Vaginal Rejuvenation

I've been having a bad quarrel with feminism for the past couple of years after having identified intensely as a feminist when I was a teenager. The reasons for this quarrel are legion, but my final beef is really with how (maybe not in theory, but) in practice, feminism especially in America, is an ideology that disproportionately benefits upper-middle class white women. At the same time, I have deep roots in feminism and amidst my doubts about it, I ask myself "What can be salvaged from feminism? What is essentially good and constructive about feminism?" And for me the answer to this question has always been: feminism makes female friendship a political imperative. For me, friendship has been the single most important aspect of having been and still identifying as a feminist (albeit with more reserve).

Strong friendships between women lead to strong communities and support networks that are not as readily available in more hetero-normative frameworks, where the male-female partnership, a reproductive one, is considered the basic unit of community and same-sex friendships are relegated to second rung. Feminism posits female friendships as productive in ways that transcend traditional notions of family. My female friends have been some of my biggest inspirations and support systems and have provided the context for a type of creative play and adventure that I couldn't imagine embarking on if I didn't have their support.

I was reminded of this on Saturday when I saw a show, entitled "Vaginal Rejuvenation," by Amanda Ross-Ho and Kirsten Stoltmann at Guild & Greyshkul in SoHo. There were a lot of photographs and collage work. Many of the pieces conceptually hinged on the oft-used tactic in feminist art from from Judy Chicago to Lisa Yuskavage of reclaiming traditionally feminine/overtly girly iconography and inverting it so that the more menacing dimensions of these images are revealed. For example in the Ross-Ho & Stoltmann show, puffy plastic stickers familiar to any girl whose childhood was spent in the 70's or 80's, flank a canvas with a photograph of a sports car on it and rows of votive candles line the bottom of the canvas. Across the top in big dripping yellow letters is written "I WANT A DIVORCE." The layers of stickers (coded feminine and childish), the sportscar (coded masculine), and the declamatory statement (coded adult female) is a dense tangle of signifiers, the total effect is hilarious and pathos-laden.

What interested me about this show was partly the art but also that the show was the result of a collaboration between two female artists, that the show was premised on Amanda Ross-Ho and Kirsten Stoltmann's shared aesthetics, experiences of growing up female, and their friendship. It's very rare in art world that conceptualizes individuality and creativity as almost interchangeable to see a collaborative show by two female artists. The show was explicitly framed in terms of their friendship. The curator of the show Joao Ribas, left a really interesting leaflet at the front desk to accompany the show. The leaflet is called "My friend, there is no friend," and it tracks the philosophical and historical views of friendship. Ribas writes, "Friendship is thus suspect: it is incongruous with democracy, as the egalitarianism intrinsic to democracy is in conflict with the inherent bias towards the particular implicit in friendship. Yet how can a creative, fluid, and regenerative dyad not be socially productive? For collaboration is its close filial kin-and these two 'wills working together' dismantle the Romantic insistence on the expression of an individual will, that expressive monad that defines liberalism and finds its apotheosis in the mock-heroism of male genius, Wordsworth and Corbusier as the chief examples." This little scrap of paper that I encountered on my way out the door made me remember that friendship can be revolutionary (if friends endeavor to make revolution together, that is).