The disciplinary and the domestic: Household images in the video performances of Letícia Parente, 1975–1982
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21814/diacritica.4984Keywords:
Letícia Parente, Brasil, Video Art, Feminism, Household Chores, DictatorshipAbstract
This essay focuses on Letícia Parente (1930–1991), a Brazilian video artist and scientist, whose works associated household imagery, domestic spaces, and quotidian chores and objects with violence, repression, and incarceration. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, she created a series of video performances, an approach to performance art in which she performed for the video camera, rather than for a live audience. Though Parente did not self-identify as a feminist, this essay interprets her work through a feminist reading, arguing that she navigated the multiple pressures of motherhood, housework, and her professional career by devising experimental tasks exploring her domestic chores and testing their limits to address both the gendered and racial divisions of labor and the state-sponsored violence of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985). These works include In (1975), which centers on the act of hanging up clothes in a closet, Marca Registrada(1975), which depicts sewing/embroidery, and Tarefa I(1982), which tackles ironing, all of which she performed in her own home. In thesevideos, Parente performs quotidian actions in ways that enact self-harm and confinement in order to marshal a response to gender oppression in women’s daily lives that paralleled the violence and imprisonment Brazilians experienced under the dictatorship.By enacting disciplinary ‘punishments’(or the threat of such punishments) on herself, cloaked as daily domestic tasks, she demonstrates the ways that the same forces that structure public disciplinary society also configure the private spaces of the home.
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