The Disciplinary and the Domestic

Abstract

This essay focuses on works of video art from the 1970s and early 1980s by Letícia Parente (1930–1991), a first-generation video art pioneer in Brazil, whose video performances associated household imagery, domestic spaces, and quotidian chores and objects with violence, repression, and incarceration during the period the Brazilian dicatorship (1964–1985). Parente worked in video performance, an approach to performance art in which she performed for the video camera, rather than for a live audience. I argue that in her video performances, Parente performs domestic and 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, her works demonstrate the ways that the same forces that structure public disciplinary society also configure the private spaces of the home. I propose that she positions domestic space as a zone of containment and imprisonment, and that her resistance occurs not in the space itself but through the absurdity and ironic bathos of their bodily performances, as well as her actual or implied self-harm and violence, themes I address by engaging Kathy O’Dell’s theorization of “masochistic performance art,” and Hal Foster’s concept of “mimetic adaptation.”

Keywords

• Letícia Parente
• Brazil
• Video Art
• Feminism
• Household Chores
• Dictatorship