Commodification
Commodity 1: Perfection (red pepper, carrots & garlic clove structure + digital illustration, 2020)
Commodity 2: Emotional Labor (capsules, glitter, Rx bottle + digital illustration, 2020)
Commodity 3: Love (polymer clay heart sculpture, rose petals/stem, digital illustration, 2020).
Commodity 4: Silence (wax lips, hardware, digital illustration, 2020).
Series Credo: "Be perfect, work for free. Love is the lock, and silence the key"
The Commodification of Women on Dating Apps:
Women are the product being offered on dating apps. Not romance, not even dating. We provide the unpaid emotional labor and virtual bodies that men routinely demand access to, paralleling out-of-app reality. The accounts of women, BIWoC and marginalized gender identities are censored more severely, resulting in profile modification and removal. Why? Because these platforms are not built for us. They are designed for and typically by men, using algorithms that exploit our bodies and silence our voices for the consumption of both the individual male gaze and that of the dating platform.
PERFECTION: Perfection is what women are socialized to aspire to, and what men are conditioned to seek (regardless of their own short-comings). We internalize this social contract and fixate on perfection. Not for ourselves though, but for male gaze consumerism. Women’s perfection is commodified, and man the ultimate consumer. The vegetable sculpture is comprised of organic produce, representing “perfection” at all costs, and takes the form of a reclining odalisque, a classic figure that traditionally poses for the benefit of the male gaze. In the end, both are consumed with and by perfection.
EMOTIONAL LABOR: The social contract which assigns “emotional labor”, or unpaid interpersonal work, to women and those who identify as women, has been indoctrinated in all of us since before we even knew that this form of exploitation existed. Beginning around the advent of the industrial revolution, the ideology of division of labor placed men in the public workforce and delegated women to the private sphere of home and domestic matters. This desire to isolate and exclude women (and let’s be honest, any non-white cisgender male) from the public sphere (which was the only place one could achieve any real influence) was implemented by limiting our ability to fully participate in an economy in which a person’s worth was determined by their ability to be profitable (ie make money) in a patriarchal capitalistic society.
Men’s public labor is rewarded with monetary compensation (aka capital) which can then be distributed back into the economy. Meanwhile, the private sector labor performed by women, which included conforming to traditional gender binary roles of where women were expected to be subservient, nurturing, supportive and empathetic, was not monetized work and therefor deemed less valuable because her compensation (safety, security, financial support) could not be re-invested directly in a capitalist economy.
Women have been socialized to assume the responsibility of The Emotional Laborer, even when we ALSO perform labor with monetary compensation outside the home, doubling the burden of expectation and workload. Men are not entitled to access to our finite emotional resources which are often exploited by those conditioned to expect it.
LOVE: How does the idea of love fit into the overall concept of this “Commodification” series? To me, love is something manufactured. Artificial and contrived. Love, as exploited in our capitalistic society, is not a feeling, but a commodity. Love is a carrot dangling just out of reach, and we just might be able to grab it if we only stop trying so hard. Love is a rose, presented as a contrived courtship ritual exchange of goods, reinforcing the transactional kind of love that the patriarchy perpetuates. Love is something to achieve, not feel. Love is exchanged, not given freely. Love is a mechanism to control, not liberate. Love is a lock. But what is the key?
SILENCE: The commodification of women’s silence is the most lethal weapon the patriarchy has at its disposal. Women have been indoctrinated since birth to be docile, play nice, be the bigger person, don’t tattle, wait your turn…and then, in adulthood we are reminded to bite our tongue, pick our battles, let it go, don’t make a scene, be rational, be good, be quiet. Be ANYTHING that doesn’t make a sound in this world where men arbitrate the rules.
Women’s silence is commodified in our capitalistic economy. We gain social, political and economic capital by remaining silent when we might speak up in cases of sexual harassment and abuse, rape, and gender-based violence. Remain silent and keep your job, marriage, friends, reputation. Speak power to truth and risk social alienation, psychological trauma and physical abuse, personal safety, etc.
Our silence results not only from our conditioned complicity in a patriarchal society, but as a means of survival. Wearing our quiet as a cloak, we discover that our silence allows us certain freedoms, because we are not seen as a threat to the status quo.
For all the false reasons we self-silence, and all the real ways we have been silenced, it’s critical to understand that the patriarchy requires our silence, it CRAVES our complicity to continue its insidious perpetuation of the status quo, which has one purpose: to benefit the few while oppressing the many.