No More Blue Mondays (2021)

No More Blue Mondays is a two-channel video that reflects on the relationship that exists between race, gender, class, and work in all of its forms including (re)productive labor, care work, and sex work. The video pairs footage from a performance in which I used nylon stockings to attach my body to an ironing board with selected archival clips of women making their way through an average workday at sites that include the home, factory floor, and stage. The archival clips were mainly created between the 1930’s and 1970’s and originally sourced from over 80 radio and TV commercials, etiquette videos, sex education trainings, peep show videos, stag films, oral history interviews, protest recordings, TV shows, and films stored in the US public domain.

You’ll notice that the archival footage overwhelmingly documents the voices and bodies of white cis men and women who comment on service and servitude, femininity, marriage, heterosexual love, and liberation. The overlapping discourse of these white narrators circulates to sustain the structure of white middle/upper class fantasies and comforts tied to the home and family. As these speakers reflect on the types of work that are expected from women’s bodies, they also identify who they believe is best fit to perform various forms of labor. Their words echo the ways that whiteness has contributed to the racialized construction of class and gender in the US. The language that white society uses to define gender has been foisted upon Black and Brown bodies and working class women to fashion a workforce that can be wedged into different sectors of the state economy when convenient. The rigidity of this system is associated with the sense of “stuckedness” felt by everyone from the white housewives who protest against the men in their lives at the expense of the unseen “help” to the women who do not view leaving the home as a luxury or choice, but as a necessary act of survival. The interlocking violence of racism, patriarchy, and capitalism acts as a binding force that generates messy contradictions.