A Face in the Crowd

 

"A girl looks on among Afghan women lining up to receive relief assistance, during the holy month of Ramadan
in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, June 11, 2017." Photo credit: Parwiz/REUTERS (found here).

ICC issues arrest warrants for Taliban leaders over persecution of women and girls

"THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants Tuesday for the Taliban’s supreme leader and the head of Afghanistan’s Supreme Court on charges of persecuting women and girls since seizing power nearly four years ago.

The warrants also accuse the leaders of persecuting “other persons nonconforming with the Taliban’s policy on gender, gender identity or expression; and on political grounds against persons perceived as ‘allies of girls and women.’”

***

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of colour remains chained. Nor is any one of you.”

- Poet Audre Lorde via Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.

I think we've all been waiting a long time to hear news like this, but I suspect the women living in Afghan (and other countries in which women are denied full autonomy)  have been waiting far longer... and with an urgency most of us have experienced to a lesser degree. One should keep in mind that all things are relative and this gap is always in danger of closing... and, I don't think there is one woman or feminine person who is not in some way aware of it. It is embedded in the feminine morphic field (along with many other fears). 

But, if there has been any good news this year, this is surely it! Take heart; some good may come of it... keeping in mind that the wheels of justice seem to turn very slowly these days.

Also see: Afghan women face near total social, economic and political exclusion.

Artful Resistance: How Afghan Women are Wielding Art Against the Taliban

New! A thoughtful reader just sent me this sobering link. Think you live in a free world? Guess again. (Thanks Bella!)

What Is Modern Slavery: A Comprehensive Research

"Over 49.6 million people (0.61% of the global population) are subjected to modern slavery, surpassing the populations of around 200 countries."

Digging Up Women for International Women's Day (#people+uterus)*

A 20th century Antique beaded purse found in an Etsy shop.

__________________________________________

Like many women, I find I have to steal time in order to create. I've stolen a lot of time in my day... but, despite my efforts to fashion a life around my creativity, I find that I continue to feel as if I am forced to steal time.

I stole time to write this post... have to steal more time to complete it. I am a woman. By a long-held tradition my time is not my own... especially if I chose to be a mother, a wife, or a caregiver... or a woman trying to survive. But, as life would have it, in some way all women are in danger of becoming sacrificial lambs.

But, maybe, not all.

Inset left is a blade fashioned from quartz crystal. Thousands of years ago it belonged to a woman we now refer to as the Ivory Lady. I wonder about her times. I wonder if her time was her own. It may have been.

And, so, sisters, with this tiny light in mind we'll tip our hats to our singular allotted day, International Woman's Day... which, in terms of this foreword was yesterday. Oddly enough, during the past two days, the Global Day of Unplugging took place. Talk about really bad timing... was the date chosen deliberately to undermine and inconvenience women?

In which case, I guess we may as well take a few days for ourselves. 3's the charm.

This post goes out to all the archaeologists - especially the women - who made it possible or even feasible. As a little girl, I used to like to dig holes in the back yard when allowed. What was I digging for? I never really asked. Perhaps, I was looking for the vestiges of another little girl... who lived long ago... and made things.

(Make every day women's day.)

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Huge Collection of 270,000 Beads Unearthed in Copper Age Tomb in Spain

“Beads are a widespread and pervasive element of material culture produced by Homo sapiens, ”the study authors noted. “As excellent indicators of technology, social organization, exchange patterns, and even beliefs, beads are a topic of research in their own right.”

"Each was made by shaping a single seashell and boring a hole through its center. The huge number represents the largest single-burial assemblage of beads ever found in any grave site."

Buried in more than 270,000 beads, grave reveals women’s power 5,000 years ago

"The team found the majority of the beads in a large chamber of the Montelirio tomb, which held the remains of 20 people, including 15 women and five individuals whose sex wasn’t determined. A smaller chamber where two women were buried also contained beads.

... The researchers identified what they believe to be threaded beads that could have formed two full-body beaded tunics, skirts and other clothes or cloths of undetermined shape."

“They would have been extremely glittery under the sunlight and that would have been a very powerful effect to see these women standing in front of a crowd performing whatever rituals they were in charge of performing.”

***

Before the advent of the photographic image, artists and artisans provided visual documentation of their times. Regarding very ancient times such as the Copper Age, artifacts (and bones) are generally all that remain.

The featured artifact in this archaeological story is the humble bead; not one, but over 2 hundred thousand of them! Many of them were found draped over and around a group of 15 female skeletons in a prehistoric Spanish tomb - Tholos de Montelirio - near to that of the so-called Ivory Lady (who was originally determined to be male). Apparently, there are 5 additional bodies whose genders have yet to be determined because their bones were crushed.

But, while the beads and the majority of bones withstood the test of time, merely a few scraps of fabric were in evidence and while the beads are thought to have decorated clothing, there are few clues as to how the clothing was really fashioned... or what the beaded garments represented. What we can determine is that they were expensive and time consuming to create. And, by this, we can deduce that the entombed women were highly regarded; they were special in some way.

Many of the beads were created from scallop shells... which may have been devotionals for a marine goddess such as Aphrodite, Astarte, Ishtar, or the moon goddess Innana to whom the hymn excerpt (below) was addressed.

