 Thank you all very much and thank you guys for all hanging in there for the day. I think it was a fantastic one. I'm going to keep my comments rather brief and sort of similar to the previous moderator deliver a little bit of an overall set of comments and then a few questions for each of the speakers although I'm going to go about it just slightly differently in that the kind of meat of the questions will be in this first part and then just a couple of sort of scattered questions for each of you because I see some real through lines that I feel like I can sort of throw to all of you. Before I do that I want to thank the Sackler Center, Eleanor Whitney, Sarah Giavonello, Lauren Ross, Catherine Morris, and of course Elizabeth Sackler for making these kinds of events possible. Before I get into my, as I say, my notes here I wanted to start with something that Zeta sort of ended with which is I'm extremely, I find it extremely important to always more our conversations in kind of historical context. And so when we look at an image from the 1970s and then one that looks similar that was made in 2008 to remember that they may have formal affinities and similar content but of course their operations are very different. So many of my remarks will be kind of in line with that and that said this story of Thomas looking up right after President Obama is elected and finding such overtly racist images as such an interesting and horrific truth in the same way that I recently looked up I was doing some work on utopian feminism or feminist utopia and the first thing that comes up is this neo-conservative blog about how women are trying to ruin the world. So it's not like a fantastic, the first link, the most clicked on link isn't actually about feminist utopia as a kind of progressive or even potential thing but instead is a kind of reactionary slant on it. So I think that this is important especially as we've entered new kind of political terrain and have a new sort of optimism in the air that we're also entering into deeply conservative territory and we have to think about that I think. That said I thought it was interesting that this panel of papers seemed to take as its perhaps unspoken red thread anxiety around representation or perhaps better said a new anxiety about the very modes of critique that once worked that were usually understood as deconstructive say in the 1970s and around which there were kind of hopeful rhetorics. It was interesting how often words like fragmented, dispersed, abject, negative came up. There is a sort of fear I think underlining some of the topics that came up today and I think it's interesting in that it points I think to a certain set of questions about what critical practices look like and how feminism can be thought. In point of fact for me it was interesting to think about just how feminism operated in these four papers in that in some cases there were artists or cultural producers as case studies being taken as feminists in other cases it was the mode of address or the mode of theory that was being placed upon them that seemed to be being argued as feminist. It seems that this rise in a kind of plumbing of the negative however the debased, the invisible and not necessarily in a dialectical sense is holding out new promise or at least a new kind of question about representation for everyone on the panel but I do have to say that I wonder if there is a kind of privileging or at least an interest in seeing through the ramifications of following through to the end a logic of kind of nihilism. Again I'm going to move quickly. I'm not trying to say that the folks on this panel have no hope but rather that they are tending towards objects that do have a real weight to them in a particular way and not necessarily a clear way out of the questions that are proposed which I find sort of interesting. Also as I said before if this is a kind of negativity it may not be a sort of negativity in the sense of a dialectic, a dialectical term so it's not so clear what the opposition is that's being proposed. These aren't necessarily propositions of alternative or oppositional structures that we may be used to from feminist theory from the 70s who were for instance proposing different ways of somebody earlier said. I think it was actually Ms. Sackler herself who said we won't stop fighting until the major hierarchy has taken over so perhaps this is what I'm getting at. The practices that were chosen today I think bring up questions with regard to representational and other strategies and I just want to think about this in terms of all the papers. The distinction between reflection, operations and artistic practices that reflect what's going on in culture and reflexive modes I think everyone on this panel was interested in thinking about that distinction. Is it a mirror held up to society so you just merely see those operations sort of magnified or is there a critical analysis being put forward. I think the last few papers made that extremely clear with relation to Thomas for instance this kind of question about how things are received if there can be a kind of pedagogy that allows for a feminist reception of works that might be more ambivalent in their very being. So how the word feminism operates within the case studies presented less in some ways as a weapon or even as something to be taken as content but rather as a site of ambivalence. I think is something I'd like us to discuss. The implication of which seems