Bodies Unbound connects Europe’s colonialist history of sexual regulation to the contemporary policing of the bodies of women of colour. Through poetry and performance created from archival material, we bring the language of colonialism – often written to be inaccessible to the people they controlled – into embodied reality, while also giving voice to those silenced by history, linguistic barriers, or fear of the state.
Laws regulating women’s labour or sexuality have curtailed freedom and maintained patterns of racism, fetishism, and surveillance from Europe’s colonial past to the present day. In the late 19th and early 20th century, many doctors assumed non-European women were prostitutes and thus vectors for venereal disease. Seen as threats to family integrity and society’s morality, such women were the “easiest target for sexual regulation.” In Germany, an 1871 law enabled police to arrest and subject to medical exam anyone suspected of selling sex. Cities required sex workers to register their place of residence, use an identification card, and undergo frequent medical exams. Such laws, ostensibly aimed at stopping disease, served to control the bodies of women of colour and the working class.
The medical and sexual marginalization of non-Europeans is amplified today in the fearful climate of the pandemic and manifests in the literal policing of bodies of women of colour. Until we reckon with this racist and sexist history, authorities will continue to enact harmful policies, such as raids on nail salons, brothels, and restaurants. These raids often harm women from East and Southeast Asia rather than addressing the economic precarity, itself a vestige of colonialism, that leads them to work in exploitative conditions.
Bodies Unbound draws from public archives (e.g. legislation, medical records, news articles) on prostitution in Europe and the colonies. Then, taking methods from docupoetry, we use these primary source materials to create lyrical works that illuminate and transcend trauma. Finally, we interpret the new texts through performance and present the final work as a poetry film.
Sculpture of the Dead, the docupoetry film resulting from the Bodies Unbound research project, was produced with support from Zarahlena (creative direction, videography), Molly Baber (editing), and Alexander Weber (sound design).
TEAM
Lena Chen (Germany/USA): Chinese artist, writer, sex worker, and organizer with Sex Workers Outreach Project Pittsburgh. B.A. Sociology Harvard University 2010. Master of Fine Art (Carnegie Mellon University 2022).
Elise Hanrahan (Germany/USA): historian, PhD candidate at Freie Universität Berlin researching feminism, sex-work and medicine in early 20th century Germany.
April Yee (UK/USA): Vietnamese-Chinese poet, literary translator, mentor for the Refugee Journalism Project at University of the Arts London. B.A. History & Literature, Harvard University 2008
