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Who is listening? | Shifting Connections
WHO IS LISTENING?
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November 10, 2013 · by Kathleen MacQueen · in Shifting Connections · Leave a
comment KAT H LEEN M ACQ U EEN
About
Between the Door and the
Street
A performance initiated by
Suzanne Lacy
Black Female Voices: Who is
Listening
A public dialogue between bell
hooks + Melissa Harris­Perry
Interviews, Reviews &
October 19, 2013
November 8, 2013
PhD
Presented by Creative Time & Brooklyn
Presented by the New School University for
Contact
Museum
Social Research
Essays
Artwork & Exhibitions
VISIT BLOG
" KO AN S O F DI S LO CAT ED
EX P ER I EN CE"
Between the Door and the Street, 2013, a performance initiated by Suzanne Lacy.
Courtesy of Creative Time and Brooklyn Museum.
AR CH I V ES
“Shaming is a form of trauma,” writer bell hooks emphasized as she
and media host Melissa Harris­Perry debated whether anyone was
listening to black women’s voices today. And trauma (in this sense of
act as well as impact) is a form of repression, a means to silence,
negate, and remove individuals and collective peoples from
participation. White women are complicit, she added, in upholding a
system that continues to make entertainment out of the abuse of
children’s and black women’s bodies. Although the two women
disagreed on the value of Steve McQueen’s much lauded anti­slavery
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2014
2013
2012
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Who is listening? | Shifting Connections
film, Twelve Years a Slave, they provided the terms of engagement for
an ongoing struggle for respect, pride, dignity, empowerment, and
opportunity. Masculinity was not under attack; patriarchy, however,
continues to be, these women insisted, a debilitating social, economic,
and juridical structure.
LI N KS
Outstanding Curatorial
Paradigm
"Must See" Exhibition
A strong, forceful, and determined energy coursed through the
standing­room­only crowd at the New School last Friday afternoon Follow
R ECEN T P U BLI CAT I O N
and I thought: Yes! this is what I search for in my life…stature and
conviction and a collective commitment to support
differences
so long
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“Shifting
as they ratify a place at the table. A week before, art critic Lucy
Connections”
Lippard spoke in the same hall but to a very different audience. She
asked us to distinguish between the American Get
creed:
life,new
liberty
and
every
post
delivered
to your
Inbox.
the pursuit of happiness and the French: liberty,
equality,
fraternity.
One reinforces individual rights while the other emphasizes human
Enter
your dictionaries
email address
relations. Who are we in relation to one another?
Some
assert that sorority is a synonym of fraternity. Is it? Derrida in The
Sign me up
Politics of Friendship (1994/7, 57) asks of philosophy’s own fraternal
interpretation of history: “How much of a chance Powered
would abyfeminine
WordPress.com
friend have on this stage? And a feminine friend of hers, among
themselves?”
Kathleen MacQueen and Jo
Ractliffe “As Terras do Fim do
Mundo: Silence as an act of
recovery” in Über(W)unden: Art
in Troubled Times
Between the Door and the Street, 2013, a performance initiated by Suzanne Lacy.
Courtesy of Creative Time and Brooklyn Museum.
bell hooks has spent a lifetime taking chances to reconfigure this stage
to include women, people of color, and LGBT individuals. Artist
Suzanne Lacy has also sought to rectify the absence of women’s voices
by creating platforms for their speech. In mid­October just as the days
felt shorter and the late afternoons were cooling considerably, she
initiated a performance of over 300 feminist participants. “Between
the Door and the Street” was sponsored by Creative Time and the
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Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and made possible
through the involvement of some 80 organizations and 120
volunteers. Women of all ages, creed, and color, along with a few
men, gathered on the front stoops of a single block in Brooklyn not far
from the Brooklyn Museum of Art to talk about issues impacting
women and girls today. Sadly, I came to realize while listening to
varying groups that those effecting young women had changed little
since I sought independence as a young adult decades ago: stories of
sexual assault and shaming abounded.
