Hello friends! This newsletter describes the context for my exhibition “4 Years in 40 Postcards” which is opening this week (so exciting!). If you read (or skip) to the end, you’ll find an invitation to participate in the show by sharing a piece of your own experience. Please consider sharing. We are only loud enough together.
The pressures on women never come from just one place. This is what makes them impossible to resist. It’s why the things men (and women) say to us affect us in ways that can be hard to explain. The words and behaviour of individual men can channel whole networks of power and messaging that exert a disproportionate force invisible to those who are not his target.
Earlier this year, I considered filing a formal workplace complaint against a colleague who used emotional manipulation to trap me for years in an exploitative work situation, but I couldn’t figure out how to explain it. I had no smoking gun, no evidence of sexual harassment, no evidence of bullying even. I had years of emails but I wasn’t sure that these didn’t just make me look crazy and controlling. How could I explain that each bit of praise for labour and dismissal of my perspective and subtle resistance to my leadership looked innocuous but that, cumulatively, they formed an invisible prison that required me to perform labour while ceding the power, authority, and credit that that labour (and my legal role) should have engendered?
I suspect others have received messages like this as well: messages that subtly played on your gender to force you to behave in particular ways. Perhaps for you too, exactly where this force came from or how it worked is difficult to explain.
Since I didn’t feel like I could explain it to HR, I decided to make art instead:
I have created a 3-dimensional work, called “4 Years in 40 Postcards,” which will be installed today at the Artemisia Gallery in Melbourne. Each postcard shows a painted image of a woman from a magazine advertisement coupled with a note transcribed from one of my colleague’s emails. The postcards are suspended by thread from the ceiling in a way that invites the viewer to walk through them to see the images and read the messages.
At first, the beautiful forms of idealized women appear inviting, and the postcards suggest a nostalgic sense of connection. But there is something uncanny about the way the women hang in space, and the viewer quickly finds him or herself surrounded by demands and expectations in the form of both words and images, reproducing the feelings of powerlessness, exhaustion, and guilt that such seemingly innocuous messages evoke for women when experienced in aggregate.
The piece exposes the invisible context that gives the messages their coercive power to constrain women’s movements by pairing them with large-scale cultural imagery in a way that dictates the viewer’s movement through space. I wanted to communicate, not so much the content of what was said to me, but what it felt like, what the effect was.
Much like me, the women from the magazine advertisements advance patriarchal and capitalist agendas and, in the process, they influence and constrain the movements of other women, but while they appear powerful, they are themselves vulnerable and fragile, used and discarded, literally “hanging by a thread.” In this, the work underscores the limited and conditional power given to women and the complex interplay of victimhood and responsibility that being a woman under patriarchy entails.
Writing this at 5am on the day of installation, I worry: what if they don’t get it? What if they just read the messages and think “well, that’s not that bad”? Or worse “He’s actually being really nice. It sounds like she’s just a bitch.” But that’s part of the point. These fears are the evidence of the coercion. The guilt invoked when you’re told you’re insufficiently collaborative, you’re needlessly taking offence, you’re drawing the wrong conclusions - that is what urges you back in line. If you move in particular ways, you’re just a bitch. He was just trying to help.
The fact is, probably not everyone will get it, but that’s why it’s art. I’m not here to convince a tribunal of my rightness or his wrongness. Viewers are free to draw their own conclusions. But my view of myself and the situation has been coloured by the authoritative tone of his assessment that I am in the wrong, and this is precisely what always keeps women quiet. Exposing my experience is the way out of his assessment and into other communities with those who have had similar experiences.
As I said, I suspect others have received messages like this too. I am leaving a stack of blank cards at the gallery for women and gender non-conforming viewers to write down the messages they have received that have made them feel trapped or constrained. These will be fastened to the walls surrounding the installation. I would love to include your story too. Just send me a message, and I will write it on a card and add it to the wall.
Patriarchy’s whole deal is that there is only one perspective and it is the male perspective. But we are here and we have another perspective.
This is so brilliant, congratulations on your exhibit! Seeing your strength in putting this together, in exposing yourself with this art, is inspirational. I wish I could come see it!
I think you can put a timeline together, talk about the facts, and stand your ground. I am not saying why you should collect this information, whether it's a complaint, or whatever reason. Maybe this process is complete for you after this installation. In my experience, though, you can make sense of what you know is real. Maybe it's just that a narrative would be my process. Having it make sense to others is a task when explaining manipulative actions, but it's not impossible because it's real. That's what I tend to focus on. I try to hone in on their words because everything they say is projection, they usually do the very things that they accuse you of. I think it's important to know that this can be quantified.
That said I have been paying attention to the Anti-HR HR Lady on YouTube. She is a lawyer and former HR professional who does consulting for people dealing with workplace discrimination. She has videos on what they are looking for when you make a complaint, HR procedure, and even a PDF log that I am going to take with me to start a documentation process at any future job. I don't know her and this isn't a plug for her, just my opinion. I am working on my own EEOC filing, possibly. I don't have dates and times for everything but I think it's important to have a narrative. It's important to me to do this even if it doesn't look like I can meet certain legal metrics because I didn't plan for this. It's an important thing me to write around and process. I plan to keep documentation from day 1 in the future, though.