less secure than ever even though we use the word often enough. The implication of this as I say makes me feel as though there's a kind of productive awkwardness around feminism at the moment which nonetheless of course also worries me. It seems to be both its promise and its kind of weak point. There's a subtext that reveals that even when a text is invested in feminism it's unclear just how that investment works what it's meant to do. If the culture as many of us have just been discussing would largely claim feminism as being over as having made its mark done its political duty how do we use the word and I would just say that in those kinds of over determined statements it's made all the more clear that feminism is actually something that makes people continuously uncomfortable and I know that the word post has been brought up several times today. I just want to point out that post does not mean over so much as it means that there's a kind of unclear line drawn in the sand between what would be a certain kind of mode say with post modernism and what comes afterwards. It's arguable whether it's actually a breach or a break or whether it's a certain kind of extension that takes those terms forward. Post colonial certainly doesn't work in the same way that post feminism does and just another kind of interesting fact about the post in the concise Oxford dictionary post feminism appears I think very pointedly but post colonialism does not which is something to think about I think what is also extremely interesting about the four papers shared terrain I think is that this acknowledgement through turns to overly conflicted terrains of representation instead of superficially celebratory ones is that a feminist or a feminism riven with antinomies which is to say conflicting claims might be more true to histories of feminism and gives an active picture of an ever evolving discussion for us today whose terms will never be stable and allows this to be a live conversation one with a history a present and a future I think it's interesting that you know Marxist theorists are allowed not to get along but feminists are supposed to so I actually think this kind of antinomy with at the heart of discussions of feminism is a productive and positive thing like any and all complicated political and ideological praxis feminism should be allowed to be fragmented riven and unstable in other words theoretical it's interesting that given the longstanding debates in feminism for some there is an unspoken and unrealistic expectation for resolution or agreement understood as an integral aspect of discursive work in philosophy say in feminism such constitutive unrest is sometimes characterized as lack so I'm back to this lack question just at the heart of a number of these papers I want to remind you that the reason that painting which has been proclaimed dead so many times stays so alive is at least according to someone like Evelle Ambois that mourning allows for something that was in the past to continue forward with the history and with new conditions I also want to say that we've been banding about the word feminism again in a kind of unmoored way which I find interesting I myself often like to use Mary Kelly who's come up so many times today already with her very precise phrase that she likes to think about art and theory that is informed by feminism theory that is informed by feminism but also at a loss or perhaps acknowledging itself as a kind of loss those are my words not Kelly's but in a recent conversation with her we talked about the driving force of contemporary feminism being predicated on the fantasy of feminism this sort of way in which we consider our own links to feminism through a kind of identificatory process that's always somewhat not really there this utopian idea of a we which I think is invoked even in a panel like this one but also forcefully denied in so many ways and my question might be for some of these panelists what happens with this desire that speaks itself as already thwarted a notion of feminism as activism coalition collective building that in many ways we talk about but we're not sure what to do with in point of fact because so many of the at least second wave feminism was so clearly connected to the politics of the moment and we have a sort of question around how our politics and our feminism come together although it seems obvious in so many ways dispatched I think in the case studies by all of the panelists was this question of what feminism does whether the kind of questions of coalition building and collectives can be thought about but it was particularly interesting to me that those kind of links are made more visible in conversations around queer and transgender debates which is something that we may talk about later and interestingly though I think there was a kind of expansive notion around heterosexuality on the panel it kind of persisted as a paradigm that gets disrupted but still maintains itself in this way I would point back to somebody like a rig array who talks about feminism as jamming the machine and women having no place of their own Anna pointed to this question about place for or space for the woman she says that in point of fact what's interesting about theoretical discourse and it's writing where it is written is that women are reduced to space in which a man takes up physical and psychical occupation and I wondered particularly with your paper how you might think about the preoccupation with