Laetitia Ky

She's amazing, I'm still smiling from reading the article. My kids tried telling me that sex was a colonial imposition on Africa, actually it could have been gender, I was laughing too much and they weren't very clear.
I'm going to remember this artist's name.

So western male born individuals are trying to commandeer an African woman's platform and shame her for not using it to further their agenda.

Given that her medium is her own hair, they believe that her body (hair) should be annexed in the battle towards their goals, for full acceptance or whatever. Whilst sharing few of the experiences she makes art about, female reproductive issues etc.

It isn't enough that she's not saying anything at all against trans people. Now all women making art in any way about femininity, the female sex's experience, need to find some way to include trans women. It's very unclear why. She's not a trans women and does not mention knowing any at close quarters. Why would she be particularly well placed to comment on their experiences? What would a trans women be able to say about the personal experience of female puberty, childbirth, etc? Both these and transitioning are fraught topics but they aren't the same nobody has experienced both (well, maybe trans men but as ever, they're not asking to be included in everything). Make your own bloody art.

Whenever I read comments like this I feel so relieved. Thank God for people speaking up. I think part of the issue is that we all know it’s all so much a part of reality that we never assumed we’d have to.

Such entitlement, to think your needs should be able to erase a woman's own experiences. It just leaves me speechless, what an embarrassment. Yuck.

Do those people who try to persuade her that sex doesn't matter, only gender does, and so invalidate her experiences, never realise how colonial they're being?

www.instagram.com/laetitiaky/

Fantastic. I just copied that exact section to paste, Eresh!

It must be really hard to make those sculptures - I'm thinking of the intense physicality of them.

'I’m not going to shut myself up to make you feel better about your convictions'

Go on yoursel, hen.

She is amazing. What a role model.

But what really took Ky by surprise was how her work got caught up in the slipstream of a western discourse about gender identification. Her focus on the punishment of biological womanhood has attracted comments that she is excluding trans women from her feminism. Ky is upfront about how the context is unfamiliar to her. “I’m not gonna lie, I don’t fully understand it. But in Ivory Coast we have things like excision, we have things like breast flattening. So when I come out there trying to express all this and someone tells me sex doesn’t exist, only gender exists, I’m like: ‘What are you saying? Sorry, but no.’”

She explains that her anger on this issue is about her work being critiqued by what she believes is a self-centred western issue. She also hears from western women who thank her for saying women have wombs. “Every time I talk about sex as a reason of oppression of African women, some western people get mad. And I’m always like: ‘I’m sorry, maybe your experience is different but I’m not going to shut myself up to make you feel better about your convictions. Because those things are really happening where I come from. I also understand they have an experience I don’t have, so maybe what they think is OK concerning their experience. I’m talking about me. If it was different for you, that’s cool. I think inclusivity is a very good thing. I’m a black woman.”

She’s amazing.

She’s so cool!