Young women spoke of abusive love relationships. They told of
conflicted identities in their experience as immigrants. An older
woman referred to “the night of the wolf” as she described a
neighborhood overrun by gangs with a cowboy mentality. Voltaire
and Toni Morrison were intoned in response to a strict religious
upbringing as offering the possibility of creating one’s own bible of
values. A group of four men spoke of accepting responsibility in their
relations with women. “How much does the media impact our notions
of victimhood and give permission for assault?” they asked. “In
glamorizing the anti­hero, what kinds of men become the center of
our attention?” A group of middle­aged women spoke of juggling jobs
and family but there was copious laughter in the telling of their stories.
A 23 year­old Punjabi woman created a metaphor of a non­
picturesque street view complete with bent sign posts in response to the
question: “Right now we have this space to hear people out but how
do we go beyond this moment?
Between the Door and the Street, 2013, a performance initiated by Suzanne Lacy.
Courtesy of Creative Time and Brooklyn Museum.
As an immigrant trying to assimilate she wanted to be realistic: “I
have so many identities and I am only 23! Wearing our identities [as
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immigrants and as women] is hard.” In another group, five teens
spoke of fears and establishing safety zones. On another stoop, five
college students considered what it meant to be black, queer, and
having a sub­standard education. One described finding strength
beyond her epilepsy to make space for others. All participants wore
dark clothing and a bright yellow scarf to create a visual unity to the
enormous diversity of race, background, and ages represented. As the
dwindling light left a chill in the air, one loaned another hers to use as
a shawl. Others passed an amethyst from one to another to designate
the speaker. Further down the block, women stood and changed seats
to reinvigorate their conversation.
And so I zigzagged back and forth across the street to discern the
range of ideas and topics as well as garner a picture of the women and
men who participated. They were all beautiful – 300 portraits as
compelling as the Mona Lisa and as complex as Faith Ringgold’s
narrative quilts – but vocal and active, gaining strength through
sharing to assuage the hurt, anger, frustrations, and despair of being
squeezed into molds they do not fit. The conversations continued from
4:30 until 6:00 and then a song rose from the middle of the street
signaling participants and viewers to blend together in a block party
atmosphere. My last listening sojourn was at the base of a front stoop
occupied by teens and women in their twenties. They were members
of Girls Write Now, a mentorship program that pairs high school
students with professional writers. Determined to modify the
perception that change for women came at someone else’s loss, one
offered that feminism be reframed as the “thoughtfulness of
interaction.” Their willingness to share openly in public was a
generous gift and I was grateful to be privy to all the conversations
that afternoon.
Between the Door and the Street, 2013, a performance initiated by Suzanne Lacy.
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Courtesy of Creative Time and Brooklyn Museum.
Present on the front stoops of Brooklyn mid­October and in the New
School audience early November, was a vast set of experiences
translated into a plenitude of identities; but, clearly, no matter what
roles women achieve in business, government, religion, education,
media, literature, and the arts, they still feel the uncertainty of a future
left to the whims of a patriarchal society. bell hooks after publishing
her most successful book was dropped by her publisher without
explanation, while MS magazine questioned why she had “dropped
out.” “Is writing dropping out?” she exclaimed. Melissa Harris­Perry
acknowledged her position as television host could be terminated at
will and that she had compromised her writing in taking on such a
demanding public role. But when a woman stood up to ask why is it
that poor black women are constantly being blamed for their plight,
recounting her own story, Ms. Perry got up from her seat, walked off
the stage, pushed away the microphone and stood face­to­face
speaking intimately with her for several minutes. They embraced and
Ms. Perry returned to give a broad response to the entire audience.
With this gesture of equanimity and respect, she demonstrated
accountability for the lives of others. If a moment could absolve the
trauma of shame, this is it: the thoughtfulness of interaction all women
might imagine and come to know.
Sha r e t his :
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Tags: bell hooks, black female voices, feminism, Lucy Lippard, Melissa Harris­Perry,
socially engaged art, Suzanne Lacy
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