TRACEY EMIN: "EVERYONE I HAVE EVER SLEPT WITH, 1963-1995"
Instead of camping in the wilderness and looking up at the stars, Tracey Emin wants the viewers to look at her list of sexual escapades, from inside her tent.
Tracey Emin’s piece, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1963-1995, is a blue camping tent, appliquéd with the 102 names of the people she has slept with. The individuals, however, were not strictly her sexual partners, but included family, such as her fraternal twin and her aborted fetuses. The piece was meant to be about the intimacy of sleep, but it was deliberately misread as an assertion of forthright female sexuality because of the sexual interpretation of the title. Although the piece was destroyed in the 2004 Momart London warehouse fire, it remains important to discuss it in relation to feminist discourse.
According to Judith Butler, femininity is a learned performance imposed upon us by conceptions and constructions of normative heterosexuality, and thus, is open to contestation. Emin is attempting to cite the main socially accepted gender roles by coopting its power and displacing its effects in order to dissemble the boundaries of the dichotomy – femininity vs. masculinity
The sleeping tent recalls the home, a traditionally female gendered space, in which females partake in normative feminine handiwork, such as applique. As an outside observer, the tent seems to contain Emin’s sexuality, similar to how normative institutions suppress stories of sex, because it is within the limits of the domestic space. Consequently, it is no surprise that the viewer must crawl on their hands and knees into the tent’s confined enclosure to realize that Emin is disrupting the notion of the essential feminine characteristics from within. Once inside the space, the confidants realizes that there is no escaping her literal references to her lack of sexual passivity, as the names of her sexual partners cover every inch of the interior. Additionally, she blatantly defies the supposed feminine purpose to bare children, as she overtly identifies her two aborted fetuses in applique. Thus, her sexual encounters are not intended to lead to procreation and she does not desire to foster a mothering role. By making her personal life political, by confessing to prostituting her body and sexual desires for artistic consumption within the confines of a traditionally feminine space, she reconstructs the ideas of femininity and female agency in Everyone I Have Ever Slept With.
