It's Stonewall in My Navel

The impulse to daydream is met with a forbidding twitch that would deny the pleasure and benefit of getting lost in your mind. The persuasive twitch nudges towards darkness implying a simplistic application of purpose. In the video, the navel-gazing subject travels inside and outside her body, where her navel plays host to revelers at Stonehenge and Stonewall. The Stonewall Inn, site of the liminal 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, was a dance bar. Such places concretize dreams and consequences of queer-dom in the 20th century and beyond (see Pulse slaughter, 2016). Stonewall itself is modeled here based on first person accounts of the iconic bar, where against the full-moon early morning hours of June 28, 1969, queers raged against oppression. They threw and thrusted pennies, bricks, beer bottles, a trash can, and a parking meter. In the video they, we, and those tools of dissent, dance, affirming that celebration and protest are not mutually exclusive.

Year

2016

Director

Laurel Beckman

Duration

7 min

Country

United States