Rene Cox

René's talk was certainly interesting, often hilarious and at times troubling*.

Her discussion on nudity in her own work was thought-provoking as I've always accepted the common interpretation of nudity as a form of vulnerability. In the west we have a pretty intense reaction to nudity and perhaps its our puritanical roots that make us consider every angle of disparagement the nude form might yield. The nude woman especially is a bizarre and bewildering concept in western cultures. We revile the woman who shows the wrong body at the wrong time, yet we demand access or control over the female body when we decide it doesn't fill the role we desire it to fill.
René's work with the body, African, American, female and male does much to move against these forces and her explanation about how nudity gave her a kind of power was fascinating. She took the vulnerable and remade it, transformed it. In a kind of reclamation, she possessed her image, her representation and chose the parameters and conditions under which it would exist. She took ownership in a space in which the female body and the black body have historically been possessions of an other. Her description of being nude providing a kind of power, a kind of self-determination was very interesting and offers an intriguing alternative to the perception of exploitation and vulnerability that we so often attribute to the object of the naked woman.
Her relationship to the fashion industry was especially interesting in this context as the fashion industry is seen as something of a crucible of reduction/exploitation by many of us media studies types. In our interview, I hoped to get her to discuss the potential conflict between an industry that many view as intensely racist and misogynistic and her interest in creating an aesthetic of black female empowerment but she didn't quite take the question in that direction and her thoughts on the matter remain unknown to me.
 
*Her mention of how much acknowledgement the Holocaust gets and how little attention we pay to our history with slavery had to me an air of casual anti-semitism, but her point - that we spend very little discourse on slavery and its legacy is well taken.