the man even in his displacement there is I think a reluctance not on this panel necessarily but just in general to speculate on what feminist representation would look like because of awareness to have a return to essentialism but I still think it would be interesting to consider this possibility in the way that someone like Diana fuss talks about motivated essentialism or Jacqueline Rose describes sexuality as a disturbance in the field of vision so not a representation per se but instead a disabling of its smooth operations and I think many of you pointed to this sort of operation yourselves today so what is recognized as feminism may not always operate as such or at least it may not look like feminism and that new ways of reimagining the context and purview are always necessary so in this way of course we usher in what could unfortunately be a total untangling of feminism and it's impossible in that way to give it a kind of identity of its own so I worry about going too far down that track and attributing a total lack of definition of relativism to how we think about feminism on the other hand if feminism is speculative urgent dialogue in which class race education and other kinds of ideas are brought in we have to allow it to have a certain porosity and finally before I give you a couple of questions yourselves I just want to think about how desire as complicated ambivalent and potentially critical maybe something to think about as well even in terms of papers that have the look or at least the feel of taking on what would seem to be lots of ideas of lack and loss again this new conservatism in which I think we reside requires how we rethink the enactment of power how it's produced what it looks like what Gramsci called a production of consent in certain kinds of work and to get to something that I think that was hinting at here how pedagogy is such an important part of feminism it's a handing off of ideas and a questioning of if we want a feminist canon or if feminism is the disrupting of the logic of cannons all together to this and I'm going to just turn quickly to Claire Grace who's very succinct and interesting paper took up questions of visibility and empowerment I think very well she points to Peggy Fallon's distinction between the marked and unmarked and I think very nicely problematizes either having ultimate potency that both have their dangers in this way I thought to have said he has heart Sadiya Hartman's refusal of visibility in her scenes of subjection which of course I'm also thinking about setter here as well but what is the politics of invisibility this is a just a kind of question how do we think and I think you began to ask this question if we understand it as reiterating a kind of invisibility that's already there how do we give it a kind of visibility counterintuitively you pointed out that interestingly we live in a moment where myths of mastery at least visual mastery are at an extremely high level even if for many of us deconstructive practices would seem to have done away with all of this and so I'm quest I'm wondering if the fragmented never complete view that mimicking that mimic surveillance taken up by Ackerman does it reveal these operations or simply reflect them again something that you started to talk about and an important element that you mentioned Claire how does this affect how does this affect art spectatorial operations differently or how do they actually operate within the gallery differently than they might in another context in addition how might we think about Ackerman's insistence on her own place within this kind of field via unstable narrative if you pause it as you do that fiction itself can take on a kind of subversive operation could you talk about how invisible protagonists as film makers or art makers as a kind of feminist refusal the gaze with no point of view no comprehensibility can still put forward a kind of tacit political thematization I'm also in terms of Patricia's paper happy to see a complication of the pleasure and repression paradigm one that we've of course thought about over the years a lot but of course insisting on explicit representation historically must be made I think very complicated in terms of how it operated before and how it operates now indeed even the assumption that all women share the common trait of a certain type of genitalia should be questioned I think masturbation also is characterized as a very heteronormative thing at least as it is put forward here one in which pleasure seeking and expansive production is put against a kind of ungenerous one that is in terms of a kind of biological paradigm conservative and heterosexual some have argued similarly in regard to homosexual sex there's a kind of ungenerosity I wanted to point to the bad girls exhibition from the early mid-1990s in terms of emin just to ask you if using the kind of recognizable and thus neutered modes of subversion as she does doesn't in fact allow us not to think difference but instead to access the very power structures by which she is trying to escape being repressed she brings up I think in her work many points about the repressive structures but also if one and this is my big question for for you and for emin if we think about emin as a feminist and she says she is one and we don't like her very much how do we think about our own position in terms of feminism and again every there may be many people here who love her but I know that there's a way in which there