“I (Don’t) Want To Be Seen: A Performative Auto-Ethnography of the Young Feminist Artist in Public”

Abstract

In this article, I bring together three auto-ethnographic vignettes, written between 2011 and 2014, that converge around issues of public space, feminist cultural production, technology, and physical exposure in Vancouver and Berlin. Drawing from performance studies frameworks, I position both the rituals of everyday life (like ordering an Americano from a coffeeshop in Vancouver) and moments of explicitly making an artwork (like collaborating on a performance for Vancouver’s LIVE 2011 biennale) as performative. What began as an attempt to read a Vancouver coffeeshop through a fairly straightforward, auto-ethnographic, de Certeauian framework during my Masters research evolved into a scene of sexual harassment and assault, and this article is both a trace of, and a testament to, the challenges that young women-identifying artists and scholars continue to come up against when they do their work in public.