1. To Make it Real (2024)

[transcript of artist reading an introduction to this work] Step 1: To Make it Real 

“I am engaged in research into deprogramming shame. There are many kinds of shame, and some of them are necessary to the experience of being a social human. Those are feelings of shame about a thing a person has done, so that next time we can make a different choice. 

What I am interested in is shame when it is being used as a tool of social control, when the shame is about what a person is. Dominant culture wants to shape us toward being something else, something away from the undesirable. Something closer to the culture’s ideals. This kind of shame is given to you, like a computer virus, the kind that enmeshes with your internal operating system. The kind that becomes part of the way that you think, so that you are your own prison warden. 

Be smaller. You’re not a man, you can’t do that. You’re the wrong kind of woman. Be smaller. You can come in but you’ll just have to cope with the noise. Everyone else can, why can’t you. Why can’t you look more like that? Why can’t you be normal? You’re so sensitive. Your hair face skin voice hands sex gender desire body thoughts are wrong. Not like that. No. Not you.

Shame like this is memetic and it’s contagious. It expresses itself laterally, so that when it’s working as intended, you police in others what’s policed in you.

 And why? I am against making myself smaller and I’m against you making yourself smaller too. The first step to deprogramming is to see it. You have to make it real. So here are the Shame Gates, externalisations of shame-based programming. Barriers that come from words said, from social lessons learned. I want to make them visible.” [/end transcript]