are kind of self-proclamations around feminism that may in fact make a kind of ambivalence within an audience and that's a question for you with Anna's paper I really responded quite a lot to this idea of the parasitical and I thought it was quite interesting I'm almost done I know that we have to hurry it along the parasitical in relationship to patriarchy but I kind of wondered along those lines if the parasitical is already patriarchal so if we could talk about that a little bit why must this I think kind of interestingly queer model that you put forward rely on heterosexual operations and a kind of romantic rejection in the way that it does isn't there more in your case studies than just a rejection of the white heterosexual man but more of a kind of rejection of the system which I think you're pointing to even Rizonte Mont in terms of kind of a Nichean philosophy has a certain heterosexuality to it as well here you point interestingly I think to self abasement and Wendy Brown's idea of the wounded attachment again all of these kind of issues of loss and sort of sadness and ripping open and you ask how do feminists recover and get a place of one's own and here again I would point back to a regret in a certain way in Virginia Wolf here I would ask about the fantasy of liberation that you're pointing us towards but wondering if it's so liberatory after all my question would be if we agree that there must be some logic of feminism to other elements and objects etc is this the only relationship that can be imagined even if it is reimagined as you do in other words the parasitical even when you turn it so precisely and again I really like it but I think even if you push the parasitical to the extreme and the parasite overcomes its host the host dies so I was curious about something that I'm interested in myself getting further inside the system while this can sound super new agey but like healing it so a notion of homeopathy for instance the wound has to stay intact yeah yeah so I'm just curious if you could talk about like a I'm gonna say words like positive and I don't I don't quite mean that moving on to Zeta this question of writing as ostensibly disembodied I think is very important you suggest that there's a way to perhaps re-embodied or perhaps even more interestingly suggest that writings always embodied and of course this has been purview of feminist theory for a very long time that the idea that writing is itself an embodied practice I think it's particularly interesting in terms of an intersection between between race and feminism because there's a sort of double indemnity at stake in this question your focus on the fear underlying your considerations of representation are interesting when I first read the paper I wasn't sure where you were going with it I thought it was sort of an interesting confession but in fact the anxiety around visibility that you confess to also seems to be a kind of methodology that there's a way in which you're saying that a kind of historicity around representation informs your current looking which is interesting and again to go back to someone like Sidiya Hartman who refuses to show images for fear that it will repeat it will not remind people will simply repeat the violence instead of asking for an analysis but this anxiety is not only I would ask you to respond to this the anxiety is not only a space of fear but also an awareness of history and a place where pedagogical and discursive stakes get played out as you yourself seem aware Audre Lorde's your silence will not protect you is particularly resonant in terms of your withholding Bartman image but she also goes on to say in another context and I think this is interesting that silence is lying it isn't just withholding it's actually a form of lying and in particular in terms of feminists she says that it's a way of withholding a kind of kinship or alliance which I find interesting in this regard and I wondered if you could talk about your anxiety about your students mixed reactions to McLean Thomas's work it seemed to me that that's what exactly you would want in a sense rather than having them all be such good students that they came up with exactly the same reaction to images that are themselves asking to be problematized in the way that you ultimately do so I guess my big question for you would be how do you maintain an anxious pedagogy and still have a little bit of pleasure too so those are my questions for you guys and I know we're past time but we started a bit late and things ran over so I'm just going to hope that folks from the audience and folks on the panel will want to have a brief conversation if that's helpful so thank you all for having me and listening to me too does anyone on on the panel want to start looks like you do those really great provocative questions can you guys hear me I can't help this is on okay the question of invisibility is one that is coming back to me and it's clearly something that's been in the history of art since I don't know at least the beginning of the 20th century and in some cases it has it's the most sort of memorable and historically significant cases Duchamp and Rodchenko it has it it eventuates their withdrawal from art world and from the practice of creating objects and I'm kind of at this place now actually in my thinking where I I'm not I'm not seeing a through line as you put it in the beginning I'm not seeing a way out necessarily and that goes for feminism and it goes for the