__________________________________________

"The day is auspicious,

The priestess is clothed

in beautiful robes,

In womanly beauty,

As in the light of the rising moon."

- Via Enheduanna's Hymn to Innana (c. 2300 BC), reposted from an earlier Woman's Day article.

__________________________________________

And, there are some reasons to believe that the women were priestesses. For one, it would explain why they were all interred in one tomb, sporadically, over a period of years.

Then, too, we are given an interesting description of one of the bodies...

(Continued below the jump...)

The Master's House and The Tower Card

The Master's House

(In memory of A. Lorde)

The Master's house is in disrepair;

the seals have been broken.

Rats are in the walls.

Pigeons shit on the front stoop.

There's a hole in the roof

bats fly through...

Windows with glass teeth

where weeds wind through.

Echoes of screams

in the living room.

Grey ash fills the corners;

 all four:

riders on horseback,

all dead.

- 2023, DS 

- My poem owes a nod to Audre Lorde's 1984 essay: The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House. Another line from that article:

"Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women."

- Image: Les Quatre Chevaliers de l'Apocalypse - ink on paper - 1937, André Fougeron. Tate Museum, UK.

***

“Empires and churches are born under the sun of death.”

- A line from Albert Camus', The Fall.

"Whereas the Death card is usually the card people are terrified of, out of all of the cards in the deck, The Tower is the one you really need to brace yourself for. The Tower Tarot card represents chaos and destruction. It is the Major Arcana card of sudden upheaval and unexpected change. This change usually is scary, life changing and often unavoidable. A negative Tower event can be akin to a bomb going off in your life. You don’t know how you will survive but somehow you will and later you will realize that while it was a tremendously difficult thing to go through and you wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy, it has made you into the person you are. One positive aspect of The Tower is that the destruction it brings is usually directed at something that was built on a false beliefs and foundations or unrealistic goals and dreams. Also on the bright side, the destruction The Tower brings is always followed by renewal and creation."

- Excerpt from a tarot page found here.

"So what does it mean to call the tower card "The Foundation of Beauty?" Simply put, those possessing true inner beauty will reach the crown, Kether, and their spiritual goals. Here is the realm of creative fantasy, a place of refuge from the harsh "realities" of the earth sphere. Through the Tower, the seeker casts aside false ideas and thoughts about herself or her world. The seeker will discover her true path, the path leading to emotional and spiritual fulfillment. However, like the pictures on the Tower card, the way to the path can be violent and chaotic. Reed likens the experience of the Tower card to having the top of your head lifted and a lightning bolt striking through your brain and down to your toes. It is a searing light that burns into your deepest heart and shows you the imperfections there. It shows how much you have to learn, and by comparison, how little you have learned. It goes through your feet and makes a hole in the ground that you very much want to crawl into."

- Excerpt from this Llewellyn "Tower" page.

***

This post is, more or less, an addendum to my previous post: Dancing with the Ghost of Albert Camus wherein I describe my own "Tower moment" using the image above (inset right).

It is one of the earliest "Tower" cards - from The Tarot of Marseille deck - but, as we can see, it's actual name is "La Maison Dieu" or God House, which was, in the Middle Ages a hospital-monastery intended to accommodate pilgrims. (See this tarot forum page.) Perhaps the original symbolism of the card was, likewise, somewhat different.

Needless to say, there are towers... and, then, there are towers... and there are masters... and, then, there are masters.

Dancing With the Ghost of Albert Camus

Dancing with Ghosts - cell phone photo - 2023, DS.

“At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.”

- Albert Camus, The Stranger

(I am being inundated with politics these days... and politics is not my place. My place is culture. My place is my artist's meditative Zone... where politics with its conflict, chaos, ignorance, violence, tyranny, & lies are, in general, not welcome.

Unfortunately, politics are as inescapable as the current heat wave this summer.

 I am now staying in Albuquerque. It appears to be a strangely unpopulated place... or, rather, a thinly populated ghost town. There are rarely people on the streets unless they're homeless. And, yet, there are lines and lines of cars on its dusty roads... passing through? I don't know. I'm still a stranger in New Mexico... a refugee although I've lived here for 8 years. There are places in the world in which you can never be anything but a stranger, but, there are people who can never be anything but strangers, too.

On the other hand, 3 nights ago, the 4th of July (Independence Day), I couldn't get to any official pyrotechnic events, but the locals put on their own unofficial fireworks display - the People's Display - with some fairly sophisticated rockets... which lasted for hours. I watched from a window over the patio as they shot up across the horizon... and I felt quite patriotic; a feeling I rarely have...especially these days... that is, unless disgust and anger are symptoms of patriotism. Maybe, in a sense they are. It means you care. 

My current "backyard" - which really isn't mine - consists of a small fenced-in patio with very little green to be seen... but, upon closer inspection, enough green to support a small colony of grasshoppers! It's these little bits of natural life which anchor me to the corporeal world. Like the juvenile grasshopper - inset left - they bring me joy and, unlike everything else clamoring for my time and effort, they're refreshingly tangible and real. And, if you pay attention to them, they'll reward you in many ways. For instance, you can learn things. I learned that grasshoppers grow in a similar way to caterpillars. That is, they shed their skins to become much larger creatures... which somehow were illogically enfolded inside their former selves; a magic trick more interesting, more satisfying than you might imagine.

