Allow me to introduce you to The Real Housewives of Bohemia, a podcast that Lauren Besser (an Upright Citizens Brigade performer and a Scorpio) and I (a poet-scholar and a Cancer) launched this August. RHB is a (weird) sister project to WEIRD SISTER in that they both involve: witches, feminist field trips, the 90s, girl bands, and me. One major point of difference, however, is that there’s a lot more James Franco discussion on RHB, because although I can never decide whether my fascination with the Franco is sincere or ironic, I’m never gonna pretend it’s feminist. RHB is full of weird jokes about astronomy &vs. astrology and lawyers and honoring-our-sisters that hopefully reward longtime listeners (okay, okay, we only have twelve episodes so far, but they are stacked thick with weird jokes meant to reward longtime listeners, or at least crack ourselves up). We call it a comedy podcast, partly because Lauren is a bona fide comedian, partly because we love to make each other laugh, and partly because we like to trick people into listening to a feminist podcast by calling it “comedy.” The full truth is that we are jouissance-filled feminists, laughing like MFing Medusas in the face of the patriarchy. We care deeply and then we don’t give a fuh, and we swerve from one to the other within seconds sometimes as we perform what it means to try to make sense of the world as women. We’re trying to unearth subjugated knowledges through the art of intense girl talk. For our latest feminist field trip, presented here as part of WEIRD SISTER’s “We Were There” series, Lauren and I attended a conversation about Emma Sulkowicz’s mattress performance at the Brooklyn Museum.
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“Carry That Weight”
Conversation Between Emma Sulkowicz and Roberta Smith
December 14, 2014, 2:00 p.m.
Brooklyn Museum
Lauren and I met at the Brooklyn Museum to watch a conversation between Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic for The New York Times, and Emma Sulkowicz, a.k.a. “Mattress Girl,” who sparked a wave of campus activism through her senior thesis at Columbia University, Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight). Smith had interviewed Sulkowicz in September in order to write an article on the performance, and the public conversation was their first chance to catch up after their initial meeting.
Smith’s big opening question, “So, how is it going?” and Sulkowicz’s many anecdotes in response reminded us that, for however conceptual Carry That Weight seems when you first hear about it, as an endurance performance, it’s also a constant physical and psychic challenge for Sulkowicz. She is still carrying a mattress everywhere she goes on Columbia University property, rain or shine, as the weather worsens. Sulkowicz, who during the talk managed to seem completely composed and totally vulnerable at once, admitted that, while her arms may have gotten stronger and her carrying methods more strategic, her anger grows as each day passes that her rapist doesn’t leave Columbia, or the university doesn’t kick him out. (One of the “rules of engagement” of the project, seen on the wall behind Sulkowicz below, is that the performance will go on until her rapist leaves campus or she graduates, whichever comes first.)
(image via Brooklyn Museum)
At the museum, Sulkowicz shared an idea she was considering: if she ends up carrying the mattress through graduation, she’ll drop it on the stage during commencement. The packed auditorium erupted into applause and cheers at this idea, which led Emma to say, with a half-laugh, “Okay, I guess I should do that.” Like so many of daily interactions that have accrued around Carry That Weight—such as the way some people’s efforts to help carry the mattress reenact consent violations, albeit with different stakes—such a gesture would resonate on many levels, and be a fitting end to the piece, announcing that Sulkowicz has been carrying the burden for long enough, and it’s time for university bigwigs to figure out how to help carry that weight.
The last thing I wanted to reflect on, which I talk about a bit in the podcast, is the way Elizabeth A. Sackler, in her introduction to the event, made the most extensive effort I’ve witnessed to connect the waves of protest swelling right now in the fights against race- and gender-based violence. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means that survivors have begun to use their own and their assailants’ real names when speaking out, from the Alt Lit to the Bill Cosby abuse charges. I’ve been thinking about how an older feminist told me that this, for her, was the significant change: real names called out in public (where the internet counts as “public,” and this is likely not a coincidence). I’ve been thinking about Rebecca Solnit’s article, “Easy Chair: Cassandra Among the Creeps,” in the October 2014 issue of Harper’s, which defines the layers of silence that get forced on victims and survivors, acts of silencing that we are beginning to label and resist: “Silence, like Dante’s Hell, has its concentric circles. First come the internal inhibitions, self-doubts, repressions, confusions, and shame that make it difficult to impossible to speak, along with the fear of being punished or ostracized for doing so.” Then: “Surrounding this circle are the forces who attempt to silence someone who speaks up anyway, whether by humiliation or bullying or outright violence, including violence unto death. Finally, in the outermost ring, when the story has been told and the speaker has not been silenced directly, tale and teller are discredited.” (Yes, I thought of UVA and Rolling Stone there, too, rereading these quotes just a couple of months later.)
I’m not sure how all of this links up—I don’t know how the acts of citizens shutting down freeways to protest the murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and others connect with Emma Sulkowicz carrying her mattress around, and other college students doing the same all over the country—but there is something in these acts of large-scale public outcry that makes me feel that we’ve hit a cultural breaking point. Although these breakthroughs also require the unveiling of deep pain, shame, and guilt, and amidst the feelings of rage and defeat we’re all trying to push through at the end of 2014, I’m feeling awed and energized, too. Some layer of fear has been cast off; some level of complacency has been transcended. I don’t know exactly where we’re going, but I have the feeling that so many of us are in this fight together.
For more on Carry That Weight and the Brooklyn Museum event, check out Episode 12 of The Real Housewives of Bohemia podcast, “Field Trip | Carry That Weight,” which you can listen to through the player at the top of this post, or through iTunes, PodOmatic, or Podbay.
You can watch the video of Sulkowicz and Smith’s conversation at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art website.