production of objects in general and I think that's why I found this particular piece by Ackerman so compelling and I'm hoping that I find the way out at some point but I think that it is a really interesting thread that ran through most these presentations and through a lot of the scholarship that is happening right now the sense of anxiety around representation and I I'm not sure I I'm not sure where we'll be in ten years if we'll we'll still be thinking about that question or where it will take us in terms of this piece you you mentioned the condition of invisibility as it functions in art spectatorship and what what I found interesting about this piece is is the the trope of invisibility doesn't come through unless you spend three hours thinking about the piece because the 90 minute projection is so long and it takes a lot of time to to to appreciate it and so if you if you allow for that time you get to this place where not only is surveillance being resisted but also the kind of spectatorial gratification of art spectatorship is being resisted also because if we're with we're there to see the protagonist that protagonist is withdrawn from vision and we're frustrated and so that's kind of an interesting example of a kind of Rochenco-esque withdrawal on Ackerman's part and not not willing to take it to the next level but obviously grappling with that question and I know you brought up so many interesting points I'm not maybe I should let someone else pitch in. I have like a hundred things I want to say maybe I won't say a hundred but I want to hit a couple of things I think and then you guys just maybe jump in and we'll have a conversation because I don't want to say too much. Okay okay so you asked this question about why go to the whiteheader sexual example right like why why privilege that in and giving it in 20 minutes and I think that maybe the heterosexual romance is sort of like Gabrielle's zebra dress you know in the sense that like in the sense that you I can't I can't think about like dictating any kind of moralistic like I can't think about saying that there shouldn't be X, Y, Z like I can only think about saying maybe it can't be the only thing you have in your closet it has to be something among other things that are given space and time and I think that maybe this also gets to the negativity that the question of the negativity because really what I was trying to get at is and I think that this is what's so seductive about this figure of the parasite for me maybe for you is the way in which the parasite shores up the sort of symbiosis and the possibility of thinking an ecosystem and I think it can be I think it's difficult to think about an ecosystem that is a kind of hetero ecosystem right where it's kind of to kind of based on difference but really queering the idea of a kind of symbiosis or kind of the way that we maybe have to start to think about the way that we can't escape completely like I was talking about on the you know googling utopia is interesting because it's like this you know deferral of a kind of escape that is a kind of liberatory escape that might be possible but so I'm interested in you know the way in which we maybe can start to think about not getting outside of the system but rather seeing the system as sort of complexly intertwined where there's not just negativity but there's negativity really really intertwined with positivity intertwined with and I don't also I don't want to think about it in terms of the sort of the binary that the kind of logo centric binary you never get out of but the way that these things feed each other and it's not just like women's loss women's loss women's loss but men's loss people's loss trans loss and I think this also gets to the fragmentation thing which is I think maybe it's a really beautiful thing in the sense that what you think about the alternative to fragmentation would be what a kind of that would be the real anxiety I would think of the anxiety of trying to keep the thing that's whole that's unified and it's also interesting to think the way that negativity literally is the possibility of negative space within a kind of whole that would break it apart and maybe that gets us to the reflect the reflexive reflective thing that you gave us in the way that we can begin to think about a kind of model that that where pieces can reflect off of each other rather than just being you know this or this or this heterosexual you know straight you know white you know black you know what what have you so I hope that that maybe gets a couple of your questions on those are a couple of thoughts I had great we have and we're going to open it up to you guys in just a minute I just want to hear from both patrician and Zeta if you guys want to jump in and rule in response to perhaps two of your questions if we think emin is a feminist and we don't like her what does that mean and she is quite a polarizing figure in the art world and I think all the more power to her for that matter because what that does is it creates discourse and it fosters a sense of tolerance for feminists that aren't I guess traditional and I don't want to use that word but I'm going to for lack of a better term what that will do is it will cause you know all types of feminists and I think in the third wave collective term we're now seeing that there's a lot more focus on alternative feminisms it's not white middle class anymore like it predominantly was back in second wave times so I think