Patriarchal societies

It ocurred to me that perhaps I should research other artists who have made FGM a subject for work.

Paula Rego, did a series of etchings on the subject in 2009, called Female Genital Mutilation. These were exhibited at the Malborough Fine Art Gallery and later reproduced in her 2012 book, Paula Rego: The Complete Graphic Work. They are disturblingly powerful and as the art critic Robert Hughes said, Paula Rego is the best painter of women’s experience alive.

Her images do not flinch from the horrendous reality of the FGM procedure. There are six etchings in the series showing the barbaric assault on young girls, by women whose own sexuality and femininity has been eviscerated likewise by their mothers and grandmothers. In these etchings the women are both white and black. To me this implies the collusion of all the races; the Western countries that know of the practice and allow it to happen in their own communities , and the whole swathes of African countries where FGM rates can be as high as 98 percent. The young girls held forceably down are black but the spectres of ravaged woman hood performing the rite are white, perhaps also implying that the ravaged females are stripped of all life and colour? There is one ray of hope however. The last etching in the series is called Escape, where a woman carries her child away unharmed. Another child , perhaps a doll, is at her feet with a bow where her genitals are. This could imply that her sexuality is still a gift for her, something for her to untie rather than being quasi castrated.

Without this release, this element from which hope can grow, I wonder if the series would be almost too graphicly horrendous?

While researching FGM in art, I came accross an interesting post and discussion from Sweden.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eivcagwvbQk

A Dual Heritage Artist, Makode Aj Linde, had created a cake in the shape of a black woman’s body, substituting his own head, (made up to look like an architypal “black” person) and invited people to cut into the cake – ie cut off the genitals first, while he screamed with each incision.

This caused immense controversy. Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth, the Swedish minister of culture, laughingly cut the cake and fed bits to the artist. People called for her to resign but the artist defended her saying his piece was to highlight FGM and its horrors.

There were lenghy discussions on the various comments pages about whether this piece was racist, and if it could be such as the artist himself was black. However, my own opinion, and that of many others was that it was deeply insensitive towards the unfortunate women who have undergone FGM. The male artist may have been trying to highlight FGM but was this an appropriate way?

The video shows white people happily cutting into wretched cake, chatting away as they eat it. The metaphor of the slicing of the cake could perhaps apply to the way Africa was sliced up with colonialism.

The cake chomping audience was rather insensitive, I think, to the barbarity of the practice. That’s what disturbed me. Yet how can a male artist really think he can make a Clitordectomy cake into a viable statement, and bellow theatrically with each cut slice, without causing offence somehwere?

But perhaps the controversy and the discussion it evoked was his aim? At least he got FGM into the main news and made people examine how they felt about their own passivity towards the subject.

Paula Rego’s handling of the subject however is hauntingly appropriate and also offers a solution: the hope of escape with women firmly turning their back on this appalling practice – which with education and outlawing, is definitely possible.

Is all art trying to raise awareness of FGM good?

Is mine? And as a white woman could it be deemed as inappropriate as some said the Clitordectomy cake was for a black male artist?

I hope not. I think that as a woman I have the right to stop this hideous control and mutilation of my fellow females.

Recently I bought some rubber samples. I had envisaged making genitalia out of latex, cutting out the mutilated shapes, or even making female genitalia out of the latex. But perhaps this is too obvious?

Instead I have etched an orchid and printed it onto latex rectangles.

I did a series of them on the different colours of latex, this has almost given it a patchwork effect. I diluted red ink with white spirit and splattered it on – to make my point. However, the flowers are intact. If my point is about the mutilation of the female sexual organs, perhaps I need to show this?

I think that the bleeding of the open screen orchids does convey the pain and brutality of mutilation. Having considered ” Cut Flowers” as the title, I now think DO NOT CUT THE FLOWERS is more appropriate. It conveys my wish for this barbaric practice to end.

Recently I have been wondering where my work is going. The Patriarcal Society is a broad subject. My understanding is that men, at a Primitive level, are both fearful and jealous of the ultimate power that women own to perpetuate future generations, and have tried to hijack this. They do it through control of their lives, control of their fertility, control of their sexuality. I was going to move on from FGM, but I can’t. Every day there is something in the papers regarding the topic. As I feel so angry about it perhaps I need to continue with the subject, but not in a hectoring, didactic way. The enormity, pathos and brutality of the crime needs to be conveyed. I have been doing open screen monoprints of orchids. These, for obvious reasons are symbolic of female genitalia.

I will do a large number of these monoprints – 90 perhaps . I can display them in rows, covering a large area, and call the piece, ” Cut Flowers”. The images will be printed on wet paper and by doing this the colours – reds and purples – will bleed. Bleeding orchids en masse will portray the atrocity of FGM – if people want to make that connection. If they don’t then hopefully the 90 monoprints , all individual and all with reds and blues and purples merging into each other in an interesting way, will have an aestheticly pleasing impact.

I have aso etched the orchid image. This has a more determined line and by printing it on blood splattered effect paper , it conveys the message too. However, I prefer the silkscreen monoprints – the bleeding of the colours produces an almost fleshy appearance…

The paper I use is important. Some of my earlier bleeding flowers were on cartridge paper. These, although effective , do not have as robust a feeling to them – the paper has bent and curled and looks flimsy. The challenge now is to find sufficient quantities of Somerset paper!

It is interesting where the cross over of feminism, sexism and racism occur or even clash.

I feel angry about the atrocities of FGM. I am startlingly aware of the silence on this from the majority of men and women I know of all ages and races.

