Feminism Under Corona. Renewing the Script – Melanie Jame Wolf
The fifth episode is based on a conversation with interdisciplinary artist Melanie Jame Wolf, whose work critically circulates within the flow of immaterial capital by using the performative condition and potential of our identities. The conversation between Sonia Fernández Pan and Melanie Jame Wolf incorporated some of the many elephants in the (art) room, such as social class, age, or “undisciplined” bodies in the field of performance, dance, and choreography. It was also an opportunity to talk about social networks and the inevitable perverse functioning of symbolic capital in and through them. As Melanie Jame Wolf points out, contemporary social networks enable a construction of personas similar to those that formerly used to happen in the media space of music videos. Pop is a fundamental component of her artistic and vital practice, including many attributes, gestures, behaviors, and objects associated with a type of femininity that was and still is stigmatized by some sort of feminist thinking that denies the sensual and pleasurable dimension of bodies. One that does not include sex workers and their concerns within its political agenda. But can any “feminism” that does not take into account all the factors of the complex and effective relationship between privilege and oppression even be called “feminism”? What is the meaning and use of essential points in a performative reality? The Gaze, written in capital letters, which Melanie Jame Wolf incorporates into her text as a kind of character within her story, also infiltrates feminism in the manner of a judge who determines the validity or appropriateness of those bodies that are not only gazed at but are continually surveilled – and at the same time, surveilling themselves and others. But just as scripts in conversations exist to deviate from them, so do social scripts exist to be renewed and consequently refused.