that's a positive contribution that her personality and her art makes to society on the whole and if you could connect that to practical sort of modes and such we enjoy discussing on a theoretical level art and that's what we're here to do today but what this ultimately should lead to is our activity outside of the lecture hall and the museum so what I think an artist like emin can do by creating controversy and sort of creating discomfort amongst feminism is truly mobilized feminists to think about re approaching old ideas and old techniques and maybe working to figure out how we can invigorate what we've come to you know to term as you know feminism in today's climate okay you hear me yeah well I have anxiety issues so I write about my anxiety pretty often but you know it's interesting that I don't I don't think my students read it as anxiety and that is one of the things that worries me because I teach a course on gender terror and trauma in African-American culture and we focus for an entire semester on representations of lynching and other forms of racial violence that there there does become a way in which particularly because my students are mostly white and most don't identify as feminist that they come to understand black feminist cultural criticism as a way of insisting upon the victimization of black people which is important but I think I want to make sure that I I teach the way that I was trained which is that you lead with what you like and I want them to make sure that they can not be ashamed of the fact that they find pleasure in Beyonce because frankly I work with elementary school and teenage girls and if I say to them you know who do you think of as a feminist they say Beyonce right she's an independent strong sort of woman etc etc so when I come in and critique her it actually defeats my intent of kind of opening up feminism feminism still a whole bunch of younger people but I had students just last week or last month rather after we watched a film on I think it was called the souls of black girls and they said well you know what if I want to go to the club and shake my you know what if I want to do that and you know are you telling me I can't do that and I said no I'm not telling you you can't do that you can do the point of feminism is that you can do what you want to do with your own body but it would be irresponsible for me as an educator not to say that there are risks out there so it really is the anxiety is about finding that balance about opening things up and not shutting things down completely in any kind of way but possibly instilling a kind of anxiety in them not hypervigilance I'm not trying to traumatize them but and some of them were deeply traumatized by the lynching course which was interesting at a women's college that I had to take so many other precautions when teaching the course but ultimately the goal is not to deny pleasure or or exactly to they're deeply yes everything's allowed would anyone out there like to ask a question of the panel and sports what do you say it loud I actually I missed the last part of your question so what would I say about her what do you think about her lesbianism and her gender play and how it operates in her work especially the recent work the recent work okay well I meet mickleene and I mickleene Thomas and I were trying to connect so that I could interview her and I sent her a long list of questions and one of the questions was around sexual orientation and then I removed it because I wasn't sure that it was appropriate for me to broach the topic and I thought well if I do go to her studio and we start having a conversation in it becomes clear what my intentions are perhaps then I can bring it up but I do find it fascinating that she she in a sense she by centering the women she doesn't even just marginalize men from her art she excludes them all together and and so it isn't appropriate or even accurate to assume that every consumer of her art is male identified which is something I found that I was doing and I had been teaching Laura Mulvey a couple of weeks ago in my film class and that idea of objectification and to be looked at Ness and isn't there a way of of negotiating your consumption of an image and I thought about Jacqueline Bobo and what she said about black women as a group being able to extract meaning from mainstream texts even when those texts aren't meant to serve them or to please them and so I think that mickleene presents us with beauty and appeal and sexuality that is really quite open there aren't any limits on it and because she isn't explicitly saying like the way that I looked at the picture and thought that's for me that speaks to a kind of openness in terms of construction so that you don't it was inaccurate or unfair for me I think to posit her images as being the same as what we see on BET or what we saw in the black exploitation films which again I assumed were for the pleasure of men but they aren't only or exclusively and I think she really empowers all kinds of consumers by by making it as open as she does and figuring herself as a as a desiring woman as in the Afro-Goddess image as well. My question is about the relationship between autobiography and feminism you know of course many of the artists that we heard about in this panel either use autobiography or at least an autobiographical an autobiographic persona in their work and I think that actually I think that distinction is important so I guess autobiography