’s even more so. Bloods first office at Columbia, on the 2nd floor of a building at the intersection of Van Buren and Michigan, overlooked the South Loop. Just two blocks south of her office was the maw of the vice district, where morphine, gambling and brothels abounded. It is hardly any wonder that Blood became involved with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which fought for the abolition of violence against women. In fact, Blood was a well loved and respected member, who offered lessons in movement and oratory at many of the meetings, and on the road at their national conferences. Records of her readings and lessons are in The Signal, the most important women’s newspaper in the nation at the time, a weekly publication by the WCTU. It is some of the only records existing on Blood. THANK YOU, women of the WCTU, for your fastidious indexing of these weekly publications. Through this thankless task, I was able to find evidence of Blood.

Blood and Riley wrote a four-volume curriculum guide to oratory called The Psychological Development of Expression. When I ordered my first edition, I was surprised to find in the colophon it was owned by a Miss Baker of Longwood Avenue in Chicago, clearly a textbook from when she was at Columbia in 1896. You will note in the marginalia of the photo that Riley read a Robert Browning poem, New Year’s Morning on October 6, 1896.

Happy New Year from the extraordinary women who founded The Columbia School of Oratory and dedicated their lives to promote women speaking in public--as necessary today as ever.

[genderassignment]

What Were the Chances: Bosnian Women at the Spansko Refugee Camp

What were the chances that a video exists of Senja at the Spansko camp recorded in 1993, around the time of our correspondence? What were the chances that her son could convince his boss in Croatia to turn the unused barracks into a safe haven from the mass murders and rapes taking place in her village across the border? That they all survived, went home, and can now fish in the summer, drink coffee, and smoke in peace?

What were the chances another letter fell out of a folder I moved tonight, from Fahira, the woman who accepted our donations after Senja went back to Grapska?

September 18, ‘95

“You asked me what I thought about the color brown--I like light and alive colors which refresh, I just got some brown clothes and I can tell you that I like them.

On the photograph, your hand is a bit bigger than mine.

For sure we’ll never meet, but through letters and photographs, people can be friends.”

Footage of Senja and Women Refugees at Spansko Camp 1993

[genderassignment]

Fearless Food: LaManda Joy on Victory Gardens and Rosie Riveters

LaManda Joy, Founder of the Peterson Garden Project 

Gardens are radical. Food is a feminist issue. I’ve been researching the story of women in the Chicago Victory Garden movement, and realized pretty quickly LaManda Joy is the go-to authority on this amazing piece of our history. One of the leading urban gardeners today, she shares her philosophy and family history with the nation’s Victory Garden movement in this interview with Gender Assignment.

LaManda, your parents sound like really fascinating people. In one of your lectures you mention your father was drafted at age 18, and your mother became a “Rosie the Riveter”. Where did she work, and what skills did she acquire? Did she use any of them when your father returned? What did she do after the war?

On her 16th birthday, my Mother got on the streetcar in L.A. and went to Webber Showcase (which, before the war was a jewelry case maker - during the war they manufactured bomber doors) and applied for a job as a Rosie the Riveter and got it. She had tried earlier but they said she had to be 16. The Rosies at her factory worked in pairs - you had the riveter and a “blocker” who held a block under the area being riveted. They used to write encouragement notes to the G.I.s and put them inside the bomber doors.

I don’t know if she got it during her time as a Rosie, but my mother is a hard worker. Up into her 80s she put women half her age (including myself) to shame with all she accomplished. After the war she, like many other women, returned to home making and my mother was a full-time mom. She did have jobs as long as they didn’t get in the way of being home when we were home (I have a brother and sister who are 15 and 13 years older than me, respectively. We are all adopted.) When I was in grade school she drove the Senior Citizen bus during the school year and she’d pick me up and it would be me and the old folks tooling around town. That was a lot of fun. In the summers she would work for the local strawberry farmer. You can read more about that here: http://theyarden.com/the-strawberry-queen-of-columbia-county/

My parents both had an incredible work ethic that I hope I have inherited. They had a lot of pride in what they did - everything they did - and were proud of a job well done.

LaManda Joy, author of Start a Community Food Garden: The Essential Handbook (Timber Press, 2015). Photo courtesy of Timber Press

You said your father was an avid gardener. How did he become so knowledgable? How did he teach you these skills? Did your mother garden with him, too?

