🌷🔑Schoolgirl Tings🌷🔑
EN: Romance novels marked for exploitative tropes and locked in a painted cabinet. After the secured Staff Reading cabinet in the library of my high school.
DE: Liebesromane, deren ausbeuterische Tropen gekennzeichnet und in einem bemalten Schrank eingeschlossen sind. Nach dem gesicherten Personalleseschrank in der Bibliothek meiner High School.
The Librarian, (2013-16) Interactive installation of wood, glass, paper, metal, acrylic paint and plastic. Dimensions vary.
Die Hochschulbibliothekarin (2013-16), Interaktive Installation aus Holz, Glas, Papier, Metall, Acrylfarbe und Plastik. Maße variabel.
Critical readings of regency romance novels revealed the following themes, which are page marked and sorted by colour:
Heteronormativity - the assumption that heterosexuality is the only sexual orientation
Rape - sexual assault of a character in the novel
The ethnicised Other - eroticisation of racialised characters in the novel
Love-making - consensual erotic contact between characters in the novel
In the realm of historical / 'regency' romance, all of these themes are necessarily warped; their intractability from the genre is symbolised in the novels' typical commissioned cover artwork.
This cabinet's 'cover-painting' excludes the tropes of an embracing couple (a woman suppliant, a man brutally impassive) and castles or great houses (implying that true romance is only possible for those wielding fealty, wealth; colonial power), focusing, instead, on the blossoming and dispersion of delicate flowers (priceless virtue; virginity).
Bereft of human figures and architecture, what remains is eroticised landscape.
HEIST
At some point in my schooling, possibly in a rare lull when my class was not preparing for an exam, I staged my first heist of this cabinet.
Using a large paperclip to pick the lock, I carefully extracted a maximum of 7 novels and fanned out the remaining books so as not to leave noticeable gaps. A system developed whereby I speed-read the books, marked the saucy bits with a dog-ear or pronounced spinal crease and distributed these marked novels to a select group of friends. Having the erotic pages marked helped ensure a rapid return of the books. One classmate – an outsider who was frequently bullied by the rest of the class, including myself – got to know of the operation that I was running. This was its undoing.