(7/24/23 Note: After a number of moults, the grasshopper became large, brown... and developed wings. While not as attractive as a butterfly it, too, transforms into a flying creature.)

In the photo, posted above, I am standing in the center of the patio on what is fondly referred to as the "launch pad." I appear to be dancing with myself. In reality I'm dancing with ghosts. Perhaps, I, too, have become a ghost... unconsciously haunting my own past...)

In this (brief) dream  I am in the house of my childhood... but, it is not not exactly the place I lived, for it has changed. Or, I should say, it has changed again. The first time it changed - in a long ago dream - a hidden room was revealed... positioned between my old bedroom and what was (in reality) a fairly unusual hallway featuring an array of closets, recesses, drawers and other enclosures. It was a phantom room but, in my sleeping mind, seemed both valid and logical.

I dreamt about this phantom room several times over the years. Its dimensions became an actual memory, as if it had always existed... somehow tucked away... enfolded in the recesses of a closet or at the bottom of a cluttered drawer.

In the latest dream, however, a screened-in porch had been added to the second floor of the family house...  in the front and, once again, where my bedroom was once located. It was accessed indoors from a newly created hallway... call it an Escher hallway, because it's position in the corporeal house was not (logically) possible. It was a phantom hallway... with another phantom construction nearby: the previously-mentioned "hidden room." I vaguely remember passing what may have been its potential doorway as I walked down the phantom hallway towards the phantom porch.

Now, the actual house was surrounded by tall trees: silver beech along the back, two enormous red maples in the front and a wall of massive pines. In the dream, they still existed. But, through the floor-to-ceiling screened apertures which composed the new porch, the trees were now fully visible, as if viewed from a treehouse.

The dream ended just as I entered the bright doorway and stepped into the screened enclosure. This, too, had a door, with stairs leading down to the ground below... a feature I may have consciously added in the process of waking up.

- From a note file created in May of this year. The addition of the porch was a fine dream-construction; an economical plan to let the outdoors in while also providing a third door - the house had two already - from which to escape. When I awoke from the dream, I felt refreshed. Perhaps, it was a metaphor for a new unconscious development and it felt like a positive one.

Which, is to say, it represented no part of my present-day physical reality but, rather, a vacation from it.

***

“Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.”

- Albert Camus (1913-1960), Notebooks 1951-1959. Camus was a French-Algerian writer, journalist, playwright, and philosopher and is most often considered an Absurdist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957.

My first introduction to Camus was in my art school days. I read The Stranger and it depressed me. Maybe I glimpsed my own future. Recently I read an online article regarding absurdist philosophy and in it I rediscovered Camus. I spent that night reading pages and pages of his quotes which exhilarated me; astoundingly, I could relate to just about everything he said. Via the Wiki entry for Absurdism:

"Absurdists, following Camus' formulation, hesitantly allow the possibility for some meaning or value in life, but are neither as certain as existentialists are about the value of one's own constructed meaning nor as nihilists are about the total inability to create meaning. Absurdists following Camus also devalue or outright reject free will, encouraging merely that the individual live defiantly and authentically in spite of the psychological tension of the Absurd."

The odd thing is, while I feel sympathetic towards Absurdism, my personal experience would require something a bit beyond it... Uber-Absurdism? I'm not sure.

"The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point

where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold.

It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism." - Albert Camus

Qualifying Feminism: Empowerment and the Arts (Part IV)

The late, great sculptress Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) and her sculpture Fillette in
a 1982 portrait by the brilliant (and often-censored) photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
(Click-on post images for actual sizes.)

(Update as of August 3, 2019: Originally this article was referred to as "Part 3b" of what I had intended to be a 3 part series. This has changed. It is now Part 4 of a 7 part series. My apologies for any confusion - DS.)

“'I am lucky to have been brought up by a mother who was a feminist and fortunate enough to have married a husband who was a feminist, and I have raised sons who are feminists,' Germaine Greer quoted her as saying in The Guardian, not long after Bourgeois’ death in 2010. The artist, famous for her mammoth sculptures of spiders, pointedly leaves herself out of the list, insinuating not a rejection of the -ism, necessarily, but perhaps a bit of condescension toward critics eager to associate her with the term, no matter her opinions.

Bourgeois does owe a lot to the feminist movement. Born in Paris in 1911, she spent many of her early years known merely as the wife of Robert Goldwater, the American art historian with whom she moved to New York in the late 1930s. Though she drew, painted, sculpted and printed throughout the 1940s and ‘50s, Bourgeois didn’t receive real art world attention until her 50s. She had to wait more than a few years before she moved from the periphery of art critics’ minds to somewhere closer to the center. During that time, the feminist movement was blooming."

- Excerpt from a December 25 (Bourgeois' birthday), 2017 Huffington Post article by Katherine Brooks entitled A Love Letter To Louise Bourgeois, A Feminist Icon Whether She Likes It Or Not. Inset right is one of Bourgeois' "mammoth spiders."