and art informed by feminism but then also autobiography and feminist discourse because something that I've also I've noticed throughout the day is that many of the panelists presenters have used you know have drawn on personal experiences or anecdotes and framing their discussions which I think is interesting just as a rhetorical strategy and I'm wondering does anyone have thoughts is that something to do specifically with the topic that we're all here to think about. Okay I'll jump in. Well in my particular paper I think I go to performance as a way to sort of deal with the reading the sort of pitfalls of reading autobiography is authentic and yeah I definitely and I'd love to hear what you have to say Patricia just in terms of the relationship between the autobiographical and the autoerotic and in the way and maybe I'll maybe I'll make this about you and maybe if I can add to your question maybe I don't want to change your question but I would add the way that maybe maybe there's something to be asked about pleasure and autobiography and in the way that masturbation kind of complicates all of these all these questions that we're already asking when we're trying to talk about self-pleasure and and performing self-pleasure and how that maybe changes things and also maybe the way that masturbation isn't whether you can kind of clear that through performance I don't know do you have thoughts? I do maybe not necessarily about masturbation anymore but certainly autobiography and confessionalism I'm first and foremost a literature scholar so I work in modes of poetry confessional poetry which is a plot problematic term personally but I think one that is helpful when you read these sort of you know Sylvia Plath and Sexton Robert Lowell type poems with the I it's very seductive right it sucks you in because it's it's a very personal motive discourse it feels like you're being directly addressed like you're part of the work and I feel that with feminism in particular with female artists there is that sort of level and mode of identification that occurs I think especially if you're searching for different ways to express yourself or different ways to assert complicated identities it's really I feel liberating in a way to be confronted with this type of art and to sort of understand that there is space for you out there and there's space for you to sort of indulge yourself right we're often told that the too much information keep it to yourself and I think that it's actually liberating powerful to understand that using the eye and being personal confessing transgressions can be a political act I think but it's also interesting how that gets racialized right like in your paper the way that white women seem to be moving in a direction of like exposure exposure exposure in sort of performance practices and then the way that you are kind of posing I think certain questions about anxiety is about that I think you were talking about with Gabrielle again you are worried because there was so much exposure mm-hmm well there's a way in which if it is Joanna was saying if it's not self-reflexive then it's simply narcissistic and we really that doesn't help anybody and when you belong to a dominant group and you're dominating space taking up I I I talking about your experience I think it's necessary to also reflect and say who am I excluding by running my mouth so much you know whose voice is not being heard do we have time for one last question going back to the sir Bartman issue friend of mine does a lot of work on sir Bartman and one of the things she did is went back and asked some Koisang people what the historical understanding the sir Bartman was next and went to a professor whose Koisang which is the group that sir Bartman comes to sort of wrote the first dissertation on sir Bartman from the Koisang perspective and from the Koisang perspective one of the things that they found is the same friend was actually my wife wrote she wrote an essay on Susan Lloyd Park's understanding of sir Bartman and one of the things having studied the Koisang understanding one of the things that she came to find is that a lot of the African-American perception of sir Bartman re-inscribed the same Western racism that was already there in other words things like her being a prostitute were not real at all things like her having signed a contract to go do this work in London was not real at all things like her having the extended labia were not real at all because that particular group doesn't practice any of these things so the thing that was interesting in hearing the discussion is that you had mentioned sir Bartman but when it came back to the discussion of bodies it came to African-American women and kind of skipped all the other women of color who sort of no matter what kind of are left with whatever happens under the table after these presentations in America in other words it's very easy to present a leopard skin as an or a zebra skin as an intellectual here who can then jump off the table and go back into being a professor etc but there's another woman who's bearing the brunt of that gaze somewhere else without a PhD without an education and it's still being that's reinscribing that for her in what's quote called the third world and I just want you to speak to if that complexity is something that you're thinking about because I fully understand your need to be very selective about that exposure partially because we're referring to things that we haven't