Kate Boyd/February 2015/writing for USEd

See the exhibition: USEd

USEd
for Karen
​
A feminist approach to knowing the world always looks for resistance,
seeks out voices, dreams and survival strategies of the USEd.
Power is never completely paved smooth,
symmetrical unidirectional lines, containable, knowable or easily identifiable.
 Never fully dominating, never complete.
And yet,
kick to kidney
head to nightstand
skin ripped at the seam until it no longer feels like home
caught in and constructed by the interwoven logic of white supremacist heteronormative capitalist patriarchy.
Are you hurting now? Ohhhh, are you fucking hurting now?
(mockingly)
Yes.
And still,
what about the ladders?
To know the USEd as only products of the USEr,
a one-way street of clearly defined unchangeable relations
of innocent and non-innocent,
 is not the best location or the best view
to radically re-alter the warp and weft of the grid.
Like forcefully satin stitching together two mop heads
into motionless uniformed compliance,
is also violent.