Session 4: Consent & Dissent
Suzanne Lacy, with Melissa Hoffman and Phranc, Three Weeks in May, 1977, performance documentation. Photograph by Suzanne Lacy
December 14, 2020, Monday, 8am EST
Join through Zoom: Meeting ID 880 8691 3297
Consent, specifically sexual consent, has long been a part of feminist discourse. From the beginnings of the rape crisis movement in the US in the 1970s to #MeToo, the question of bodily safety, autonomy, and agency has been at the forefront of feminist activism. In this fourth seminar, we will look at artworks that deal with consent and its imperfect opposite, dissent. When consent is denied, coerced, interdicted, or simply an inadequate framework for imagining our capacities, dissent—the right to resist, to protest, to voice opposition—becomes a vital resource and creative, often embodied strategy.
Suggested Reading:
Elaine Scarry, Consent and the Body: Injury, Departure, and Desire,” New Literary History, 21:4 (Autumn, 1990): 867-896.
Saidiya V. Hartman, “Seduction and the Ruses of Power,” Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997): 79-112.
Aliza Shvarts is an artist and theorist who takes a queer and feminist approach to reproductive labor and language. Her current work focuses on testimony and the circulation of speech in the digital age. Shvarts received her BA from Yale University and her PhD in Performance Studies from New York University. Her artwork been shown at venues including the Tate Modern in London; Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA in Prague; the Athens Biennale; Universidad de los Andes in Bogota; SculptureCenter, Art in General, and Participant Inc in New York; LACE in Los Angeles; the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia; and Artspace in New Haven, CT. Her writing has been published in Whitechapel Documents in Contemporary Art: Practice, The Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader, TDR/The Drama Review, Women & Performance, and The Brooklyn Rail.