In response to Performing Identity by Elizabeth Bell

In my video work, I always come from the place that there is no "I", there is no "her", there is no "it", there is no "us", there is no "we. Everything is interchangeable. As women move from the marginality of the domesticity of the home, raising children as their only identity, what do they retain of that of that subjugation? They literally wear the carpets, they are the shiny tiles of their floors, they are stainless steel refrigerators that match the microwave. Women have not moved enough from the architecture of their identification with their biology as a kind of destiny. The womb an interior, the home an interior, the purse an interior, women is still in the womb, pushing a shopping cart, or mopping a floor, still confined to that architecture, still looking into her purse. When will she ever leave the house?

A girlfriend and I were talking it out freely the other night, I off handedly started a rap, " my dick is a home"As a queer woman my proverbial relationship with a virtual phallus, can be quite playful, but I was surprised that a playful mixture of my own subjectivity would also still place the genitals in a home, or about a home, or to somehow create a womb for the phallus. That even in my most playful schism I would domesticate my projected phallus?

If we consider this postmodern idea of subjectivity in flux, then in we not only criticize the need for an identity, but how do we escape these deeply held ideas of our identity, if while coming up the stairs to the man the "honey" that was home all day. And yet I tried to develop this idea of the masquerade that women in the workforce have to play. And don't we want women to be these walking beauty pageants, making all our erotic dreams come true, emotionally available, bringing home the bacon, and yet also be respected at work, we send so many conflicting messages, that I would assume we would want women to wear bikinis at work?

But what if the self is fragmented, always in translation, then is there is so much space for these deep ingrained beliefs about self to emerge. I can not seem to shake the home, I can not seem to move from the domestic space. If we really want to dismantle these master narratives, and yet they are so much a part of the infrastructure, what is the thorns and what is the difference between what is the castle and the thorns?