Hawk Swanson’s practice began with the Feminism? Project (2005-2006). The artist scripted ten video performances from edited interviews with a variety of women throughout her home state of Iowa, starting with sorority sisters and concluding with family members. Their raw responses about feminism ranged from naïve surprise to composed discourse, but became flip one-liners and ironic ramblings when the artist performed them, intoned in a valley-girl voice in provocative contexts.
In 2013, Hawk Swanson revisited a video from the Feminism? Project in collaboration with artist Xandra Ibarra for a video entitled Untitled Fucking. Through queer sexual vocabulary of topping, bottoming, and “bottoming out,” Ibarra and Hawk Swanson’s collaboration stages the deep and complicated interplay between the performance of white feminism and the feminisms of color that whiteness excludes. The piece also poses a collective challenge to the systems of representation that discipline the notion of political “voice.” Working in the erotic interplay between saying and doing, Hawk Swanson and Ibarra rehearse the queer and feminist contradictions that arise when explicit sex and performance collide, directing us towards the untitled and yet to be articulated horizons of political possibility. Scholars Amber Jamilla Musser and Juana María Rodríguez have both written on Hawk Swanson and Ibarra’s collaboration.
In 2013, Hawk Swanson revisited a video from the Feminism? Project in collaboration with artist Xandra Ibarra for a video entitled Untitled Fucking. Through queer sexual vocabulary of topping, bottoming, and “bottoming out,” Ibarra and Hawk Swanson’s collaboration stages the deep and complicated interplay between the performance of white feminism and the feminisms of color that whiteness excludes. The piece also poses a collective challenge to the systems of representation that discipline the notion of political “voice.” Working in the erotic interplay between saying and doing, Hawk Swanson and Ibarra rehearse the queer and feminist contradictions that arise when explicit sex and performance collide, directing us towards the untitled and yet to be articulated horizons of political possibility. Scholars Amber Jamilla Musser and Juana María Rodríguez have both written on Hawk Swanson and Ibarra’s collaboration.
