So Thick that Everybody Else in the Room is so Uncomfortable

short performance

Cloud City (2016),  ALL BOATS (2016), Grace Exhibition Space (2017)
Brooklyn, NY 

So Thick That Everybody Else in the Room is So Uncomfortable is a short performance and zine about class, race, and sexuality, butts, hips, and unruly bodies. There is a dance, a straight white man holds up food items to be crushed between Emily’s thighs, they wrestle in a puddle of crushed food while the man delivers a monologue written by Emily about Jennifer Lopez, Google Images, asses, and lobsters.  

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

“…Google President, Eric Schmidt, stated that Google Images search was created because of the desire to view Jennifer Lopez in her exotic green Versace dress.[2] In 2000, Google Search results were limited to simple pages of text with links, but the developers worked on expanding this further, realizing that an image search was required to answer "the most popular search query" they had seen to date: Jennifer Lopez's green dress.[2]”

“…we had no surefire way of getting users exactly what they wanted: J­Lo wearing that dress. Google Image Search was born.”

A big culo does not only upset hegemonic (white)notions of beauty and good taste, it is a sign for the dark, incomprehensible excess of “Latino”and other African diaspora cultures. Excess of food (unrestrained),excess of shitting (dirty), and excess of sex (heathen) are its three vital signs. Like hegemonic white perceptions of Latinos, big butts are impractical and dangerous. A big Latin rear end is an invitation to pleasures construed as illicit by puritan ideologies, heteronormativity, and the medical establishment through the three deadly vectors of miscegenation, sodomy, and a high-fat diet. Unlike the functionality of breasts, big bottoms have no morals, no symbolic family function, and no use in reproduction. Or, in Simone de Beauvoir’s classic words, “the buttocks are that part of the body with the fewest nerves, where the flesh seems an aimless fact.”

Negrón-Muntaner, Frances. “Jennifer's Butt.” Perspectives on Las Américas: A Reader in Culture, History, & Representation, pp. 181–194.

– excerpt from the zine and performace So Thick That Everybody Else in the Room is So Uncomfortable