even studied completely yet we're looking at sir Bartman but we haven't even come to a complete understanding of what that episode was or even gone back as black people to the black people who went through that experience and asked them what it meant to them yeah well I think there are different projects I don't think Susan Laurie Parks was trying to represent historical truth I think she was actually toying with and complicating that idea that there is no way really to go back and ascertain absolutely for certain what happens because we would have to have had Sarah Bartman speaking in her own voice and I would just say that having a PhD doesn't protect me from anything it is certainly a privilege and I have access to certain spaces but I mean we could have a whole panel on what it's like to be a black woman in the academy there was just a conference last month on what that's like so I don't purport to speak for all black women everywhere and certainly diaspora is complicated there are continuities there are competing conflicting experiences I was speaking to the ways in which I would agree with you in that Sarah Bartman has become a kind of symbol for African American feminists that sometimes is not complicated enough because she is symbolic and then she therefore loses some of her own specificity but again it's hard to access that it's great that your wife went and talked to the Khoisan but I'm not sure that even in her research she would be able to know exactly what it was like for Sarah Bartman in the moment of her existence in the late 18th and early 19th century so what I thought Susan Lori Parks was trying to do why I teach her play is that she's complicating first of all she's presenting it as a fictional narrative she's telling it she's playing with time and linearity by telling it backwards and she makes the Venus into a figure that is not wholly likable or sympathetic and that to me is extraordinarily daring because the ways in which Sarah Bartman has been used by many African American feminists or scholars or intellectuals is that she is figured as the ultimate victim and to say that it's possible that this woman similar to Josephine Baker had choices demonstrated her own agency for Susan Lori Parks potentially participated in her own exploitation those are really complicated ideas that ultimately I think assert the humanity of the person rather than this overriding objection or victimization so I don't purport to speak for all black women everywhere I think you're right that the discourse around Sarah Bartman and the spectacularization of the black female body impacts different people in different ways but that's what it is it is complicated so thank you for pointing out that it is complicated I agree maybe as one last expansion on this point because I think it's interesting who's called upon who to in terms of representation as though I mean this question brings up this this question that I think has been kind of hovering throughout these papers and even earlier that that when you tell one story there's an expectation for a kind of fidelity to a history and every one of the papers here has problematized that and asked for certain attention to be paid to the kind of theoretical or speculative work that actually happens and think about it as a place where thinking happens and I wondered if you could talk just for a second about Chantal Uckerman in this way which is to say that she's precisely not trying to speak for the subjects that she's keeping sort of out of the frame as it were so could you just say what it is you think you know the kinds of misinterpretations of her work are kind of interesting in this respect as well perhaps I'm just thinking of somebody who's who's spent so many decades thinking about a kind of identificatory strategies and this particular project that you talk about operates somewhat differently from some of the earlier ones and I thought maybe you'd have something to say about that or anything else I just want to I want to get you to say one more thing I'm just gonna be transparent about it I really want to hear one more time from Claire nothing is coming up directly in terms of Chantal Uckerman's work or this piece in particular I mean I think it's it's a withdrawal to represent a subject that interests her but that is obviously extremely complicated for her and she's not willing to lapse into kind of representational mode that she has such questions about so her strategy for doing that is to show a blank screen and I don't know where that takes us but it's it's something that that she's left us with and maybe it's pre-feminism yeah maybe interestingly the work that she made most recently since this project is it's called Seven Women in Antwerp I think and it's a gigantic screen so sensual beautiful incredible close-up portrait of these seven women standing on the street corner in various in various ways in various modes of experience daily experience and there's no dialogue or anything and it's it's sort of the inverse of this project and that it it fills the screen with a sensual display of women and I'm not sure what what her steps were between the two projects but it's interesting so I guess with that we should close thank you all so much thank you panelists I also just wanted to thank everyone who presented today and to all of you who came the museum remains open until six o'clock so please it doesn't give you a lot of time but please stay and enjoy the rest of the day thanks