In the middle of the nineteenth century the first sororities open on the University of Mississippi campus and by the 1920s, shortly after women receive the right to vote, they begin to burgeon, in Mississippi and across the country, rising and flourishing with a great energy like a micro all-female Rome, with new allegiances, scholastics and loyalties. With the advent of unprecedented opportunities, there is a distinct hunger for a bodily industry not previously found within the domestic situation. Sororities are necessitated by an increase of students from a less privileged position and gender. All the political power, formal and de facto, on American campuses belonged to men or fraternities – the latter being even older than our country – with little to no guarantee of safeguarded housing or commissioned campus inclusion for a growing population of female students. Women, post-suffrage, plucked from the hearth, wandered college lawns with little to no social guidance for this drastically different milieu. Sororities became home base; resources for tactical intelligence in a new, harsh environment, providing social membership and navigational strategies for women with very specific cultural skills that are, in this uncharted land, misplaced and unnecessary.

When I remember the women who shared my backyard, I see them as members of the Kappa Delta sorority, I see their letters and colours. But then at other moments, they are in the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. It’s one woman’s face, one woman that I never spoke to, yet remember, with thick eyeliner and a worked-for smile that seemed pressed between two boards. Of course, there are also other times when I can see the Delta Gamma symbols and painted mugs, and then that’s how I remember it.

But really, it’s been several years now since I’ve leaned to get a closer look as they played beer pong, since I’ve listened to them squeal in our driveway and found them the next morning, wearing gym shorts, an adult woman’s body asleep and spilling out of a child’s Barbie Jeep. And if I’m honest, it’s getting to the point where the years have been too many, and now I can hardly see them at all.

*

A new woman sits in front of Cubitt’s camera and somehow, she looks similar, though she isn’t. Though she couldn’t be more different than the women who preceded her, I most notice her similarities, all of them in continuation becoming each and every one, becoming the same.

When Van Gogh was in Arles, in the south of France, he painted two portraits of the contemplative and singular ‘Madame Marie Ginoux, L’Arlésienne: Madame Joseph-Michel Ginoux’, who was the proprietress of the Café de la Gare at the time. The practice of repetition and pattern-making in technical painting and the two portraits became six over the course of two years – each of which varies slightly in props, vantage point and tonality – but all ultimately contain Madame Ginoux, the female form, as it is most desired and prized at its time: sober. Like Cubitt’s women in succession, there’s a collapse of person taking place. Or maybe it’s better stated that, similar to ‘L’Arlésienne: Madame Joseph-Michel Ginoux’, the women in Cubitt’s film all begin to look, well, the same.

L’Alésienne translates to the woman from Arlés. You might as well flap your wrist dismissively, only use the corner of your mouth while saying it: the woman from Arlés. Of the six paintings, one version hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and has the woman from Arlés with a pair of gloves and an umbrella. Another version hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and has the woman from Arlés, like Stormy Leather, seated in front of a few books. If only the woman from Arlés had also been straddling a Hitachi Magic Wand vibrator, though this is only a snapshot, only a painting – just one from a series – and we don’t know and we can’t see what is taking place on the periphery. We can’t see what is happening outside and beyond the immediate contexts of the film and the painting. What would happen, I wonder, if we were taken under the table?

Recently I re-watched, and saw for the first time, all of the Dove commercials I could find online. In one series, entitled, ‘Selfie,’ girls and women, young and old, appear together:

I don’t want to wear make up and my mom can’t understand that. She says it enhances my features,’ says a young African American woman, looking in the mirror, eyes bulging while her mother applies mascara to her eyelashes – Jacques Lacan would have a symbolic picnic on this picture. ‘If you’re gonna age, you’re gonna age. Embrace it,’ says a young, blonde and bespectacled woman to her mother. ‘I… I… I…’ the mother stumbles. ‘Embrace the age,’ says her daughter, holding her hands up in front of her face, miming embrace. ‘I know but I just can’t.’ And the mother shakes her head. ‘I don’t like my skin. It’s been really blotchy. It’s hard and it’s really sensitive and it breaks out really easily,’ says a young, full-lipped Asian woman, while her mother looks on. ‘I never, ever take pictures with my hair down because it just looks really bad in all of the pictures,’ says a young woman with a long, dark braid slugging down her shoulder.

Isn’t it time to re-define beauty? The text appears alone on a white background.

It’s the Dove commercials, coupled with Cubitt’s co-opting of the feminine experience, the sober Madame Ginoux and the women who shared my backyard: they’re all a part of the same smear of pre-packaged femininity.

