CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/16/2018

NEW RELEASE! Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon

“So why a show ‘about’ gender,” curator Johanna Burton asks in her Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon introductory essay. “Our hope is that Trigger offers a lens beyond the stalemate of identity even while acknowledging identity’s vexed central role in culture today (and perhaps always). Audre Lorde famously argued in her 1983 essay ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’ that one cannot use the tools of racist patriarchy to examine the ‘fruits’ of racist patriarchy. Following this logic, one must ask: What are our tools today? Can anything truly be seen as falling outside the conventions, systems of oppression, and stalemates we interrogate? Gender, as a moving target, usefully occupies and exceeds the context within which it is understood. If it is a weapon, it is one of deflection rather than outright attack. Indeed, in our current moment, when conservatives are calling for the ‘safe spaces’ they mocked not long ago, we might understand gender as a boomerang, hurled through cultural systems of appropriation and instrumentalization and returning transformed.”