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Three Weeks in May” (1977) by Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz.

This is the final scene of a three-week long performance event in LA. The audience entered a dimly-lit gallery, wherein a massive winged lamb’s carcass hung from the center of the room. Above the carcass, four nude women, painted red, crouched quietly on the ledge. On the floor below was a graphic depiction of sexual assault scrawled in chalk on asphalt. Tape-recorded voices spoke haltingly of rape and assault experiences. As the culmination of three weeks of rape-awareness performances which included giant maps pinpointing the locations of rapes, the final gallery portion of the even invoked the stark physical reality of the dots on the maps, suggesting the brutalizing effects of the sexual objectification of women. The nude women mutely perched on the ledge bore striking resemblance to the countless nude women hung on the walls of Western museums, deepening the critique of a cultural practice that has made of woman an object, a category, a “sign.” Through this piece Lacy and Labowitz demonstrated how such transposition of women into signs (or representations of femininity), endangers the lives of actual women.

Quote for thought, “If the female body has become the locus of the inscription of difference, the “text” by which identity is read, then women’s performance art is always the positioning of a female body as subject in direct opposition to its patriarchal text. Women performers challenge the very fabric of representation by refusing that text and positing new, multiple texts grounded in real women’s experience and sexuality.” - Jeanie Forte

Shout out to my hometown democrats in Salt Lake City, Utah!

Santorum-backer suggests women put “Aspirin between their knees” to act as contraception.