Writing in the Kitchen with Martha Rosler and Carrie Mae Weems: From Reproductive Labor to the Affective Labor of the Image

What do images have to do with the stubborn perception that women are naturally and fundamentally mothers? How can artwork aligned with feminism teach us to see women differently? In Writing in the Kitchen with Martha Rosler and Carrie Mae Weems: From Reproductive Labor to the Affective Labor of the Image, Kimberly Lamm explores these questions by examining two artworks from the canon of feminist art: Martha Rosler’s video Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) and Carrie Mae Weems’s photo-text installation Kitchen Table Series (1990).

Drawing on psychoanalytic feminism, Lamm demonstrates how these artworks challenge dominant images of women in the American cultural imagination, reveal the fantasies of maternal care we bring to those images, and expose the expectation that women will craft images of their bodies that transmit comforting, easily consumable affects. Lamm calls the work of meeting this expectation the affective labor of the image and follows the interrelated ways Rosler and Weems work through this deep-seated expectation, expressing ambivalence about the idea that women can — and should — naturally care for others for free, without complaint, and in the name of love.

By reading Semiotics and Kitchen Table in tandem, Lamm shows how the two works of art evoke the interrelated ways white and Black women in the United States have been called into the affective labor of the image, and by limning their distinct themes and stylistic features, Lamm also illuminates the differences the history of US racism has made in those affective conscriptions.