Monet Clark

A performance, video and photographic artist working on both sides of the camera in wryly humorous, semi-autobiographical, feminist pieces.

Review: “A Playboy Bunny Navigates the Politics of Dystopia”

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My response in the comments below to one of the points of this review which was based on an incorrect assumption about my race: “As the artist who made BUNNY GIRL & as a women who is mixed race & comes from a long line of not white & mixed race women, I wish the writer of this piece had done her research on me, before calling me out in regards to “white feminism”. Having tried to make sense of the traumas to myself and to my family lineage due to racism, through education in the liberal PC environment of Bay Area academia starting 30 yrs ago where I focused on women’s studies, I know the arguments presented in this piece all too well and my family has lived them. Thusly I am deeply offended by the main argument in this article. I thank Hyperallergic & the writer for seeing my piece fit for publishing a piece on, I am very grateful. However I just wish that if the writer wanted to make a piece on “white feminism” she would have used my unique vantage point as a mixed raced feminist in the argument instead of assuming I’m white, because I’m white passing. The pitfalls of our current super hyper PC culture is this tendency to cast stones at our own, eating them up till I’m concerned there will be nothing left. The irony is that my video comments on the deteriorating state of our shared biosphere and how the feminine is needed to rise in order to save us all, black, white, red, brown, yellow, fur covered and green (plants). We are all in this together.”

 

A Playboy Bunny Navigates the Politics of Dystopia, Hyperallergic, Anne Lesley Selcer

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“The strength of the piece is the character’s tender process of becoming animal— contrasted with her bare vulnerability and her inscribed sex-worker sexuality. This Playboy Bunny has gone feral from its social role, now potentially available to be with multitudes of other animals and plants. “Bunny Girl” is the product of a bio-politics in which power is not located in the gaze, as it has been for many feminist performance artists, but in the contingency of the body within an increasingly hostile ecology. The video work suggests a possibility of addressing environmental catastrophe and subjectivity from a non-human-centric starting place. Turning feminist performance in this direction borrows its defiant tone to rethink a fresh binary. —Anne Leslie Selcer, Hyperallergic, June, 2017

After this article was published I posted this comment on the site in response to one of the writer’s points which hinged on an incorrect assumption about my race.

“As the artist who made BUNNY GIRL & as a women who is mixed race & comes from a long line of not white & mixed race women, I wish the writer of this piece had done her research on me, before calling me out in regards to “white feminism”. Having tried to make sense of the traumas to myself and to my family lineage due to racism, through education in the liberal PC environment of Bay Area academia starting 30 yrs ago where I focused on Women’s Studies, I know the arguments presented in this piece all too well and my family has lived them. Thusly I am deeply offended by the main argument in this article. I thank Hyperallergic & the writer for seeing my piece fit for publishing a piece on, I am very grateful. However I just wish that if the writer wanted to make a piece on “white feminism” she would have used my unique vantage point as a mixed raced feminist in the argument instead of assuming I’m white, because I’m white passing. The pitfalls of our current super hyper PC culture is this tendency to cast stones at our own, eating them up till I’m concerned there will be nothing left. The irony is that my video comments on the deteriorating state of our shared biosphere and how the feminine is needed to rise in order to save us all, black, white, red, brown, yellow, fur covered and green (plants). We are all in this together.”