Torture - The Feminine Touch

From 2005-2009, Coco Fusco developed a series of projects that explored contemporary military scenarios as intercultural encounters, examining the role of female sexuality as a weapon in the War on Terror. Treating the so-called “theatre of combat” as a dramatic and symbolic space, she concentrated on military prisons. Many of the War on Terror’s most controversial images have emerged from military prisons run by the US military in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba, featuring depictions of ritualized humiliation of “enemy combatants.” In her performances, writings and video about this subject, she attempted to analyze these spectacles of subjection and to consider how the American military has capitalized on the growing presence of women in its ranks, adapting originally feminist ideas about sexual assertiveness in order to exploit them as interrogation strategies.Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She has performed, lectured, exhibited, and curated internationally since 1988. Her work combines electronic media and performance in a variety of formats, from staged multi-media performances incorporating large-scale projections and closed-circuit television to live streaming performances on the Internet that invite audiences to chart her course of action through online discussion. Her performances and videos have lately been included in the Mercosul Biennial (2011), and featured in Afro-Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic at the Tate Liverpool (2010) and Self as Disappearance at the Centre d’Art Contemporain La Synagogue de Delme (2010). She is an Associate Professor and Director of Intermedia Initiatives at Parsons The New School for Design in New York. Moderated by Nana Adusei-PokuCoco Fusco, Torture - The Feminine Touch, lecture, ICI Berlin, 31 May 2012, part 1, video recording, mp4, 23:01 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e120531

Lecture and Performance of A Room of One\u27s Own by Coco Fusco, given at Florida International University, November 3, 2006

Coco Fusco performs. Her performance includes multimedia and closed circuit tv and focuses on the role of women at Guantanamo Bay and their interactions with detainees