"O'Keeffe, whose comfort with her sexuality is evident in the nude photographs taken of her by her husband Alfred Stieglitz, was not comfortable with the way that the paintings were interpreted as erotic images. This may have more to do with the degrading ways that the paintings were discussed. Stieglitz marketed her flower paintings in sexual terms, including quotes from men who were influenced by Stieglitz's viewpoints. She asked her friend, Mabel Dodge Luhan, to write of her work from a feminine perspective to counter interpretations by men.

Judy Chicago gave O'Keeffe a prominent place in her The Dinner Party (1979) in recognition of what many prominent feminist artists considered groundbreaking introduction of sensual and feminist imagery in her works of art, seeing it as a sign of female empowerment."

- From the Wiki entry for Flower Paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe. Inset left is an O'Keeffe orchid found there. Inset right is an element from Judy Chicago's tribute to O'Keeffe: a dinner plate from her ground-breaking, 1979 feminist art installation, The Dinner Party.

"I thought you could write something about me that men can't – What I want written – I do not know – I have no definite idea of what it should be. – but a woman who has lived many things and who sees lines and colors as an expression of living – might say something that a man can't – I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore – Men have done all they can do about it. Does that mean anything to you – or doesn't it?"

- American artist, Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), from a 1925 letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan found in the Wiki entry (linked above). Inset left is a photograph of O'Keefe by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz.

"Louise Nevelson has been a fundamental key in the feminist art movement. Credited with triggering the examination of femininity in art, Nevelson challenged the vision of what type of art women would be creating with her dark, monumental, masculine and totem-like artworks. Nevelson believed that art reflected the individual, not "masculine-feminine labels", and chose to take on her role as an artist, not specifically a female artist. Reviews of Nevelson's works in the 1940s wrote her off as just a woman artist. A reviewer of her 1941 exhibition at Nierendorf Gallery stated: "We learned the artist is a woman, in time to check our enthusiasm. Had it been otherwise, we might have hailed these sculptural expressions as by surely a great figure among moderns." Another review was similar in its sexism: "Nevelson is a sculptor; she comes from Portland, Maine. You'll deny both these facts and you might even insist Nevelson is a man, when you see her Portraits in Paint, showing this month at the Nierendorf Gallery."

Even with her influence upon future generations of feminist artists, Nevelson's opinion of discrimination within the art world bordered on the belief that artists who were not gaining success based on gender suffered from a lack of confidence. When asked by Feminist Art Journal if she suffered from sexism within the art world, Nevelson replied "I am a woman's liberation."

- Sourced from the Wikiwand entry for Louise Nevelson. Inset right above is a portrait of Nevelson by Richard Avedon. Inset left is her 1985 piece, Mirror-Shadow VIII.

"The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem."

"Patriarchy both creates the rage in boys and then contains it for later use, making it a resource to exploit later on as boys become men. As a national product, this rage can be garnered to further imperialism, hatred and oppression of women and men globally. This rage is needed if boys are to become men willing to travel around the world to fight wars without ever demanding that other ways of solving conflict can be found.”

- A quote from feminist (and wise woman), bell hooks, (found here). Her photograph was sourced here. And, here's her blog (last updated September 29, 2016.)

(Update, April 8, 2019: I've just added a quote from a Vietnam vet that supports hooks' insight. It can be found in a footnote at the end of the post. I've also added another quote by hooks.)

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The Newer Woman

Well, I guess the operative question is: what became of the New Woman? Did she simply morph into a Newer Woman?

No, not exactly. Two world wars got in the way. And, by the end of the second one, patriarchal society reasserted itself once again. The upshot is (in as few words as possible), after the disastrous effects of toxic-masculinity-in-action (i.e., war and genocide) depleted the world's population by millions (upon millions) of humans; the world's "little ladies" were obligated to return to the confines of the home, and dedicate their lives to what nature (and the state) intended: motherhood. In reality, the war machine needed new blood (literally) and more human fodder, the bloated corporate sector needed fresh regiments of gullible consumers, and the government needed its tax revenue which, in the form of new taxpayers (requiring new Social Security numbers) it was a patriotic citizen's "duty" to provide. Women were expected to push more and more babies out of their wombs (and purchase the latest soap-powder) while men were obliged to finance the whole deal (or die trying).*

Needless to say, the New Woman movement lost much of its momentum during the post-war years of the mid-1900s. But, then, in (almost) Karmic retaliation, the Baby Boomer generation was spawned. And, the Baby Boomers, in turn, beget the 60s... a time when pretty much all the best-laid plans of white mice and white men went straight to hell. Well, at least, for a decade or two. It was as if, suddenly, all the King's horses, vassals and concubines no longer gave a hoot about putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, but, instead, decided to make an omelet (with his remains) which all might share... regardless of race, religion, nationality, gene-pools or gender. And, it was from this mighty upheaval that second-wave feminism was born.

This is not to say that all females of artistic persuasion were driven underground during the post-war period. No, the feminist spirit was kept alive by a number of female artists who had been born later in the time-frame, at the very end of the 19th century. Many of these women also gravitated to Paris, and it is their artwork which illuminates this section.

