Pain of Work

In "The Common Self", by Lewis Hyde, the author argues against ideas of authorship/ownership in art, suggesting that subjecthood is inherently collective. This is m-utopian thinking because it assumes that every every subject is A-Gendered, A-raced, etc and ignores the "E-rased" subject. Those intersectional subjects who have historically been denied authorship/ownership by systemic racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination. In "Conceptual Art and Femminism: Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper, Elanor Antin, and Martha Wilson" author Jayne Wark wrote that many feminists in the early 1970's were suspicious of "those who proclaim, from a position of power and privilege, 'the death of the author,' at precisely that historical moment 'when women have just begun to remember their selves and claim an agentic subjectivity'...[and] questions of subjectivity and "otherness" were just beginning to take on crucial significance" (46).

These issues are still relevant and thus the invisible work of women is reclamation. This work is only invisible to non-women, and in line with the nature of this work, invisibility is also reclaimed as a useful tool.


invisible quote