Pain of Work Case Study 2

Scene from a 2 year monogamous relationship:

22 year old woman and 24 year old husband. Woman dresses as man from 1848 and role plays as though she has an illness that keeps her from speaking. Man acts as her slave and personal servant. The 22 and 24 year old travel from Georgia to Pennsylvania on first-class trains, stay in the best hotels, and dine one evening with a steamboat captain.

In 2015 Uri McMillan writes in "Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance" that Eurocentric narratives of performance art omit black artists, focus on white female subjectivity, and that the art world assumes that black and avant-garde are incommensurable. In protest, McMillan recasts the historical case of fugitive slave Ellen Craft as performance art.