Today, a thoughtful and wonderful university professor got in touch with me, to say that he was teaching DRAWING BLOOD in his class. I was honored. He further said that the students wanted to collectively ask me a question.
I’ll paraphrase it like this:
How could I now do work about politics, when I had spent so much of my youth posing naked and drawing naked girls. Didn’t one compromise the other.
It’s a question I’ve gotten fairly often, and I enjoyed the opportunity to write a thought out answer.
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Dear Professor,
Thank you so much for the kind words!
To be frank, I feel like my experiences with GWCs and the sex worker community are fundamental basis for my politics. They taught me what it was like to be in community that, though presumed to be dumb, frivolous, victimized and voiceless, was filled with ferocious intellect, toughness, and defiant solidarity. They taught me, from experience, that no one was voiceless.
If your students haven’t already become acquainted with the great Emma Goldman, I’d suggest her to them – as well checking out the lives of women like (French resistance spy) Josephine Baker, (communist radical) Frida Kahlo, (war photographer) Lee Miller, and (civil rights and anti war activist) Eartha Kitt.
I sometimes suspect that questions like these come from a deep societal discomfort with femininity. Many male journalists seamlessly segue between writing about sports, politics, financial crises and riots – as they should! But women who do work that is branded female get stuck there. The work that women do is never as serious; it is, after all, the work of women.
For an art viewing exercise, ask your students to check out these pairs of paintings, by Picasso, Dix and Goya. One painting of each pair is about war, and the other about sex. Ask your students if they believe the same man could have, or should have, created both paintings. Why, or why not? And if the answer is yes, why is it hard to accept that similar complexity might exist in a woman artist?
Picasso
Goya
Dix