Virgindyke's Hyenas: 'Dystopia: One is not born a Woman', 2013 Art:Language:Location 17th October

Art:Language:Location 2013

Erica Böhr

'Dystopia: One is not born a woman', 2013

CB2, Norfolk Street, Cambridge

Erica Böhr’s current practice spans installation,text, sculpture, collage, live actions and performance. The use of language, humour and absurdity plays a pivotal role in her practice. She is primarily concerned with mapping liminality (that which is neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’) and is particularly interested in reconstructing and repositioning the role of the female outsider who occupies liminal, peripheral positions in society. For art:language:location 2013, Erica presents ‘Dystopia: One is not Born a Woman’, new work which interrogates the role of Mother, in light of social expectations and pressure. The artist's adopts the anti-hero persona, Shabby Mummy in her crocheted ‘balaburka’, as a direct challenge to prevailing mythologies and social expectations of maternal perfection.

Shabby Mummy's Balaburka, 2013,(part of
performance costume), crocheted

In her research for this body of work, the artist’s primary area of investigation lies in the construction and performativity of gender liminality, where binary oppositional categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ are judged to be inadequate and are crude loci of identities.

'One is not born a Woman', 2013

Her work is underpinned by the social constructionist theory which advocates that our identities are multiple, de-centred and changing; that they are produced, embodied and enacted in a socially relational context, and are inseparable from power relations between subjects. While sex is determined biologically, gender is produced by society: In Western patriarchal societies, male-advantaged gender hierarchy requires that women mark themselves as ‘other’, in order to reassure men of their dominant position in the hierarchy. Consequently, the cultural and social construction of gender enculturates women to do so. Based in part in the Hegelian notion of the ‘Other’, the work by feminist philosophers from Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Mary Daly and Sheila Jeffreys (among others) points to the role of ‘difference’ between male and female. Like the afore-mentioned feminist writers, French philosopher Michel Foucault, emphasizes the role of power in gender construction. This distinction creates heteronormative social mores and repressive regimes.

'Virgin, Mother, Madonna, Whore', 2013, digital print

The title of the work is drawn from Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal work The Second Sex,1949, in which she states:

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” de Beauvoir asserts that femininity does not arise from differences in biology, psychology, or intellect. Rather, femininity is a construction of civilization, a reflection not of “essential” differences in men and women but of differences in their situation.

Ultimately, an essentialist view of binary gender is meaningless: one cannot talk in general about 'women' or any other group as a single entity, as identities consist of so many elements that to assume that people can be seen collectively on the basis of one shared characteristic is wrong. The artist proposes that we deliberately challenge all notions of fixed identity and aspire to the ideal that men and women alike should always be defined primarily as humans.