Mutual Interview with FM Staff Writer Alicia M. Chen

In this installment of my column, FM staff writer Alicia M. Chen and I talk to each other about the performance art projects we undertook together in the fall. We were both in a class that required us to perform a performance art piece for all of November. AMC posted every waking hour of every day, on the hour, on a public Instagram account. If she missed an hour, she’d have to post twice the next. The photos had to reflect her daily life. My project was to dig holes everyday. I mostly dug by the Charles River, and usually at night. I’d keep the soil.

AMC: My project wasn't supposed to be about gender in the first place, but I realized the role of gender while the project was going on. I think there is an expectation as to how women should spend their days and nights, and then put that on social media for people to see. That was something that I had to grapple with, because I wasn't sure if I fit into that, or if I even should fit into that. I came into the project without thinking that I needed to portray anything—it was my life. But then I realized that within every hour there's still some kind of picking and choosing. What about yours?

EKR: My project was ostensibly about land use and land ownership. But as I spent time with the dirt, I started thinking a lot about traditional femininity, where women are supposed to be light, pure, wispy. Our professor told me about this anthropological phenomenon of women eating dirt all over the world, and I started thinking about that all the time. It felt like this subversion of femininity as cleanliness and loveliness. It’s so hard to articulate why this became about gender for me, because it was a time of trying to configure thoughts about queerness and what gender meant to me and what type of womanhood I wanted to be associated with. Interacting with the dirt, for me, became this proxy for interacting with non-traditional forms of femininity.

AMC: It's hard to articulate how gender relates to everything. I’m looking for these words that I can't actually find.

EKR: So you ended up having a kind of shitty month.

AMC: Oh, I had a terrible month. It mostly sucked because I was doing something each hour that I didn't want to, but I did anyway. Knowing constantly that there would always be someone knowing, based on what I posted, where I was, what I was doing, what classes I was in—at one point there were 150 followers who would see exactly where I was. That was new to me, and something that I increasingly grew uncomfortable with. In terms of the content, an hour is hard to sum up, and so is choosing one picture to sum up your week or your month, which is the way most of us use social media. Also, following a schedule was hard. I messed up a lot. A lot.

EKR: Is there a version of yourself that you wanted to perform?

AMC: I had to decide what daily life meant. Even though going out was something I did, I wasn't more familiar with that than with brushing my teeth. It weirded me out, how much I thought about it, but I couldn't put my finger on why I actually cared about it. And at the end I'd just post a picture of a fucking banana. With peanut butter on it.

EKR: And you didn't tell anyone you were doing an art project.

AMC: I didn't. People were really weirded out. A lot of people unfollowed me. It would have been different if I had—people would have been more forgiving.

EKR: We want to explain ourselves.

AMC: To rationalize, because we all want to be normal and accepted.

EKR: I remember you once posted an ugly selfie and it was kind of a big deal.

AMC: Well, posting a selfie was something I'd never done in general. For something to be a selfie, it's posted with the conscious knowledge that you took this, because you wanted a picture of your face, instead of another picture your friend took because they wanted to capture the moment.

EKR: Which is another kind of explaining ourselves. Do you remember the artist Amalia Ulman?

AMC: Yes. She became increasingly insane on her Instagram, and then increasingly normal. She was the reason I chose this project. I was really fascinated by the way she constructed this long term narrative over social media. She was telling a story, and people don't usually think of Instagram as telling a story. Our posts are so constructed but so believable. What was your month like?

EKR: I didn't end up following all my rules either, because it got so cold! And the ground got so hard! Mine was different because it was so private. I didn't tell many people. I think that’s because it didn't feel quirky-weird, it just felt bizarre, knowing that I was digging, and everyone was in the Yard—in this period of adjustment here that was like, what do people do at Harvard? What do people do to be successful here? And what am I doing? And why I am doing this strange thing that is so unrelated to what women are supposed to do at Harvard?

AMC: So different from what women do at Harvard.

EKR: I think that's something both of our projects dealt with: with representation of daily female life, what life looks like versus what it should.

AMC: What do you think femininity looks like at Harvard?

EKR: It's a good question. I actually have a much more distinct vision of what men are supposed to look like here.

AMC: Right, with women it’s so varied. I think there isn't a specific mold, but there is an expectation of dualism—someone who's playing into expected gender roles but also has an element of independence, a detached, I-can-have-two-things-at-once femininity. There's this idea that you're here because you're accomplished, you have a lot of options in terms of academics, but you’re also going to be who men want you to be.

EKR: One thing was that a big part of my interaction here first semester was around grooming and preparation. And that meant the opposite of dirtiness—the expectation of cleanliness, but also something beyond cleanliness—the literal removal of all things “extraneous” on a woman’s body, of all texture. It's also a time of a lot of anticipation, preparing oneself for things. And that felt antithetical to my digging, this act that was, first of all, unfeminine, but also something I was doing alone, and not to serve anything else. No product, no furthering of a relationship or furthering of my work. It wasn’t a skill—just a task. And life here in general is task-averse. We don’t cook our meals or clean our plates or walk more than seven minutes to a class.

AMC: More of an individual stride for self achievement, while the college eliminates all of your other responsibilities for you.

EKR: Exactly, and this was weird and reflective and not goal-oriented. So your account, it wasn’t like a finsta.

AMC: It wasn't like a finsta whatsoever. My mom somehow found it, and once I was doing my radio show at 5 a.m. and she texted me and said, “Alicia, you have to quit radio, you can't be up at 5 a.m.” So then I wouldn't post late at night. And then I stopped staying up that late, anyway. My life started following my posting.

EKR: Oh yeah, it would come up everywhere. I remember reading “One Hundred Years of Solitude” in Hum 10, and there was this character who ate dirt, just as I was learning about this, and she was this ferocious little girl. Everyone would try to stop her and she would kick and scream, and I thought, exactly!

AMC: It's interesting, the idea of eating something from the ground. There's this egg called “century egg” in Chinese cuisine. How you make it is take raw duck egg and put it in the ground. The white of the eggs turns solid and translucent, and the yolk becomes spreadable. There is a long history of putting things in the ground and using it for preservation. There's an idea that the ground is permanent. A way to keep things when there's no way to keep things.

—Magazine writer Eva K. Rosenfeld can be reached at eva.rosenfeld@thecrimson.com. This is the third installment of her column, The Girls Want To Be With The Girls, which explores female communities on campus. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.