Photographs by Etienne Frossard

We shall not miss it at KAJE considered the life and work of Shulamith Firestone, whose The Dialectic of Sex (1970) proffered revolutionary demands for gender abolition, artificial reproduction, child liberation, and “cybernetic communism.” Exiled from the women’s liberation movement before the book was even published, Firestone’s only other published text, Airless Spaces (1998), fictionalizes her experiences living in and out of mental institutions in New York via involuntary hospitalizations. Through an immersive exhibition that culminates in a live performance, Ruhl’s six-week engagement at KAJE explored both the timely promise and problems with Firestone’s anarcho-communist manifesto, relating her own experiences of mental illness and hospitalization with Firestone’s extraordinary second book. 

Once deemed the “demon text of radical feminism,” The Dialectic of Sex has been excoriated by feminists and anti-feminists alike, most notably by Angela Davis and Hortense Spillers for its lack of consideration of people of color, as well as her use of racist stereotypes when addressing the Black Liberation Movement. We shall not miss it uses the text as a means of reckoning with the noxious legacy of white supremacy in feminism, in this case within a Marxist feminist genealogy, wondering what kind of “undetonated energy from the past”—to borrow a term from Elizabeth Freeman—one might find in Firestone’s proposals for radical alternatives to familial and loving relations under capitalism.

In “The Vanishing Dialectic: Shulamith Firestone and the Future of the Feminist 1970s,” Kathi Weeks suggests that the artificial womb concept in Firestone’s earlier text acts like a novum—a scientifically plausible technological innovation that drives science fiction narratives and their corresponding cognitive estrangement. Ruhl’s installation environment evokes the basis of Firestone’s reproductive utopia with inflatables that serve both as sculptures, and, in the context of performance, as noise-generating instruments.