Characters: JOANNA:
Usually we uh start out bitching but maybe if we’re lucky we can
get into something a bit more constructive... NARRATOR: In art collectives, consciousness raising sessions and political meetings, women began to examine the specific terms of their collective and individual circumstances. [Visuals: cut to shots of the cakes, one is a Barbie cake, the dress is a cake.] JOANNA: I think there are times when Walter cares more about the law than he does about me, and that can hurt. CHARMAINE: I don’t think that uh, I don’t think that uh Ed ever loved me. I mean uh. He married me because I looked right it made a big impression on the other TV executives for his wife to look like I look. (loud breath, perhaps tears) He never loved me. KIT: I didn’t bake anything yesterday. It took me so long to get the upstairs floor to shine, I didn’t have any time to bake. JOANNA:
Well you don’t have to bake Kit, there’s no law NARRATOR: It was hard for them to come up with a new language, it was hard for them to rewrite history. [Visuals: The Barbie cake is reconstructed from a plate of crumbs to a complete cake because footage is shown in reverse.] They challenged the gender roles they had been taught to adhere to. [Visuals: cuts to CHARMAINE staring at herself in the mirror, tying up her hair and applying a fake mustache and cowboy hat. This refers to performances by Ana Mendieta and Eleanor Antin.] They explored stereotypes of the so-called masculine and the so-called feminine. [Visuals: Cut to CHARMAINE dressed as a cowboy with a codpiece in her pants. Dissolve to a shot of CHARMAINE doing her make-up and being ultra feminine.] They participated in female self-objectification, as a method for describing who they thought they were and what they thought they were expected to be. [Visuals: JOANNA and CHARMAINE are sewing a vagina made of fluffy ruffles. Shot transitions to MARIA dressed as Valie Export in her piece Genital Panic.] SCENE
ONE, Part II: MARIA: You know, I’m looking’ at this guy right, and I looked at him a lot before. [Cut to MARIA as Export.] So now I know that I have this little piece of him actually in me, physically in me, and it makes me feel completely different I don’t know sort of special or something. [Cut back to MARIA in group.]I’m talkin’ to him and I realize that he doesn’t actually see me and I’m wondering what it was he was seeing when we did this. I go over it in my head. And now I know what it was he was seeing. It’s really simple. He’s seeing my legs. He’s seeing my breasts, my ass, my mouth. [Cut to MARIA as Export.] He’s seeing my cunt. [Cut back to MARIA in group.] (Pause) How could I have been so stupid? That’s really all there is to see, isn’t it? NURSE: That’s not true. MARIA: I don’t know. NURSE:
That’s not true and you know it. JUDY
CHICAGO: [lounging in a bathtub, covered with bubbles, she
speaks into a bright blue telephone receiver.) What is cunt? We have
definitions of ourselves by men. Cunt is passive. Cunt is receptacle.
Cunt is vessel. Cunt is giver is giver of all rewards and blessings. Mother.
Cunt is is is is…Cunt is evil, demonic, will swallow you up. Those
are all projections, fantasy projections, but what we have to do is we
have to seize our own cunts, grasp it firmly in our hands and proceed
to announce what it is. Announce that it, that it’s real, that it’s
alive that it’s aggressive, that it’s outgoing. Ya know, that
it looks like this, that it needs this, that it has this kind of dimension.
And what does that mean? That means to really take control of our own
identity as women. NARRATOR:
They wanted to understand their real situation as women. They
sought consciousness as to who and what they were in political, social,
sexual, emotional and economic terms. SCENE
FIVE: ANN:
[talking into a yellow telephone that matches her dress] It’s
like, it’s like I’ve been reborn, It’s like all my life
until this very moment I was nothing and now I’m alive, fulfilled.
Now I know what it means to be a woman. |
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©
Oriana Fox 2004 |
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