When I remember the women who shared my yard, I remember so little about them, not even their names. I knew that they collected themselves under the auspices of their sorority and lived within strict ritual. I knew that there were specified hours for in-house dining, formal dress, informal dress, imbibing, sauntering, gorging, dancing, test taking, posing, strutting and reclining. The Greek system is an old one and it has seen several iterations of its reputation during its existence. Today, it most often makes headlines for its involvement in senseless social ills and human tragedy. The racist chanting of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s at the University of Oklahoma, the hooded isolation and food deprivation of new Chi Phi pledges at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, photos posted on Facebook of nude and sleeping females by the Kappa Delta Rho’s at Penn State. But these are all fraternities, the apex of concentrated male culture. And so I wonder where sororities come into play – running alongside the rampant sexual assault, hazing gone wrong, bullying, violence, misapplied peer pressure, poor academic achievement? Aren’t they, too, perpetuating a quieter but equally insidious version of an all-white, upper class, universalised system of collecting themselves: the sisterhood?

No longer analogous with safe spaces, the Greek system, from a surface examination, has entered a veritable Dark Age and it is beyond my comprehension why they have not, altogether, lost their privileges and been disbanded. A power has gone unchecked. The system is too big. The sorority house was designed toward the higher order of feminist ideals of empowerment and individuation, but over time they have instead alienated the female-identified populations that need their communities most, preferring a homogenised and institutionalised female intimacy and solidarity, one which also excludes and disaffects. They share a similar syntax with generalised feminist language, espousing achievement and power, but ultimately use a wildly different vocabulary, creating a discourse that rests somewhere between over-the-counter pop feminism – which supports strict gender binaries – and universalised sisterhood-speak. What young women are given, at a formative age, is a sisterhood that sells.

It’s over the top but I can’t pretend I don’t think it. The 1983 horror film, The House on Sorority Row. A simple prank goes awry. A beautiful brunette pretends she is going to shoot the sorority house mom to instill a little fear in her, then accidentally does, and in the process of trying to cover her tracks, other women in the house are implicated, and as the women splinter off to save themselves, they’re murdered by a demonic doll – but they’re also so murderous themselves, even the innocent. They just look so murdery in their pressed spring dresses. What I want to highlight is less the act of homicide and more the setting for roiling evil. It’s what comes before the gore – all of the leg shaving, halls bedecked with streamers and Girl Gear. It lends a surreal aura to the picture and creates the perfect setting for unrest. It’s the desires shared late at night, many drinks in, at the beginning of the film.

‘A toast to law school,’ one woman belches, putting her head on the shoulder of the person next to her – a passive pose, a horde of capricious Greek goddesses, lounging, imbibing, ripe and fecund as fruit flies. ‘May it be the three shortest years of my life.’

*

Cubitt began the Hysterical Literature series on his website in August 2012. According to the project’s homepage, the video series has been watched over thirty million times in 200 countries, and was made using the properties of orgasm, using literature, using women, for several reasons.

‘There’s a historical tradition of stigmatising female pleasure more than male pleasure,’ Cubitt says, ‘as referenced in the title of the series.’ He aims to push viewers toward an alternate, conceptual understanding of the erotic in film. He gives his audience two options, to ‘respond to the salacious physical aspects (Sex,) or ‘to respond to the concept and literature (Art?)’. Similar to the conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, who believed that art needed no definition beyond ‘this is art’, Cubitt asks himself on his Frequently Asked Questions page, ‘Is it art?’ And he provides an answer, from Cubitt to Cubitt: ‘Everything is art when it’s done right.’

For me, this says: The female orgasm is so conclusive and accessible that it needs no qualification. Or it means: I just don’t know. It’s a very Hollywood move – hawking one’s work as harmless, as innocuous, because it’s art, because it’s entertainment. This film creates an economy, something is being traded – the ecstasy of art, literature, power – and where there is an economy, there is inherently a political body.

Before purchasing an entrance ticket to the museum, I could have viewed all of the women who were projected on the wall, read their thoughts on their participation, performance and the overall execution of the film, alongside the perspectives of writers arguing the work’s artistic value and social necessity – I didn’t. Within this exhibit, I was shown a handful of those sessions offered online, in a diminutive and stark gallery theatre, darkened just enough so that one feels semi-isolated, but not to be fooled into thinking that you are ever alone.

What happens when you take a project that is indigenous to the Internet, created for the isolated digital viewership, and put it in a museum, at the end of a particularly social exhibition – one which invites participation by asking the audience to mark favourite passages in a small, provided library of books and displays objects found within their tattered covers, ostensibly by folks like you and me? This is the ethos of Bibliothecaphilia: audience as curator. What is important is the interpretation, not the intention. The curatorial gestures within this small exhibit model a cosy library or an esoteric personal collection; there’s a familiarity and intimacy upon entering the gallery doors, a conviviality as groups grab elbows, whisper names and show whoever they are with, whoever is in their group, within their arm’s reach what it is they’ve found. I touch my boyfriend on the arm. My arm is touched back.

