Florence Rice Florence Rice had an abortion in the 1930s. I was sixteen when I had my daughter. They put her in my arms and she looked at me like, If you don’t want me, then I don’t want you either! You know, she just had that look, and I fell in love with her then. I began to dream about giving her the opportunities that I never had. Later on, I sort of went
The artist at her exhibition Tracey Emin “My Bed’”/JMW Turner at Turner Contemporary, 2017 2018. Photo by Stephen White; courtesy Turner Contemporary. My in-laws live in the north of England. Their modest semi-detached home is decorated tastefully with trinkets from their world travels, family photos, and a few replicas of notable artworks. I love the juxtaposition of viewpoints when I’m in their house. Inside, my eyes bounce from the Mondrian-inspired glass door, a miniature painting
DURING THE QUARANTINE phase of the pandemic, New York City was deathly quiet. In this silence, I began to discover my own genderqueerness, which manifested by way of playing with clothing, adjusting the height of my heels, and picking up nail art. Two years later, I’m still playing around with nail art, but the experiment has blossomed into a research-based art praxis connecting the history of nail art to queer theory and phenomenology. I’ve leaned
WOMEN AND HONOR: Some Notes on Lying, an immense work of fourteen pages by the lesbian poet and white feminist Adrienne Rich, begins with a clarification in parentheses at the top of page one: “These notes are concerned with relationships between and among women.” Drawn from remarks Rich made at a writers workshop in 1975, Women and Honor was published two years later by Pittsburgh-based press Motheroot (RIP). My copy from Cleis Press was given
At the Cairo Conference on Population and Development in 1994, Loretta Ross, Toni Bond, and others coined the evocative term reproductive justice to make clear that women have human rights, including the “human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have” safely, and with our government playing an affirmative role in manifesting these rights. Women (aka human beings with human rights) have the power to give
with assistance from CATHARINE STIMPSON, SHANE SNOWDON, BARBARA SMITH, and ANDI ZEISLER 1790–1792 In 1790, Mary Wollstonecraft anonymously pens A Vindication of the Rights of Men. It’s all rave reviews and hot sales until her name is added to the second edition and, overnight, the text is derided as overly emotional. The following year, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is published under her name, and a feminist philosopher is born. 1843 Margaret
North Yorkshire, UK; Methuen Drama, 2008, 288 pp., $25.95, paperback A short synopsis of English playwright Sarah Kane’s 1995 play Blasted: Tabloid journalist Ian and his much-younger girlfriend, Cate, check into a hotel room. Ian makes several racist and homophobic comments and berates Cate’s intelligence. They discuss what seems to be a war going on around them. He coerces her into uncomfortable, violent sexual acts. She escapes through the bathroom window. A soldier bursts into
It’s Alive premiered at Chicago’s Woods Theatre on April 26, 1974. To promote it, Cohen hired women to push strollers around the venue inside which snuggled tape recorders emitting growls. Audiences bit and there were strong ticket sales, but Warner Brothers executives found the film “distasteful” and hampered its most exploitable asset (a killer baby) with ambiguous advertising. Chicago Tribune Archive via nespaper.com. FEMINISTS, HORROR HOUNDS, metalheads, and cinephiles descended on Chicago’s Music Box
A detail from Stella Waitzkin: These Books Are Paintings. © Waitzkin Memorial Library Trust. Photo by Jennifer Baumgardner. IN THIS ERA of compulsory eyeball luring, saying no to self-promotion looks courageous to me. Perhaps this is why a deceased, somewhat-obscure modern artist named Stella Waitzkin so captured my curiosity recently. Her enduring subject was refusal—of feminine roles, the art business, throwaway culture. Her welcome mat read “GO AWAY.” She made art every day for more
Yoko Ono performing Cut Piece at Carnegie Hall, New York, 1965. ⓒ Yoko Ono. Photo: Minoru Niizuma. YOKO ONO SELF-PUBLISHED Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings in Tokyo in 1964. In 1970, this visionary work of conceptual art was published in the US. Ono’s “instructions” were a radical approach to art because they centralized the participant in the work to manifest the piece, whether the artist was present or not. Some of the instructions
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