Uncomfortable Shoes: The politics of being a woman
March 8 - April 30, 2021
RoFa Projects, Potomac MD
Artists
Uncomfortable Shoes: The politics of being a woman
"When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful." Malala Yousafzai
Today I remembered with a gallery friend when we had to wear high heels to go to art fairs. Otherwise, people did not enter the booth and we did not sell. There are many articles that discuss it and women having to put their feet on ice to rest after long hours.
Louboutin, one of those responsible for making women walk on their toes, says that "heels make women walk more slowly and thus the man will have more time to admire her"; I even go so far as to say that he would hate for people to say that his shoes are comfortable.
It was after the Second World War that fashion raised women to high heels to show them as feminine and desirable. The shoe was created to provide protection and comfort to the foot while the person carries out their daily activities. However, heels destroy the feet, the back, the pelvis, etc.; but they convey status, power, and social position. Are they really instruments of power or of torture?
How many of us wear tennis shoes and change into heels before arriving at an event? And thus, transform us into that archetype of the feminine. In Japan there is a movement called #Kutoo. It goes against the policy that forces women to wear heels to work. #Kutoo is the union between Kutzu (shoe) and Kutsuu (pain).
On the other side of the coin, there are many movements to empower and support women, such as the Red Shoes Movement, or the Zapatos Rojos in Puebla and other cities to talk about femicides, including the power it has when it is worn by dissident bodies, those whose femininity has been castrated.
There is also the “In Her Shoes” movement developed by the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence and later adapted for Latin America and East Africa to sensitize service providers, aid and development workers, and others about the rude reality of women who suffer violence, which number about 700 million worldwide.
Or the shoe when used by the girl who, due to classism and learned beauty standards, does not comply with the accepted canons, as is the case with Yelitza. If we see the glass shoes with spikes inside like those of Silvia Levenson or the shoes of oppressors of Annette Turrillo. are we really talking about footwear or rather about female icons that threaten her life and freedom?
When we speak about #Kutoo we are speaking about shoes or feminist claims against heteropatriarchal culture, where the choice of styles is not exactly a choice. Are we really accepted in an environment if we do not limit the norms imposed by a machismo system that determines the roles of women? Why do women have to continue to suffer to achieve our goals, when men do not have to?
The truth is that shoes, clothes, the “duty to be” are only a consequence of a great complicity between the government and the heteronormative patriarchy, totally cohesive in the perpetuation of the impositions of gender in the private and public.
The entire landscape is loaded with symbolic and physical violence against women. The personal is still political. Oppression begins from the most intimate, from the body itself, where the patriarchy of consent leads us to comply with canons of beauty, aesthetics, seduction and even success.
What then is the political dimension of our bodies, of our private life? Everything is conceived in terms of structures and power relations based precisely on that heteronormative patriarchy.
"The personal is political". The politics of being a woman is the starting point for the analysis of daily life and in this case of artistic expression as a voice of protest and truth. The personal is political turns every aspect of private life into a political experience.
What is hidden behind the curtains as Regina José Galindo would say? Why are women classified into categories that exist in relation to men?
Constant androcentrism favors the culture of domestic violence and psychological violence, as Galindo perfectly represents in her performance "El monumento a las desaparedidas" in honor of the victims of disappearances and femicides.
Do we want to end inequality? The only way out is to end a system that articulates the idea of one group under the control of the other, as seen in Priscilla Monge's Polaroids. Or in her Boomerang that are transformed into instruments of power and actions to express verbal violence with irony and emphasis.
This exhibition is an invitation to achieve the great dream of a society that eliminates the dominator / dominated duo, that ends internal colonization, as Millet suggests. A subtle and overwhelming colonization, silent, ambivalent, as we see in Levenson's pieces, where the glass of a pink hammer seems to hide everyday life and aspirations for freedom.
The power of patriarchy not only controls the ideology of the system, but also the police, the government, the laws. For this reason, we see more and more the increase in femicides, disappearances, and impunity in the face of it.
In addition, the mental instaurations of the same system project impurity and malignancy on women, as has always happened in history. This is reflected on the doormats of Eugenio Merino and Avelino Sala, where great thinkers in history succumbed to the imposition of patriarchy by accepting and promoting gender discrimination.
Violence against women and girls is a global epidemic, which will not disappear with a vaccine like that for COVID-19 and which has been made worse by it. It is the leading cause of death and serious injury among women ages 19 to 44.
38% of violence against women has been caused by their male partners. This is what Manuela Viera Gallo reminds us of with her Domestic Violence jewelry. Violence of any kind, be it child marriage, genital mutilation, honor killings, domestic violence, rape or economic deprivation, prevents women and girls from participating equally in social, economic and political life.
Art is openness, or it should be. It is acceptance of differences where otherness is embraced and it helps us to understand that sexual roles are not biology, but a social creation based on imposed and learned rules. One of the great objectives of feminist art is to raise awareness, through artistic proposals, about the various aspects of the feminine condition within a heteropatriarchal society.
March 8 is a turning point in the fight against discrimination, recognition of life and women's rights. Women have had great achievements: suffrage, civil, educational, and political rights. Today we have the first female vice president in the United States, but the rates of femicide continue to grow and the percentage of women in museums is still vastly lower than men.
As Simone de Beauvoir said, "You are not born a woman, you become one." The struggle continues; art helps us to eliminate dichotomous divisions, it brings us closer to what is fair, to ecofeminism and to its transversality.
There are no glass shoes because we don't want them. What we want is equity and when that happens, we will undoubtedly do better.
Gabriela Rosso