After the war, my parents moved to Oregon from L.A. to be near my Mother’s grandparents (who had raised her). It was there that my Father learned to garden from my great grandfather. When I came along in the late 60’s he had become an avid gardener and I was out there with him from my earliest memories. Mother also gardened but she worked on the flowers. She also was an incredible cook/baker/preserver so she taught me all those skills.

Did your mother get involved in the Victory Garden movement in Chicago while your father was at war?

They lived in L.A. and she remembers having a small garden at her grandparent’s house.

Were women the primary gardeners during this time? How did women balance their domestic duties with gardening during this movement?

You would think this would be the case but, surprisingly, the “records” indicate that a lot of men who were unable to fight (due to age or medical conditions) were leaders in the movement. That doesn’t mean women didn’t play their part. In the Chicago story, there are strong women with leadership roles in the Victory Garden movement. But in the “rank and file” stories, if you will, there’s more about men doing it than women. Also, organizers (at least in Chicago) were very specific that Victory Gardens were something to be done in “leisure time” - they didn’t want it distracting from the business of war. They also stressed that just a few hours a week could provide food for a family. Which is true to this day.

How did recipes change during this time?

Rationing made everything scarce (thus the need for the Victory Gardens). Sugar was in short supply so people used molasses. Butter was hard to come by so people substituted applesauce. There’s a whole “genre” of “ration recipes” available on the internet. I’ve made and tasted some. They weren’t so great… but, admittedly, it was a limited sampling.

How did their lives change when Victory Gardens were no longer needed for the war?

Contrary to popular belief, the Victory Garden movement continued after the war. The names just changed…at first, as the world was settling down and communism and the cold war were coming into play, they were called “Freedom Gardens” and you’d see propaganda like “Food Fights the Red Menace”. Then, as the world started to slowly recuperate and the troops came home, inflation hit so they were called “Thrift Gardens”… I’ve heard many stories of former neighborhood Victory Gardens lasting for years after the war only to go away when the land was used for other purposes. And, of course, Boston has the famous Fenway Gardens which have continued from the site of an original WW2 garden to this day. There’s also one on the South Side in Chicago called Rainbow Beach that was an original Victory Garden.

The story of Peterson Garden Project is a truly remarkable one, built on the site of an original Victory Garden! How does this project invoke the values of the Victory Garden movement?

Growing up with Greatest Generation parents I got a daily dose of their ethos “nobody’s going to do it for you,” “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” “we’re all in this together,” etc. So when the opportunity to garden on this original Victory Garden came about I thought those lessons would be useful today. I get a pervading sense that people expect someone else to solve their problems - particularly where food is concerned and the related areas of health and nutrition. Seems to me the easiest way to cut to the chase and impact the problem was to teach people how to grow their own food. Basic, right? Or, as my Father used to tell me with one of his army sayings (edited to be more loving…) “KISS: Keep it Simple Sweetheart” The Victory Garden movement inspired me because huge amounts of people learned to grow food (90% of Chicago Victory Gardeners had never gardened before) and solve the problems of their time. Why not give people the skills and opportunity to do it again to solve the challenges of our times?

LaManda Joy’s new book, Start A Community Food Garden

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LaManda Joy wants to inspire everyone she meets to grow their own food... seriously. She is an author, national speaker, award winning master gardener and considered the "Best Urban Farmer in Chicago." Inspired by the massive WW2 Victory Garden movement she founded the Peterson Garden Project in 2010.

This award winning education and community gardening program utilizes empty urban property to create short-term organic gardens where thousands of people have the opportunity to learn how to grow their own food. Peterson Garden Project also operates a Community Cooking school to teach people how to cook their own food, too.

She has collaborated on Fearless Food Gardening in Chicagoland: A Month-by-month Guide for Beginners (2013) and Start a Community Food Garden: The Essential Handbook (2015).

LaManda has served on the board of the American Community Gardening Association, spoken at the Library of Congress, national conferences, garden shows, festivals, libraries and appeared on PBS and other media outlets and was featured in the documentary Food Patriots...Her rallying cry "We can grow it!" recognizes the influence of the past while invigorating the American can-do spirit to create a positive future.

Her home garden, The Yarden, has been featured in local and national news outlets and is the basis for her blog and Facebook presence TheYarden.com.