Jen Smith

t’s not the war, it’s the way that we live.

In the Bush administration’s war on terror, feminist concerns of sexual self-determination and labor equity were co-opted as tactics of military interrogations. Despite this performance of sexual power, women remained objects in a violent, neo-imperialist tableau. Yet this vignette is a particularly American portrait of sexuality, racism and dominance, one that cannot be easily exorcised. My work investigates the ways in which heroic mythologies of the nation state inflect libidinal impulses. It asks what is the visceral legacy of those impulses? And how do these desire animate the body?