A Wall of One’s Own: Latinas Reclaiming Spaces, Subverting Economies, Empowering Communities1 Carmen M. Méndez-García Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Abstract This article analyzes issues of gender, space, and ethnicity in three different pieces: Coco Fusco’s performance A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America (2006), the mural painting Latino America (1974) by the Las Mujeres Muralistas group, and the Venas de la Mujer installation (1976) at the LA Women’s Building by the Las Chicanas group. Though created in two different temporal contexts, the three pieces are connected by Virginia Woolf’s idea of the space as “room of one’s own,” and thus share an understanding of the complexity of issues, such as female creativity, the portrayal of/appropriation by women of spaces traditionally considered to be masculine, and the ephemerality of certain artistic media. By studying the three pieces in their geographical, social, and artistic context, I intend to demonstrate that issues denounced by the Chicano Civil Rights Movement (also known as El Movimiento) and the Feminist Movement in the 1970s are still unresolved in 21st century America. Keywords: Coco Fusco, Las Mujeres Muralistas, Venas de la Mujer, space, gender, Latinas. https://doi.org/10.26262/exna.v0i3.7552 ____________________________________________________________________________________________ Fifty years after the promise of the Long Sixties, categories essential to the Civil Rights Movement such as gender or ethnicity, seem to be more contested and as pertinent as ever in contemporary America. Performances by Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco, while clearly rooted in the 21st century, can be illuminated by their comparison to pieces from the 1970s: at a time when both a feminist and a Latino consciousness were being created, these pieces touch upon similar topics, share a common political intent, are equally affected by and dependent on issues of ephemerality, and are deeply concerned with the portrayal and essence of femininity and Latinidad. In the following pages, I intend to analyze Coco Fusco’s A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America (2006) and its connections to the work of two groups of women artists from the 1970s: Las Mujeres Muralistas, working in San Francisco, and the collaborative art installation Venas de la Mujer, exhibited in the Los Angeles Woman’s Building in 1976. Virginia Woolf’s 1929 “A Room of One’s Own,” an instigation for women to find spaces of their own for creativity, is central to Fusco’s piece, and also resonates in the media 1 This article was written as part of the research conducted for the Project “Troubling Houses: Dwellings, Materiality, and the Self in American Literature” (FFI2017–82692–P), MINECO/AEI/FEDER, UE), funded by the Spanish Government and the European Union. Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media; Issue 3, 2019; eISSN: 2585-3538. ©2019 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC-BY-SA 4.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. 110 Carmen M. Méndez-García (walls) and venues chosen by other Latina artists, as all of them navigate issues of representativity, gender, ethnicity, the creation of art, and its permanence in their communities. Spectators attending Fusco’s performance piece A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America (2006) may be surprised by her appearance in military gear and her ode, before the start of what looks like a military briefing, to the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who is pronounced as a model of emancipated, empowered womanhood in a “loving lyrical tribute ... that sounds like an early American religion hymn” (Muñoz 137). While the association of female independence and military discipline is in itself problematic, it is in the third section of the performance that the “room” of one’s own in the title becomes apparent. This room is not a home or a domestic space, but an interrogation room where a male prisoner is being tortured by a woman: the ironic undertones of the title, thus, refer not only to the room itself, but also to ideas of “owning” the space and to what the “power” of women in such a room could be. Fusco’s piece came out a couple of years after photographs and videos of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo surfaced, showing female soldiers as interrogators and perpetrators of violence, specifically using sexual harassment on Muslim men. The piece is, therefore, a response to the concerns of uncomfortable viewers (including Fusco, who was disturbed by such images), trying to reconcile the “empowerment” of women in the military with the fact that said empowerment is happening in spaces of torture. For Fusco, the images from those prisons go against the long- standing feminist tenet of women as victims (Beckman 127), not agents, of violence. The demands that Woolf puts forward in her seminal piece “A Room of One’s Own” (1929), such as female