White Flag’s upcoming exhibition, Time Wounds All Heels, features a black and white photograph, which you can view here, by the artist Jane Hammond, titled “October First (Mom’s Birthday)”—and, indeed, it is a picture taken on the artist’s mother’s birthday, in her mother’s living room. You have the family present, as on any other birthday (the artist herself is in the background), you have balloons, you have an ordinary living room in which you can see stuffed chairs and a boxy television set, and…you also have a young woman, situated front and center, who sits in one of the armchairs and lifts her pantyhose-clad legs to expose her vagina. What kind of a birthday is this, you ask? The most natural one in the world.
In 2002, nearly 600 Nigerian women staged protests against petroleum pollution in their country by threatening to do as the woman in Hammond’s photo does – expose their genitals, that is. This threat had serious leverage in a region that responds to the “Curse of Nakedness,” which promises shame and harm to men who view female strangers’ naked bodies, especially married and elderly women. Anthropologist Terisa Turner explains,
“We all come into the world through the vagina. By exposing the vagina, the women are saying: ‘We are hereby taking back the life we gave you.’ It’s about bringing forth life and denying life through social ostracism, which is a kind of social execution. Men who are exposed are viewed as dead. No one will cook for them, marry them, enter into any kind of contract with them or buy anything from them.” (Source.)
Is this the ultimate form of female empowerment? Reclaiming the vagina from its sexual connotations and putting it to use as a political weapon? Or does it just reinforce possibly harmful taboos?
Like these Nigerian women, the woman in the photo exercises complete agency – she is in control of her body and her sexuality. She is the one telling the inappropriate joke at the dinner table. “Birthday,” she says, “Get it? Birth day.” She is the visual equivalent of a good pun – explicitly, painfully obvious but knowingly sophisticated. Sexuality, birth, pleasure, femininity, domesticity—these are all overlapping spheres that influence and interact with each other. And when they’re all present at once and made explicit, this reality can provoke our discomfort. She rocks the boat in the otherwise placid waters of domesticity.
Like any lady comedian, she makes a joke out of the elephant in the room—her very lady-ness. Though she has two things in common – her anatomy, and her determined control of it – with the Nigerian women, her mission couldn’t be more different: to make light of “the source of all things,” and to expose it for what it is and all it really is.
The opening reception for Time Wounds All Heels take place at this Saturday, January 15, 2011 at 7 PM. For more information about this exhibition and other upcoming programs at White Flag, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.