We sit on the museum floor, though there’s a single empty bench in the centre of the room. A man enters the space and sits down with his date as a woman named Amanda appears on screen and begins reading Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange – her body, not the criminal Alex, the new focus of the text, tethering the body and its corporeal functions to the book’s narrative. At her first fist clench and gasp, the man stands up, takes the arm of his date and leaves. ‘Nothing to see here.’ Or, ‘What filth!’ Or maybe, “You’ve seen the face of one woman climax, you’ve seen ‘em all.’ He shuts the curtain, but not before looking askance at us, still watching, still grinning, up until that moment when the woman lets go and detaches herself from the world and word, from the discourse between gaze and body – another resounding approval of the female orgasm, kept neat – when we finally get a glimpse of woman in her most rarefied, valued state: just a little bit loose.

Our staying, our viewing the film in its entirety, an obvious engagement with this work – long after several people come and ago – within this social sphere, renders us perverts.

Another couple enters. They stay for one sequence. They hold hands, sit on the bench, look at us on the floor and knowingly grin. She blushes, he smirks. We’ve made a connection. They looked, made contact and they’re now complicit.

Here’s the honest truth: I laugh several times while watching Hysterical Literature, because it’s funny. I chuckle like I do when I watch Super Bowl commercials because that’s what they’re made for – and who cares if Lenny Kravtiz’s guitar isn’t even plugged in at the half time show – this is what I’m prepared for and I can dig it. I can slop it up with a spoon and eat it. This is for the spectacle, entertainment over easy. ‘Camp art is decorative art, the filigree of its material, of its genre or mode,’ says Susan Sontag in the essay, ‘Notes on Camp’. ‘The emphasis on style and not on substance.’ I know what to expect in these commercial intervals, the emphatically stylish show, where everyone looks and feels so very good. But what happens when we pre-package the orgasm and this marketability extends to gender? What happens when, within the museum space, we feel like we’ve been pitched? At that moment, I believe, we must pin what it is we are being sold.

For real women, by real women. Just like you, and me, and me.

The women are trying to reign themselves in, curb the female hysteric of climaxing, letting loose and assume dignity in their reading, but they cannot. And eventually, they will not. While I watch them, I imagine myself among all their acceptable faces, I imagine where our lives might intersect, but mostly how they wildly diverge, and I also imagine myself writing this essay.

I imagine how I will describe this, sitting on the floor within a particular space in time, and how I will make one believe that I was feeling and thinking something which had not already been thought and felt, something which wasn’t used up already, worn out before I even got to it. I imagine myself describing them and initially thought that I could describe them all, one by one, go online and watch the whole thing, every series, noting every feature, and maybe I would make an e-book out of it, too many pages long, just sketches of women, one after the other. And what would that do? Wouldn’t that do a lot of the same? Wouldn’t that be refusing to see what is under the table? I imagine mentioning Claude Levi-Strauss’ notion of the female present, wrapped in a bow: ‘Men are the givers… women are the gifts…’ – it goes something like that? And I imagine bucking up against this idea, these gifts and this giver of the film, Cubitt, who says, ‘Some people who see Hysterical Literature get the whole nest of levels. Others only see the surface. This is all part of the experiment.’ The reorganisation of the audience’s sensibility and role, it’s all part of the experiment, the grand point, the thin virtue in this project resting directly on the surface; this is how bland transgression can get. Cubitt is dull and his certitude about the female experience is duller. But still, I imagine finding a channel through which I could press on the notion of the female readymade and contend with my own voyeurism, my own perpetuation of the female touch fascination. I imagine myself jostling with the fact of what I actually felt after sitting with Hysterical Literature, which is what all of the Dove commercials that had come before had exhorted me to feel, in the name of consumerism, because I am woman, the new liquidity, the formidable clientele; and therefore, I now may see my face in the mirror when I’m shown the marketable good life, because believe this: purchasing power gives access!

What I am writing now is not something that I am able to fully understand. Or: what I am writing is not something that I am able to fully understand yet. While watching this film, but only in its moment, I felt something pleasant. But it was to my greatest chagrin, like a mouth bubbling over with dollar store milk chocolate, what those soap commercials always wanted me to believe and take on, but for so long I couldn’t: sticky sisterhood, as she writhes, in ecstasy.

On the way home I have to drive excruciatingly slow so as to not skid and slip on the icy road.

‘Are you nervous?’ I ask him.

He tells me he isn’t. ‘The worst thing that could happen to us is we hit ice,’ he says. ‘But we’re not going fast enough, so it would be fine. We wouldn’t get hurt. It would just suck.’

‘It would be expensive,’ I say. ‘And I can’t afford it.’

‘We could hit ice right before this bridge,’ he says. And we both study the bridge at the bottom of the hill before us. ‘You could lose control. The car could go off the bridge and into the ice and I don’t know how deep that river is.’

I think, but don’t say, that it is dangerous to feel this way, the two of us: our jobs are easy on us, of the many things we desire, we have a few. I am barely coasting, barely giving it gas, the car hardly moving, and we don’t speak again until we’re safely across.