KINESTETHIC EMPATHY
Juliet McMains
Professor, Department of Dance
Despite our historical distance, my body identifies with the women in Millet’s prints—eyes cast downward, arms bent in front of bodies animated in repetitive tasks of labor, not unlike my own posture while writing, cooking, or engaged in other means of knitting together the fabric of society that fall disproportionately on women. The meticulous strokes of Millet’s etching needle strip away layers of invisibility to honor women’s labor, and in his attention to the detail of their work, I too feel seen. The power of their physicality, however, is tempered by drooping shoulders and stooped heads, Millet’s control over his subjects’ postures rendering them unwittingly acquiescent to my romanticizing gaze. In contrast, I feel little kinesthetic empathy with Dunning’s disembodied subject, facing us head-on in a posture of defiance that I cannot quite reconcile with her stillness and apparent complicity (is it pleasure?) in her own transformation into the product of domestic labor. In this space of tension, anger rushes in. Am I complicit in my own subjugation at someone else’s hands? Could I find resistance in my own loss of face? Her unflinching gaze, which seems to persist even after buried under whipped sweetness, deflects the objectifying power of my gaze with her own.
CRAFTING VALUE
Priti Ramamurthy
Professor, Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies
The coronavirus crisis has turned home-spaces into work-spaces, for the privileged; home is now where we craft value, seamlessly moving between the worlds of home-work, for which we are not paid, and work-work, for which we are paid. The dialogue between Millet’s nineteenth-century prints and Dunning’s video, Icing, reminds us that there is a history to this doubleness. In Millet’s etchings the division between home-work and work, which is valued in the market, is blurred. In each image, a woman crafts value by shepherding livestock, churning butter, carding wool, spinning, sewing. Is it for her household to consume or for the market or both? The market the space where many, many different kinds of things crafted by humans are exchanged for money does not yet dominate social relations in the ways it does today.
In Icing (1996), a woman crafts value exclusively through home-work. She is laboriously, meticulously, tediously, skillfully icing a human head, as if, it is a cake. Home-work, Dunning suggests, is the work of socializing human beings to be valuable. The youthful, androgynous head is not allowed to move or sway except to the rhythms of the woman’s frosting spatula which creates a mask of whiteness. Why is it that “woman” does this kind of work? Or is this kind of “work” what makes a woman recognizable as a female gendered being? If masking is about how whiteness is constructed in home-spaces, does that provide an opening to unmask so as to undo the racial privileges of whiteness in work-spaces?