First in line: the 1939 painting, Rhythm Colour no. 1076,  by Ukrainian-born French artist Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979)  - above, inset left - who co-founded Orphism (a form of cubism) with her more celebrated husband, French artist, Robert Delauney. Wiki tells us that "she was the first living female artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre in 1964."

As it was, she was one of four female artists initially considered Cubists and one of three who survived the wars to witness the next wave of feminism in bloom. The one Cubist who tragically missed the new resurgence was Spanish artist María Blanchard (1881-1939), whose 1916 painting Composición cubista appears next (above, inset right). Above, inset left, is Composition cubiste by Polish painter Alice (or Alicja) Halicka (1894-1975), while (directly) inset right is a portrait of artist Diego Rivera by Russian-born (Cubist-turned-pointillist) Marie Bronislava Vorobyeva-Stebelska (1892-1984)... also known as Marevna. Of note: in 1919 Marevna gave birth to a daughter fathered by Rivera who, as we know, later married (Patron Saint) Frida Kahlo. More of Marevna's work can be found here.

Speaking of Patron Saints, there was another, German-American visionary and Transcendentalist artist, Agnes Pelton (1881–1961), who can be counted among the women who appear here. Her Patron Saint article is here. Her 1939 painting below, Sea Change, was sourced from a Whitney Museum of American art page. As it was, Pelton was one of two female artists asked to join the Transcendentalist Painting Goup, the other was Florence Miller Pierce (1918-2007). You can find her work here.

And, then, in the latter years of the 19th century, something marvelous occurred... and the 19th century dealt us one of its last cards: an American pioneer, an artist who, living for almost 100 years (1887-1986), would take us into the 20th century and beyond, finally setting the record straight for all female artists while inspiring countless others (myself included). That is, yes, women could be innovators in the art world, and yes, women could be masters at their craft, and, most definitely, women could contribute to the human footprint sans the obligatory "baby-bump." Her name was Georgia Totto O'Keeffe and she broke every rule in the book, besting the men at their own game without batting an eyelash. She is, in fact, Trans-D's missing Patron Saint #12... but, if I never get to her, know that I meant to. Of all her prolific work she is best known for her massive flower paintings (Inset left is Red Canna (1924); another painting is below the jump); organic marvels of which she said: “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.” 

Qualifying Feminism: Empowerment and the Arts (Part II)

A poster in a London bus station featuring an image by the artist Egon Schiele.
The banner, however - strategically plastered over the figure's pubic area -

was not of the artist's device. See here or here.
(All images in this post can be clicked-on to enlarge.)

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The C-Word: Censorship

“Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.”

- Egon Schiele, Austrian painter (June 12, 1890 - October 31, 1918).

"The purging wave seems to know no bounds. The poster of an Egon Schiele nude is censored; calls are made for the removal of a Balthus painting from a museum on grounds that it’s an apology for pedophilia; unable to distinguish between the man and his work, Cinémathèque Française is told not to hold a Roman Polanski retrospective and another for Jean-Claude Brisseau is blocked. A university judges the film Blow-Up, by Michelangelo Antonioni, to be "misogynist" and "unacceptable." In light of this revisionism, even John Ford (The Searchers) and Nicolas Poussin (The Abduction of the Sabine Women) are at risk."

- Via an English translation of one of the more coherent passages from the notorious "#MeToo" backlash letter published in Le Monde earlier this year, written and signed by 100 French women-of-note, up to and including Catherine Deneuve. The original document (in French) can be found here and, in English, here. Inset left is the  painting under scrutiny at that time, Thérèse Dreaming.

"As with previous awareness raising campaigns, it is not unlikely that the backlash will snowball and that the deeply entrenched patriarchal mechanisms that have maintained sexism for centuries will reassert themselves. That is after all how the system has survived to date. It is also all too likely that we will all — men and women — soon grow weary of allegations of sexual harassment as we have done in the past, making #MeToo a distant memory, a bud that did not blossom into long-lasting structural change. As Jessa Crispin writes in her manifesto about why she is not a feminist, popular social movements must, by their very nature, be “banal… non-threatening, and ineffective.” This underscores the problem with movements propelled by hashtags and celebrities."

- Excerpted from the Public Seminar article The Many Faces of the #MeToo Backlash, written by Maryam Omidi.

"In an angry riposte, French feminists described the letter’s signatories as “apologists for rape” and “defenders of paedophiles”, a reference to Deneuve’s vigorous support of the French-Polish film director Roman Polanski, convicted of raping a 13-year-old girl.

'There’s nothing really new in the arguments they use; they’re like the embarrassing colleague or tired uncle who doesn’t understand what’s happening,' a group of feminists wrote in an open letter of their own to French radio."

- Regarding a backlash against the former backlash via this article. Inset left is a still from Repulsion, a Roman Polanski film starring Catherine Deneuve (pictured) as a woman who kills two men, one of whom sexually assaulted her. As one might expect, Deneuve's character is portrayed as psychologically deranged (i.e., violence of men is expected and often applauded in a patriarchal society, violence in women - even when justified - is pathological.)

