Feminist Studies

Abstract:

Historically, racialized, sexualized, and gendered bodies have been subjected to the epistemological promiscuity of others’ visions. Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu is particularly interested in the ways that “women’s bodies are [v]ulnerable to the whims of changing movements, governments, and social norms.”1 In Mutu’s work, that vulnerability gets staged and subverted through an aesthetic dismemberment. Using clippings from pornographic, ethnographic, and high fashion magazines along with pearls, hair, and paint, Mutu makes collages that are arguably new, often black and what she calls ‘female-ish,’ forms of life, extraterrestrial and taxonomically irreverent.

Using racially and sexually abjectified images and reassembling them into glittery dis/figures, Mutu not only reimagines modalities of life in and as dismemberment, but indicates how an unresolvable dismemberment subverts a taxonomizing gesture that otherwise kills. I argue that Mutu’s oeuvre, including everything from her collages to her short films, enacts what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls a “Black feminist poethics,” a modality of Black creativity, or more nearly blackness-as-unencroachable creativity unmoored from the promiscuous grip of fungible visions.

1 Lauri Firstenberg, “Perverse Anthropology: The Photomontage of Wangechi Mutu, A Conversation with the Artist,” Wangechi Mutu: My Dirty Little Heaven. Edited by Okwui Enwezor, Lauri Firstenberg, Friedhelm Hütte, and Courtney Martin (Netherlands: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 42.