Occupying one corner of The 8th Floor, at The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation exhibition space, are two adjacent screens. In a time-lapse video played in reverse, a mother and daughter, in close embrace, chew on a raw onion as they pass it between their mouths. Instead of seeing the onion get smaller, it grows larger the longer we watch it. On the other screen, the daughter does the same with her father. In artist Patty Chang’s In Love (2001) the onion is abject, a symbol for awkward intimate exchanges between family members. For me, the onion layers are a metaphor for overlapping identities, and the intersections those layers suggest for feminism in The Intersectional Self, showing at The 8th Floor.
Feminism has moved towards what is now commonly known as intersectionality—a perspective which asks how multiple types of oppression can act on a person or group of people. It considers that various types of oppression are not a result of discrete actions but come about as a confluence of influences; in other words, the experience of discrimination comes in multiple forms simultaneously and its a/effects are subsequently internalised. Intersectionality elucidates these multi-layered realities of lived experience with and within various systems of domination—sexist, racist, homo/transphobic, ableist, and so on. The Intersectional Self has a timely curatorial focus, and centres on how experiences of gender fluidity have and continue to influence feminism. The exhibition starts with the premise that feminism has always been intersectional—our bodies, our senses of selves, have always been marked by these multiple forms of oppression and discrimination. At a time when the media peddles visual codes of feminism that rely heavily on white representations and