As for Roman Polanski, in 2018: "in light of the #MeToo and Time's Up movements, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted to expel Polanski from its membership." As for Polanski's relationship with his "victim," Samantha Geimer, apparently they have become friendly... see Samantha Geimer on Roman Polanski: 'We email a little bit'.

"The problem of comprehending Lolita begins with this moral discrepancy and her literary position as a rape victim. It causes us to unravel with Humbert. We question the book, ourselves, our culture, and in the space between our disgust and Humbert’s desire, we obsess over and recreate the story. Spawning two films, several musical adaptions, ballets, plays, a Russian opera spin-off, fashion subcultures, and endless memorabilia, Lolita is a transcendent literary icon. Her ghost lingers in Lana Del Rey, Katy Perry, Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus and many a pop icon seen cradling a teddy bear in skimpy lingerie. The hyper-sexualization of young women is Lolita’s legacy, a cast thrown sixty years into the future: a transition from rape victim to sex icon."

- From Emily Roese's 2016 (Huffington Post) article: The Problematic Idolization of Lolita. Inset right is a detail from a poster for Stanely Kubrick's 1962 film adaption Lolita.

"Violence against women is often against our voices and our stories. It is a refusal of our voices, and what a voice means: the right to self-determination, to participation, to consent or dissent, to live and participate, to interpret and narrate. A husband hits his wife to silence her; a date rapist or acquaintance rapist refuses to let the 'No' of his victim mean what it should, that she alone has jurisdiction over her body; rape culture asserts that a woman's testimony is worthless, untrustworthy... Having a voice is crucial. It's not all there is to human rights, but its central to them, and so you can consider the history of women's rights and lack of rights as a history of silence and breaking silence."

- From Rebecca Solnit's A Short History of Silence, an essay from her (highly recommended) collection: The Mother of All Questions, 2017, Haymarket Books.  Regarding the photo (inset left) - "STILL NOT ASKING FOR IT" - more info can be found here and here.

***

Apparently, the poster which introduces this section is one of several which appeared in London bus stations this year announcing an exhibit of artwork by Egon Schiele, a Viennese artist and painter, known for his oddly contorted human figures, both nude and otherwise (inset right and sourced here). I don't know that any feminists were involved in the censorship of his work - and, possibly, the exhibition of his nudes in a bus station wasn't the most brilliant of plans to begin with - but, in terms of censorship "100 years old and still too daring" makes a significant point. In terms of culture, are we as a species moving forwards, backwards, or remaining stationary? More importantly, will the censorship of art and/or the artist - either contemporary or from the distant past - solve anything? Lastly, is the sensual and/or sexual content of art - regardless of the variety explored or intimated - a feminist issue? And, if so, should art fall under the jurisdiction of any and/or all other political and societal movements as well?

While I can both sympathize with and applaud the #MeToo
(and subsequent Times Up) movements - which marked the historical moment when women finally broke their silence and dragged a few "rape culture" enthusiasts out from under their proverbial rocks (where they'd been congregating for a very long time) - the infamous backlash letter signed by 100 French female luminaries was correct in one respect: suppressing a work of art due to its sexual content or the sexual behavior of its makers - even when said content or behavior is presently considered taboo - is antithetical to the nature of art, human creativity and human expression. But, most importantly, for a feminist, fanning the flames of censorship can also backfire.

Then again, history tells us that in almost every case of censorship or prohibition - across the board - the eradication of the offending behavior was not achieved... neither in the short term and, most certainly, not in the long term. Case in point: Lolita, the 1955 novel written by Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977). Basically, it's a feminist's nightmare - and a hebephile's wet dream - following the obsessional musings of a middle-aged man directed towards his manipulative, sexually precocious 12-year-old stepdaughter whom he eventually rapes. Banned in Great Britain and France for a period of two years, it was then banned in Australia from 1958 to 1965. Meanwhile, when it arrived in America, 100,000 copies were sold in its first three weeks. After all, nothing says "Must Read" like the word: "Banned"...

Farewell to a Free Spirit (with 8/17/18 update and Addendum)

Oksana Shachko (January 31, 1987- July 23, 2018)

"... I was deeply inside the religious world and very concentrated on my craft. It started to take off for me. At ten years old I had already started painting in churches and exhibiting my art. I was deeply inside all these institutional bodies, and because of it, I started believing in God. I always went to Church to pray. When I was twelve years old I decided to go live in the church, to paint icons and spend my life praying. I wanted to stop living a normal life and become a monk.

... (but) I started to think that I didn’t want to overwhelm my parents with stress, so I decided to stay. At that moment, I started to think about the meaning of believing. It was a big paradox for me. My parents are religious, they believe in God, they go the Church… But they refuse that I become a monk. I didn’t understand. I continued living with my parents and started searching for an answer to my questions. I continued painting icons but started engaging in more conversations with the people surrounding me. I wanted to know why they came and prayed in front of these icons. I also starting becoming critical of the Church. When I was fourteen, I found a group of young people from fifteen to twenty years old who organized philosophical clubs out of school... They were very critical of religion. I found them very interesting. I started to come more and more and read their books. I discussed religion with them and continued to say, “God exists,” wanting to prove it to them. One year passed, two years passed, and I became a total atheist...