empowerment through economic independence and a space one could claim one’s own, are displaced by Fusco: from a tranquil setting, where women could create art, to a claustrophobic setting of torture and violence, where women are seen as destructive, following orders and using their femininity as a weapon to extract information from male prisoners, using sexual innuendos as “special tactics by female interrogators” (A Room 144). Fusco presents herself to the audience in military attire, trying to explain to her audience the rationale behind the use of “women’s weapons” to interrogate suspects. The piece adopts the setting of a press conference, and uses familiar formats (slides, video) and an argumentative rhetoric, all of which tries to portray normalcy and reminds the audience of the civilized setting of a lecture hall. The audience is informed that, “At the onset of the new millennium, American women finally have what they need to demonstrate their prowess” since “the War on Terror offers an unprecedented opportunity for the women of this great country [America]” (A Room 143). Spectators watch the interrogation scenes through a simulated CCTV, a technology that guarantees safety and distance from the interrogation room, while exploiting the voyeuristic, spectacle-like quality of torture by broadcasting what is happening inside the room. The domains of private and public, which have dominated much of the discourse about gender inequality, are thus questioned alongside the idea of “empowerment” they suggest. Fusco explicitly reminds the audience of how it was “the great British writer Virginia Woolf who argued that every woman had to have a room of her own in order to manifest her strengths” (A Room 142). However, in her performance, empowerment seems to be equated with violence and harassment, and the female “strengths” (A Room 142), the A Wall of One’s Own 111 “special tactics” mentioned above, rely on an explicitly sexual interpretation of femininity that Fusco has described as “the phenomenon of instrumentalized female sexual violence” (“Artist’s Statement” 139) with interrogators using tactics that go “from sexually inflected insults all the way to stripping down to sexy lingerie under the uniforms and rubbing their genitals against these men” (“Operation Atropos” 83). Fusco acknowledges that there are no pictures of women doing this, but there are testimonies both by women interrogators who were party to such events or by those who witnessed them: Fusco’s intention is, then, to capture the ephemeral use of space by performing “this material, which is politically volatile, but also dramatically powerful” (“Operation Atropos” 83). From the room as a private space of liberation and creativity imagined by Woolf, where men and distractions were barred, Fusco takes us to a CCTV space of exposure and shame, where the woman is an agent, but only by abusing men, exerting “vicarious power” by following orders, with the surveillance cameras recreating what Fusco recognizes as a “theater of cruelty,” following Stephen Eisenman’s book The Abu Ghraib Effect2 (Copeland 5). The female soldier is shown invading the personal space of the prisoners, in what can only be read as a very disturbing idea of the “empowerment” of women in what Fusco calls the “New America,” but also performing, i.e. the piece is placing itself in a “mass cultural tradition of theatricality and display” (Copeland 5). Fusco has stated that while torture is “indeed painfully real,” it is the elements of theatricality and performance in it that produce results, emphasizing how a large number of interrogators in the military have dramatic performance backgrounds (Fusco and Ritz 154). In real-world interrogation rooms, Fusco and Mike Ritz explain, “much thought is given to items (props) within the room, lighting, and sound to create an atmosphere for the source that is conductive to talking” (156). In her performance, Fusco describes these spaces as “simple rooms, furnished with nothing more than a desk and a couple of chairs ... sanctorum of liberty, [where] American women are using their minds and their charms to save American lives” (A Room 143). The artist is clearly creating a comparison between Woolf’s ideal room as a space conductive to creativity, a space that isolates women from the ever-distracting realities of the domestic world, and the artificial setting of the interrogation chamber, where a very different kind of “narrative” is created in the interaction between interrogator and prisoner. By making the interrogator be female, Fusco is, on the one hand, replicating the contemporary reality of the “disproportionately high number of women involved in areas of the military that are not combat related ... [such as] intelligence” (“Operation Atropos” 83), but also emphasizing how, even in the military, the strengths that women can act out are highly sexualized, with “sexual harassment as a particularly gendered and culturally specific strategy designed to break Muslim men” (“Operation Atropos” 83).