More than 30 years ago, Sandra Lee Bartky (1990), wrote about her intention, as a feminist philosopher, to “give women permission to feel the anger that I believe is already there” (p. 4). Writing around the same time, Anne Carson (1995) raged against a major project of paediatric culture, from antiquity to now – that of “putting a door on the female mouth” (p. 121). In this collage project, I riff off a first line from a famous Russian-language poem by Agnia Barto which reads: “Our Tanya cries loudly”.
It is this ringing loudness that I’m most interested in.
In wishing to crank the volume to 11, I compose roaring screams, ringing laughs, powerful yells, and deafening cries from the pages of illustrated books, magazines, and papers which do not contain them. Through collage as a method, I work with and most often against, the printed artifacts, whether the primness of the images of the British royal family, the absence of women in the 1970s books on fishing, or the single photograph of a woman, Soviet uniform-clad Valentina Tereshkova, in the 1969 “Footprints on the Moon”.
For example, “Sports!”, an oversized coffee-table photo book of action photography of Neil Leifer (1978), contains a few photos of female athletes, mouths slightly ajar or smiling, and plenty of male ones, often captured in moments of loud celebration or open-mouthed excretion. In this book, published around the time I was born, as in many others, the loudness belongs to men.
From images that capture women as demure, poised and therefore convenient for public consumption and sometimes capture very few women alltigether, I create mouths wide open, howling, shrieking, wailing. Inspired by Carson (1995) and other feminist writers, I form imagery of sounds that no man would make and no “proper civic space would contain” (p. 125).
References:
Bartky, S. L. (1990). Femininity and domination: Studies in the phenomenology of oppression. Routledge.
Carson, A. (1995). Glass, irony, and God. New Directions.
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