I went to Coco Fusco’s A Room of One’s Own. It was great!!! Coco Fusco was everything I expected and more. I had watched her famous documentary Couple In a Cage she did with Gomez-Pena and read Broken English and I’m really happy to have had this chance to see her perform in person. She’s one of the leading performers in political theater right now.
I liked the conception of the piece which was to show what it means for women, a gender minority, to have become perpetrators of violence in the Iraq war, something she explores through the active presence of female interrogators in Guantanamo. I liked the execution of the piece which consciously avoided any kind of sensationalization of the use of sexuality in torture. There was a post-show discussion with Coco Fusco and she told us that she had gone to a school for interrogation, something run by retired interrogation officers who go by Team Delta. Fascinating. She went to this school with a group to learn about torture, and she says that she’s been to academic conferences with the interrogators from Team Delta (with whom she was open about what she was doing).
She took to task second-wave feminism and its uncritical embrace of female empowerment. For second-wave feminists sexual liberation was a form of female empowerment and the only way in which women could be thought of in relation to violence was as victims. (yeah, women were that oppressed in the U.S. too) But what she’s discoverd as she started on this project is that despite the misogynist and homophobic sexual culture of the military, women interrogators do it to advance their careers. Marginalized in the army as they may be, women still choose to do this.
Thing is, second-wave feminism didn’t think thoroughly enough about what “empowerment” is. And its consequences. Which is probably true of many similar movements that seek to give voice and autonomy to formerly oppressed and abjected persons. Empowerment means that you will get power. It doesn’t exactly tell you what you’re supposed to do when you finally have it. It more or less assumes that you’ll know what to do since you’ve *personally* experienced subjection yourself. It assumes you won’t do the same thing as your oppressors. Well, so much for wishful thinking.
P.S. there was this unforgettable moment during Fusco’s performance when Fusco, in the character of the female interrogator officer who completely believes that what she is doing is in the service of the public and the nation, said “but we are doing this so that you can sleep at night in peace.” I froze as our eyes locked for a second. Tears welled up.
