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Between the Door and theStreetA performance initiated bySuzanne LacyOctober 19, 2013

Presented by Creative Time & Brooklyn

Museum

Black Female Voices: Who isListeningA public dialogue between bellhooks + Melissa HarrisPerryNovember 8, 2013

Presented by the New School University for

Social Research

WHO IS LISTENING?

November 10, 2013  ·  by  Kathleen MacQueen  ·  in  Shifting  Connections  ·  Leave  a

comment  

Between the Door and the Street, 2013, a performance initiated by Suzanne Lacy.Courtesy of Creative Time and Brooklyn Museum.

“Shaming is a form of trauma,” writer bell hooks emphasized as sheand media host Melissa HarrisPerry debated whether anyone waslistening to black women’s voices today. And trauma (in this sense ofact as well as impact) is a form of repression, a means to silence,negate, and remove individuals and collective peoples fromparticipation. White women are complicit, she added, in upholding asystem that continues to make entertainment out of the abuse ofchildren’s and black women’s bodies. Although the two womendisagreed on the value of Steve McQueen’s much lauded antislavery

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LI NKS

Outstanding Curatorial

Paradigm

"Must See" Exhibition

R ECENT PUBLI CAT I O N

Kathleen MacQueen and JoRactliffe “As Terras do Fim doMundo: Silence as an act ofrecovery” in Über(W)unden: Artin Troubled Times

film, Twelve Years a Slave, they provided the terms of engagement foran ongoing struggle for respect, pride, dignity, empowerment, andopportunity. Masculinity was not under attack; patriarchy, however,continues to be, these women insisted, a debilitating social, economic,and juridical structure.

A strong, forceful, and determined energy coursed through thestandingroomonly crowd at the New School last Friday afternoonand I thought: Yes! this is what I search for in my life…stature andconviction and a collective commitment to support differences so longas they ratify a place at the table. A week before, art critic LucyLippard spoke in the same hall but to a very different audience. Sheasked us to distinguish between the American creed: life, liberty andthe pursuit of happiness and the French: liberty, equality, fraternity.One reinforces individual rights while the other emphasizes humanrelations. Who are we in relation to one another? Some dictionariesassert that sorority is a synonym of fraternity. Is it? Derrida in ThePolitics of Friendship (1994/7, 57) asks of philosophy’s own fraternalinterpretation of history: “How much of a chance would a femininefriend have on this stage? And a feminine friend of hers, amongthemselves?”

Between the Door and the Street, 2013, a performance initiated by Suzanne Lacy.Courtesy of Creative Time and Brooklyn Museum.

bell hooks has spent a lifetime taking chances to reconfigure this stageto include women, people of color, and LGBT individuals. ArtistSuzanne Lacy has also sought to rectify the absence of women’s voicesby creating platforms for their speech. In midOctober just as the daysfelt shorter and the late afternoons were cooling considerably, sheinitiated a performance of over 300 feminist participants. “Betweenthe Door and the Street” was sponsored by Creative Time and the

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Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and made possiblethrough the involvement of some 80 organizations and 120volunteers. Women of all ages, creed, and color, along with a fewmen, gathered on the front stoops of a single block in Brooklyn not farfrom the Brooklyn Museum of Art to talk about issues impactingwomen and girls today. Sadly, I came to realize while listening tovarying groups that those effecting young women had changed littlesince I sought independence as a young adult decades ago: stories ofsexual assault and shaming abounded.

Young women spoke of abusive love relationships. They told ofconflicted identities in their experience as immigrants. An olderwoman referred to “the night of the wolf” as she described aneighborhood overrun by gangs with a cowboy mentality. Voltaireand Toni Morrison were intoned in response to a strict religiousupbringing as offering the possibility of creating one’s own bible ofvalues. A group of four men spoke of accepting responsibility in theirrelations with women. “How much does the media impact our notionsof victimhood and give permission for assault?” they asked. “Inglamorizing the antihero, what kinds of men become the center ofour attention?” A group of middleaged women spoke of juggling jobsand family but there was copious laughter in the telling of their stories.A 23 yearold Punjabi woman created a metaphor of a nonpicturesque street view complete with bent sign posts in response to thequestion: “Right now we have this space to hear people out but howdo we go beyond this moment?

Between the Door and the Street, 2013, a performance initiated by Suzanne Lacy.Courtesy of Creative Time and Brooklyn Museum.

As an immigrant trying to assimilate she wanted to be realistic: “Ihave so many identities and I am only 23! Wearing our identities [as

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immigrants and as women] is hard.” In another group, five teensspoke of fears and establishing safety zones. On another stoop, fivecollege students considered what it meant to be black, queer, andhaving a substandard education. One described finding strengthbeyond her epilepsy to make space for others. All participants woredark clothing and a bright yellow scarf to create a visual unity to theenormous diversity of race, background, and ages represented. As thedwindling light left a chill in the air, one loaned another hers to use asa shawl. Others passed an amethyst from one to another to designatethe speaker. Further down the block, women stood and changed seatsto reinvigorate their conversation.

And so I zigzagged back and forth across the street to discern therange of ideas and topics as well as garner a picture of the women andmen who participated. They were all beautiful – 300 portraits ascompelling as the Mona Lisa and as complex as Faith Ringgold’snarrative quilts – but vocal and active, gaining strength throughsharing to assuage the hurt, anger, frustrations, and despair of beingsqueezed into molds they do not fit. The conversations continued from4:30 until 6:00 and then a song rose from the middle of the streetsignaling participants and viewers to blend together in a block partyatmosphere. My last listening sojourn was at the base of a front stoopoccupied by teens and women in their twenties. They were membersof Girls Write Now, a mentorship program that pairs high schoolstudents with professional writers. Determined to modify theperception that change for women came at someone else’s loss, oneoffered that feminism be reframed as the “thoughtfulness ofinteraction.” Their willingness to share openly in public was agenerous gift and I was grateful to be privy to all the conversationsthat afternoon.

Between the Door and the Street, 2013, a performance initiated by Suzanne Lacy.

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Courtesy of Creative Time and Brooklyn Museum.

Present on the front stoops of Brooklyn midOctober and in the NewSchool audience early November, was a vast set of experiencestranslated into a plenitude of identities; but, clearly, no matter whatroles women achieve in business, government, religion, education,media, literature, and the arts, they still feel the uncertainty of a futureleft to the whims of a patriarchal society. bell hooks after publishingher most successful book was dropped by her publisher withoutexplanation, while MS magazine questioned why she had “droppedout.” “Is writing dropping out?” she exclaimed. Melissa HarrisPerryacknowledged her position as television host could be terminated atwill and that she had compromised her writing in taking on such ademanding public role. But when a woman stood up to ask why is itthat poor black women are constantly being blamed for their plight,recounting her own story, Ms. Perry got up from her seat, walked offthe stage, pushed away the microphone and stood facetofacespeaking intimately with her for several minutes. They embraced andMs. Perry returned to give a broad response to the entire audience.

With this gesture of equanimity and respect, she demonstratedaccountability for the lives of others. If a moment could absolve thetrauma of shame, this is it: the thoughtfulness of interaction all womenmight imagine and come to know.

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Tags:  bell  hooks,  black  female  voices,  feminism,  Lucy  Lippard,  Melissa  HarrisPerry,

socially  engaged  art,  Suzanne  Lacy

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