Last summer I was at a dinner party – perhaps not the most appropriate place to bring up the subject of FGM- but they were people I knew fairly well .

I was sitting next to a prospective UKIP candidate. I mentioned to him that perhaps UKIP wouldn’t get much of the female vote, as there were no women in the party and a lot of their members were making crass sexist remarks.

This person expressed suprise at my observation. I asked him what his policy, were he elected, to FGM would be. Interestingly his wife was the one who said it was a cultural issue and not our concern – rather overlooking the fact it is illegal in this country and has been for 29 years.

I felt really rather depressed by the comment. If people think something is ” cultural” they are almost saying;

” hands off, it’s racist to interfere. We need to mind our own business”

People are frightened of appearing to criticise others’ cultures. The Asian Paedophile gang in Rochedale got away with their systematic abuse of young girls for years because the police were worried about being branded racisit if they arrested them.

At university recently an eminent gay, female artist was invited to come and talk to us. She is somewhat acerbic, reknown for being cruelly outrageous – this is perhaps why she has survived in an art world where other male artists like Georg Baselitz, with no sense of irony or self doubt, get away with pronouncing that women can’t be great painters as they:

“simply don’t pass the market test, the value test”, adding: “As always, the market is right.”

This female artist talked about 12 Years a Slave adding that she thought it had been too long and thought the film director was like Dereck Jarman, who did beautiful but tedious films . A good film relies on tight editing, otherwise it loses its audience, as in this case ,because in the end she was so bored she said she didn’t care what happened to the “****ing slave”. People laughed. Then she added as an afterthought that a few slaves might be useful to have . Quite a few people laughed , as they do when someone is being totally proposterous. Is this an example of tasteless British humour – saying something outrageous when you don’t really mean it, as comics do?

One of our fellow students is black. He was mortified that we laughed. From his perspective of history it is not a laughing matter.

In the context of all the other outrageous, tasteless things she had said, I don’t necessarilly think her comment was racist. Tasteless certainly. Yet, on reflection, is it OK to get away with tasteless statements just because you are famous?

I do worry however about branding people as racisit. It can also become dangerous if everyone becomes too PC.

Schools, hospitals and social workers so far have not tried to erradicate FGM. Despite the atrocity, some think the parents involved are lovingly following their cultures; doing what they think best for their daughters.

Surely its Abuse, Sexual Abuse and Grevious Bodily Harm?

In Africa especially, a vast proportion of women are mutilated. It’s a form of castration to control them. These women are often treated like slaves. If they come to this country their daughters are still abused in the name of their old customs.

I hate violence and didn’t see the film in question. My sister did, and bearing in mind how long slavery existed in this country – about 300 years, she wondered what she would have done, had she lived as a white person during the time of slavery in Britain.

We all like to think we would have morally questioned it.

FGM is a way of enslaving women for over 5000 years. Let’s get everyone involved now and abolish it.

I have recently been working on my three themes: the displaced goddess, religion and primogeniture. The three ways women have lost power in society. Women are oviously better off in Europe than they are in middle eastern countries . In Saudi women can’t drive – it could be bad for their ovaries, so the males say – yet they practice FGM in parts of Saudi which is known to cause death or reoccurring infections, trouble in childbirth, still birth and infertility. A bit more of an issue than driving “might” cause… And driving doesn’t seem to effect womens’ ovaries elsewhere in the world, interestingly.

Someone asked me why all these things seem so important to me.

It got me thinking and I suppose I have always seen women as equals and achievers – I had a determined mother, whose own mother had been widowed with 6 children and yet coped and was definitely a matriarch. I didn’t have a brother and I went to an all girls’ school where I saw women in charge and girls achieving. Unfortunately this school was also a boarding school and i have a real issue with boarding schools. They are unnatural. Children need to grow up not exclusively with their peer group but with all ages; learning to negotiate the itty gritty of daily life – leaving the bathroom tidy, emptying the dishwasher, taking in Granny’s logs etc. At boarding school they are isolated from these realities. Perhaps for girls, boarding schools are less damaging as girls are more nuturing by nature and absorbing a vision of women as achievers may not a bad thing. But for young boys – sent away at age 7 in some cases – I think boarding schools are detrimental. Just look at our terrible immature male MPs, many of whom went to all male boarding schools. Boarding schools are very much a British Establishment and yes, this explains an awful lot about our society and its misogynistic views. At single sex boarding schools (Eton) boys don’t ever see women as equals.

So what average woman wants to go into politics and confront this group of emotionally stunted, sexist, bigotted and immature idiots? Perhaps this is why the Conservatives now have so few women in their ranks whereas Labour has many articulate ones?

Another subject I feel deeply about is FGM. I remember being horrified about it in 1983 and then feeling, naively, as history has proved, relieved when it was made illegal in this country in 1985. Despite this, not one person has been prosecuted in 29 years and countless young girls have been mutiliated every year since. This is appalling. In France it is illegal and they are stamping it out – but some families take their daughters to London because they know they can do it there. The French authorities regularly police the Eurostar to London. Why are we so cruelly negligent in this country?

We need to change a whole global perception of the right to abuse women. Castrating women does keep them docile obviously but what a mockery of human rights. What have our MPs been doing for 29 years? If young boys were having their dicks cut off for “cultural” reasons i bet they would all have been standing on their seats shouting out loudly about the cruelty of it.

And it would have been stamped out.

Anyway, i need to get back to my examination of women in a patriarchal world and the images I am going to use…