Oxana and Sasha Shevchenko,
Kiev, 2013

... At this time, I met with Anna Hustol and Sasha Shevchenko with whom I created Femen. I never thought about feminism before. In Ukraine, feminism is never talked about. We had a lot of meetings with professors, the University director, the mayor, and some businessmen to gather money for the students. When I went to see those people, I was accompanied by a guy and they only listened to him. That was not normal. When I was seventeen, I started to get very angry about this with the other girls. That’s when we decided to create a girl movement, to prove to everybody that we are able to create, to do things, and to work."

- Excerpt from: A Meeting with Oksana Shachko,  a November, 2017 interview with Armelle Leturcq for Crash magazine from which the photograph of Oxana (inset left) was taken. The icon in the background - featuring the Virgin Mary wearing a burqa while breast-feeding the infant Christ - is her own work; a detail of which is shown later in this post. Inset right is a detail of a photograph found here.

"During the five years she was in Femen, Shachko was arrested dozens of times, interrogated, allegedly abused by police and spent almost a year in jail. She was also one of the members who was allegedly kidnapped in Belarus in 2011 after protesting the Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko during a topless rally. Shachko and other members said they were forced to strip naked in the woods, were beaten, had oil poured on them and were threatened to be set on fire." 

- From Oxana's Huffington Post obituary.

***

Oksana Shachko (or Oxana, as she preferred) was an almost fragile young woman... slightly built and diminutive, but, at the same time, striking enough to have been a model, and fierce enough to have been a prize-fighter. She showed great skill as an artist at a very early age, and was groomed as a painter of religious icons: a highly traditional and stylized genre of image-making that left little room for personal expression. As a prepubescent girl, she was spiritual to such a degree that she came very close to entering a monastery.

However, by the latter half of her teens all this would change. She would question the validity of religion and turn to atheism. She would question her position as the subordinate female of the species and turn to feminism. She would question her own convictions in relation to the apathy she found in her native Ukraine and turn to activism. Ultimately, in 2008, she would help organize a small band of Ukrainian feminists. They called themselves "FEMEN" and set in motion a series of outrageous, theatrical demonstrations in response to the political, patriarchal and demoralizing injustices to women they observed in both Western and Middle Eastern societies. Inset right below: Oxana at work.

Unfortunately, FEMEN was not an entirely successful experiment. The women were often berated, humiliated, beaten and imprisoned. And, although they gained enough notoriety to make headlines worldwide - consistently photographed by male members of the press - they failed to make a favorable impression on a number of their fellow feminists who - with a few exceptions - managed to miss the point.

And, it got worse. In a 2016 interview, Oxana reflected: "After our protest against the elections in Russia, I was detained for two weeks. In the police department, I was blamed for everything and deported. From then on, I was denied entry to Russia, for life. We were arrested after every action in Ukraine but never were deported of course, because we were the citizens of the country. Yet our activism became physically impossible. In the end, we were accused of preparing a terrorist attack against Putin and the Patriarch Cyrill. They planted weapons, bombs, and also the portraits of these two beauties. Within one day... we managed to escape from Ukraine."

Can't Keep a Good Woman Down

Our Godmother... feminist artist, Judy Chicago.

"I told Chicago that I was struck that, though she had often struggled in her career — overcoming the disapprobation of critics, the indifference of institutions and overt and tacit misogyny — she had managed to hold onto a sense of her work’s importance. She said, with her usual matter-of-factness, that it was simply a matter of pragmatism."

- Excerpt and photo (above) via the recent NY Times' feature: Judy Chicago, The Godmother.

***

It's pretty much impossible to keep up with Judy Chicago, but never let it be said some of us  don't try! Recently chosen as one of the Times' Top 100 most influential people, and appearing on the cover of NY Times' (February) Women's Fashion issue, Judy is always newsworthy. Don't believe me? Just check out this avalanche of Judy articles appearing within the past year.

Anyway, she isn't our Godmother for nothing... although Our Fearless Leader, or Her Majesty will do...  Which is why I'm here today. I realize it's a little late but at 6:30 PM tonight EST Judy was at Stanford University chatting with art historian, Marci Kwon, at the Bing Concert Hall.

The event was Livestreamed here. When and if archival footage appears, I'll update this post with a link.

A Day For the Little Ladies (Updated 3/28/18)

Suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst in action circa 1914.
(All images: click to enlarge.)

"After the Socialist Party of America organised a Women's Day on February 28, 1909 in New York, the 1910 International Socialist Woman's Conference suggested a Women's Day be held annually. After women gained suffrage in Soviet Russia in 1917, March 8 became a national holiday there. The day was then predominantly celebrated by the socialist movement and communist countries until it was adopted in 1975 by the United Nations.

In August 1910, an International Socialist Women's Conference was organized to precede the general meeting of the Socialist Second International in Copenhagen, Denmark. Inspired in part by the American socialists, German Socialist Luise Zietz proposed the establishment of an annual Women's Day and was seconded by fellow socialist and later communist leader Clara Zetkin, supported by Käte Duncker, although no date was specified at that conference. Delegates (100 women from 17 countries) agreed with the idea as a strategy to promote equal rights including suffrage for women. The following year on March 19, 1911, IWD was marked for the first time, by over a million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire alone, there were 300 demonstrations. In Vienna, women paraded on the Ringstrasse and carried banners honouring the martyrs of the Paris Commune."

