Pictured above, from L-R: Sergeant Coco Fusco & my friend Emily

Last Friday I was privileged to attend The F Word, a conference on visual art & feminism at Rutgers University in NJ. Besides hanging out with my good friend Emily, a multi-talented artist and co-founder of the queer feminist magazine riffRAG, my fave part of the day was watching celebrated performance artist Coco Fusco present her lecture, “Strategies of Gender Management,” and answer audience questions in full US Army drag.

Fusco actually trained with the military in 2005 to prepare for her current work, “A Room of One’s Own,” in which she presents information on women’s expanding role in the war on terror. While British writer Virginia Woolf famously endorsed women having their own space for creative ventures, Sergeant Fusco explores the importance of women having their own rooms to interrogate detainees.

Inspired by real incidents of women soldiers’ abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Fusco lectures with the use of a PowerPoint that includes text from Condoleezza Rice’s speeches and interrogation manuals. Fusco also commissioned an artist to draw pictures (“I can’t draw,” she stated) for her presentation based on the manuals’ illustrations.

By employing satire to draw attention to female officers’ abuse and torture of prisoners, Fusco explores the war on terror using a unique and thought-provoking approach. Are we really expected to patriotically celebrate torture as an act of female empowerment?

Later, while answering audience questions, Fusco stated that satire is most effective when it’s unclear whether the piece is satirical or not. She appreciated a critic’s analysis that she “uses fiction to take people to a place that’s real.” Fusco and audience members referred to her earlier performance, “Couple in a Cage,” in which she and her then-boyfriend Guillermo Gomez-Pena dressed as Amerindians and installed themselves in a cage in several museum exhibits, as an example of satire that successfully blurred the line between fiction and reality.

Thank you Coco Fusco and Emily for making this event fun… and for stopping to pose for the picture even when time was limited and lighting was less than fabulous! Mwah.