Regarding sport as an expression of culture and as holding a distorted mirror up to patriarchal society, Caroline St-Laurent uses her feminist practice to engage with the body as a critical vector in the cult of performance and as fertile ground for reflection on how multiple systems of oppression overlap. Through demanding performances requiring sustained effort and military precision from St-Laurent and her collaborators (often athletes themselves), the former gymnast shines a light on how the body is subjugated to the devices \u2014 material, discursive, technological, and institutional \u2014 behind sport, but also on the agency and empowerment that sport can generate when it is re-appropriated by women and marginalized people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Women Performing ARTS + SPORTS Femmes en performance<\/em>, created in collaboration with artist and former national-level gymnast Liliane Moussa, St-Laurent again makes physical effort into an act of resistance. For nearly an hour, the artists perform a series of strenuous athletic movements, including jumping jacks, sit-ups, and acrobatic gymnastics. Gathered over recent years and recited in turn, the statistics and testimonies of female athletes that punctuate the performance highlight the misogyny rampant in the sports world. Viscerally engaged in action (and with each other), St-Laurent and Moussa push their bodies to their limits, exploring the violence and inequities in sport, their sweat and increasingly laboured breathing attesting to their exhaustion. In St-Laurent\u2019s performances, speaking in such moments of sheer fatigue alludes to feminist lassitude in the face of social inertia. By superimposing sporting and discursive acts (citing statistics, chanting) and highlighting how impossible it is to master them, St-Laurent reveals the constructed and fallible nature of one as much as the other, their \u201cqueer failure.\u201d The question of vulnerability, central in St-Laurent\u2019s work, here becomes a critical lever \u2014 if not an epistemological posture<\/em> \u2014 for challenging the notion of equity in sport, in which, more than anywhere else, highly arbitrary categories such as gender, age, weight, health, race, sexual orientation, and class intersect, challenging an impression of equality that institutionalized sport prides itself on but that mirrors the systems of oppression erected and fiercely guarded by the patriarchy and capitalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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