- Excerpt from the Wiki entry for International Women's Day. Images: uppermost, Sylvia Pankhurst, activist and artist, and one of three daughters belonging to British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst (her portrait - inset left - was painted by daughter Sylvia. Another example of S.P.'s artwork appears later in the post.) For more information about the Paris Commune,* see the foot-note section.

Regarding the German poster (inset right, above, and found in the Wiki article) - which, by the way, was banned in Germany at the time - reads: "Give Us Women's Suffrage. Women's Day, March 8, 1914. Until now, prejudice and reactionary attitudes have denied full civic rights to women, who as, mothers, and citizens wholly fulfill their duty, who must pay their taxes to the state as well as the municipality. Fighting for this natural human right must be the firm, unwavering intention of every woman, every female worker. In this, no pause for rest, no respite is allowed. Come all, you women and girls, to the 9th public women's assembly on Sunday, March 8, 1914, at 3 pm."

"The most dramatic celebration of International Woman's Day was in 1917 in Russia. Led by feminist Alexandra Kollontai. Central to their protest in 1917 were complaints over deteriorating living conditions. Rents had more than doubled in St. Petersburg, renamed Petrograd, between 1905 and 1915. Food prices, particularly the cost of fIour and bread, rose between 80 and 120 percent in most European cities. The price per pound of rye bread, the staple of working-class diets in Petrograd, rose from three kopeks in 1913 to eighteen kopeks in 1916. Even soap rose 245 percent in 1917 Petrograd. Merchants speculated in grain, fuel, and meat, while factories closed for lack of energy to run the plants. Female and male wage earners who faced layoffs often went on strike. Between January and February 1917, more than half a million Russian workers, mostly in Petrograd, went out. Taking the occasion of International Woman's Day March 8th in the West, but February 23d on the Gregorian calendar), women led a demonstration from the factories and the breadlines."

Soviet Women's Day poster.

- An excerpt from On the Socialist Origins of International Woman's Day (.pdf) by Temma Kaplan (1985). Inset right (above) is a photo of Russian feminist Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952). It was the demonstrations and protests which occurred on and around March 8th, 1917, that signaled the beginning of the Russian Revolution! In the Wiki entry for the February Revolution we find:

"Women, in particular, were passionate in showing their dissatisfaction with the implemented rationing system, and the female workers marched to nearby factories to recruit over 50,000 workers for strike. Both men and women flooded the streets of Petrograd, demanding an end to Russian food shortages, the end of World War I  and the end of autocracy. By the following day 24 February O.S. (March 9 N.S), nearly 200,000 protesters filled the streets, demanding the replacement of the Tsar with a more progressive political leader."

"Fast forward to March 8, 1908: 15,000 women marched in New York City for shorter work hours, better pay, voting rights, and an end to child labor. The slogan “Bread and Roses” emerged, with bread symbolizing economic security and roses for better living standards.

Many of those who protested for working rights were young immigrants from Europe who came to the United States seeking better opportunities, says Carol Rosenblatt of the Coalition of Labor Union Women... “They had a much different expectation than when they got here. They were exploited.”

That May 1908, the Socialist Party of America declared that the last Sunday in February would be National Women’s Day." 

- Photo (inset right) and text borrowed from the 2013 article: Where Did International Women’s Day Come From? by Stephanie Solis. The photograph depicts workers at the Reliance Waist Company and is credited to the Kheel Center, Cornell University.

"Due to its ties with socialism and communism, perhaps it’s not surprising that International Women’s Day didn’t catch on here in the United States the way it did in other countries. Recently, however, international digital marketing campaigns have brought the holiday (in its less-political form) further into American culture, complete with corporate support from PepsiCo and other brands. In 2017, the official theme for International Women’s Day is #BeBoldforChange, a campaign that calls on its supporters “to help forge a better working world—a more gender inclusive world.”

- From the 2017 article The Surprising History of International Women’s Day via the History channel site. Regarding Women's Day 2018, well, the hashtag is: How will you continue to #PressforProgress? Inset left: McDonald's gives on a nod to IWD.

***

(Yes, it's finally Spring! And, yes, I'm finally back... after a weird, chaotic, confusing month. The operative question is: will I be spared a fourth "saison en enfer"? We shall see.

Meanwhile, as we know, International Women's Day fell on March 8th... which, of course, was weeks ago. But, believe it or not, I  began (diligently) constructing this post on that day. Alas, it had a lot of competition... I was already working on three others!

So, an entire month went by with utter silence on my part. Sorry, comrades. But, if it means anything, this post - for what it's worth - is finally presentable and, fingers crossed, 2 more should follow it fairly closely.)

Honestly, I generally ignored International Woman's Day in the past, figuring it was mostly a superficial, patronizing token of a holiday (as in, "here's a day for the little ladies" kind of thing). But, as it turns out, I was wrong. The day has a rich political history, and as we can see by the German poster from 1932 (inset right) - and the other posters featured above and below the jump - often a militant one!