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Public Project
WOMAN GO NO'GREE
Copyright Gloria Oyarzabal 2024
Date of Work Dec 1969 - Dec 1969
Updated Nov 2019
Topics Architecture, Conceptual, Documentary, Fine Art, Landscape, Mixed Medium, Photography, Portraiture, Street, Travel
Empires,by their very nature,embody and institutionalize difference,both between metropolis/colony and colonial subjects.Imperial imaginary floods popular culture.Gender categories were one kind of bio-logic European colonialism institutionalized in African cultures:there’s significant religious and linguistic evidence that before colonization social practices weren’t ordered according to gender difference.Colonization of the mind exported women infantilization as part of Western patriarchy,configuring a state of vulnerability,making the path of dependency propitious.Can we assume social relations in all societies are organized around biological sexual difference?Thus,the three central concepts that have been the pillars of Western feminism-women,gender,sisterhood-are only understood with a careful attention to the patriarchal nuclear family from which they’ve emerged;familiar form far from being universal In addition,male privilege as an essential part of the European ethos is implicit in the culture of modernity.What if new modernity models bring us to a new vision of "the other"?We should take into consideration issues as class,race,age,gender,even health,as being fundamental to the female experience.   Erotic,sexuality,sisterhood,motherhood,marriage,tradition,domestication,…all this nuances,with it’s own lights and shades in each society should come out in the same level.Beauty circulates as a form of commodity with social,economic and cultural value;however these norms are often measured with Eurocentric values,white beauty narratives(thinnes, youth,..)being strongly racialized.Whiteness is reinforced at the same time as the norm while "otherness" becomes fetish and "exotic”.Beauty canons,modernity,stereotypes…Let’s decolonize feminism questioning Western rational theoretical frameworks that construct gender categories in a universalistic manner. 
How do new realities affect new understandings of kinship,marriage and family as a result of status,sexuality,geography?In 1987,more than a decade before the dawn of queer theory,Nigerian writer Ifi Amadiume wrote “Male Daughters,Female Husbands” freeing the subject position of 'husband' and other masculine  attributes from its affiliation with men,dislocating sex,gender and sexual orientation.Can a daughter be considered a son?Can a woman take another as a wife,openly complying with all the requirements that the marriage tradition imposes on the groom?In the pre-colonial period sex and gender could not coincide,thus denying the supposed universality of the subordination of women.
I explore intersections between gender- History-knowledge-making searching to overcome social and symbolic ascription only by gender difference,opening the range to other factors for the construction of identity. Let us wish for new ways of relating genders,of new models of intercultural dialogues not based on supremacy nor on an excluding hierarchy,and maybe identities,both individual and community,could naturally develop towards a society which one wouldn't have to be invisible in order to advance.Utopia or feasible reality?
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