At the start of this school year, Emma Sulkowicz began carrying a standard, blue, extra-long twin mattress around Columbia University’s campus. Her endeavor is part of a performance art piece called “Carry That Weight/Mattress Performance” that seeks to bring attention to her university’s mishandling of her sexual assault case. Picasso once stated “art is an instrument in the war against the enemy;” Emma’s work as both an artist and activist seems to emulate this notion. In the weeks since she started the piece, students have begun to help her carry the mattress as she lugs it across campus, each grabbing a corner so the burden is shared rather than hers alone.
Like Emma, I like to think of myself as both an “artist” and as an “activist.” As the editor of Recess, I try to question how art is an activist endeavor and how activism is an artistic endeavor. It is rare to find art sans politics, or activism divorced from aesthetics. Situationist International and punk rock, second-wave feminism and Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, Dumile Feni and the anti-apartheid movement: art and activism go together like peanut butter and jelly. Both are performing ideas within a public sphere, but choosing to stand-up and speak out on an idea means opening oneself up to the vulnerabilities of exposure.
To do this as a woman comes with a far greater risk than to do this as a man.
Back in the spring of my first year at Duke, Katie Zaborsky wrote in one of her Editor’s notes that “concerns of personal safety may not seem like they have much to do with art, but that’s only if you don’t see artistic space as existing in a reality that can be ugly, unfair and dangerous.” She was discussing the fact that she would never wander New York streets in the same way that many men do in pursuit of enlivening experiences, à la Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris or T.S. Eliot in “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Her piece resonated with me as a first-year woman in the same way it resonates with me today. It reminds me why, despite my love of wandering, I always feel as if I can never let myself actually get lost: the risk is just far too great.
Perhaps, that is why I used to find refuge in wandering the internet. It felt like a safer space. I used to believe that I was drawn to writing on online platforms because it was easier than other forms of art. I could avoid stage fright and the threat of people insulting me to my face, or worse. But, the more I wrote, the more I realized that writing as a woman meant that I would always be put in a vulnerable position, whether that writing was shared on the internet or from the top of a soapbox. The internet is as much a public space as a sidewalk.
This week, another artist-activist named Emma circulated the web: Emma Watson addressed the United Nations in order to kick-off the “HeForShe” campaign. The speech was heartwarming and explicitly feminist. It comes as no surprise then that within hours of this speech being circulated, a deluge of comments appeared online: on YouTube, “is she mentally ill?”; on BuzzFeed, “I came here for naked pictures. I see none”; on 4Chan, “that feminist b***h Emma is going to show the world she is as much of a w***e as any woman.”
If these comments don’t seem out of the ordinary, it is because they aren’t. It seems that every time a celebrity woman acts outside of traditional gender boundaries, she is barraged by harassment. Unfortunately, this is not just a reality for celebrities but for all women on the internet. Think of Duke women on CollegiateACB. Think of Karen Owen. Think of Belle Knox.
These sort of reactions don’t just happen to sexual women, but to all sorts of women who dare to hold an opinion on the internet. As a student-writer, I have received harassment and threats of assault because of what I have written in The Chronicle and my personal Facebook page. In a Pacific Standard article from January, writer Amanda Hess noted that nearly 75 percent of reported online harassment was experienced by women. This included women who received threats of assault, murder or rape for writing an unfavorable review of a movie, blogging about software and coding, or, worst yet, actually talking about women’s issues.
As a woman who hopes to both wander and write, my future does not look too promising in regards to my sense of safety. It is easy to dismiss such harassment as meaningless because it is online, but that neglects the real toll of these comments: either women in public spheres have to focus more on their safety than what they are saying, or they leave these spaces entirely. We all lose.
Part of me wants to say that to dare to make art, or to engage with art, in these ugly, unfair and dangerous spaces is exactly the sort of radical activism we need to tackle the problem, but another part of me feels like to advise such is problematic. The task feels as Sisyphean as Emma must feel lugging her mattress around campus.
Is the price of feminism really for women to continually put themselves at risk?
My identity as an artist and as an activist comes at the expense of many women before me: I am indebted to Janet Malcolm as much as I am to Gloria Steinem, to Josephine Baker as much as to Malala Yousafzai. Each of these women put themselves at risk—physically, emotionally or otherwise–and paved the way for women like me to talk about what is difficult and uncomfortable, to assert that the experiences of women are not just worth sharing, but also worth hearing.
To create a safe and equitable forum for art and activism is not to create a space free from differences. We should discuss; we should even vehemently disagree. But there has to be a way to do this without compromising the physical and psychological safety of women. Until we as a community cultivate these forums, women will continue to have to carry that weight. We can, however, each do our own part to make sure no woman has to carry it alone by doing the most radical thing that both art and activism demand of us: listen.
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