Jessamyn Plotts a New Woman at Inner Space a Chamber Gallery explores the universe of the college fraternity from an alternative perspective. The frat has become a mysterious void in our culture, not unlike the enigmatic power often associated with feminine interiors: the home, the vagina, the impenetrable, unintelligible and maybe unintelligent mind. For the uninitiated, the frat is sometimes a site of play, and at others a site of violence. The frat has frequently been portrayed as a site of total freedom for men, sexual depravity or promiscuity for women.

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It is also a construction site for cultural identity. Our idea of what it means to be a woman of value is produced within the fraternity through social interactions, validation by entrance to parties, marriage, sex, or dating, and by widely disseminated information dispersal outlets such as Total Frat Move. As a traditionally white and male institution, the frat holds a powerful weight of race and gender, asserting the continuation of racial and hetero-normative lifestyles into a future that has never been more ambiguous on these fronts. This is not to devalue the accomplishments and immeasurable impact felt by fraternities and sororities representing communities of color, but to note the predominant cultural understanding of fraternities as spaces of white male privilege.

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For women, frats often function as a site of simultaneous validation, shame and intense sexual fear. Date rape, roofies, alcohol poisoning, hazing rituals and the constant monitoring of the female body all contribute to a need for approval shot through with fear and incentives to perform and perfect the appearance of traditional, sexualized femaleness. Even as fraternities become racially and culturally diverse, women’s role in the frat world as objects of sexual desire are obviously based in illusions of white femininity as put forward by the media, Hollywood, etc. This is made clear by the “Girls” section of Total Frat Move, which I reference frequently as I conduct research for this project. Thirty-five of the first fifty-four women featured in this section are white and blonde.

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Increasing tension and violence around fraternity and sorority houses over the past two years suggest an intensification of cultural and ideological performance in response to shifting sexual and racial paradigms. Behavior has become desperate, frantic, and sometimes lethally performative. Consider the suspension of fraternity activity on both the CalPoly and Texas State campuses following instances of racism and death, both this year. These are only two of what seems like constant events that are particularly alcohol/drug related, sex/gender/body related, or race related.

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These very real events disappear beneath the endless pile of frat house representations in the form of entertainment industry production. Hollywood movies in particular have carried the myth of the fraternity for decades now, perpetuating the image of an undulating drunken sex chamber where anything goes and all will be forgiven. From Animal House to Old School, we are asked as Americans to condone the youthful exploits of white men. Neighbors 2 complicated the landscape only minimally by collaging the visual and behavioral attributes of frat boys onto the bodies of female actresses. Visually, the film is a repeat of former frat iterations.

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A New Woman addresses the frat as a site of extreme action, extreme performance, and extreme power in the psyche of Americans of any gender or race, whether as fear or as self-validating energy. Rarely has this site been addressed in an art context, where people tend to resist what the frat and frat boy represent. Considering American politics post Trump, now seems like the right time to bridge the gap between these worlds.

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BIO:

Jessamyn Plotts is a radical feminist artist living and working in Dallas Texas, where she is an MFA candidate at Southern Methodist University.  While in Dallas, Plotts has asserted her body as the immediate vehicle for action in image making, performing endurance, opposition, and abjection in public spaces throughout the city. Plotts maintains a resolute adherence to the power of painting, writing and drawing to enable these performative actions, and has recently experimented with exhibiting such works together in an attempt to create new understandings of the connections between representation, narrative, and momentary experience.