The Female Christ Goes to Market
by: Anna Backman Rogers , October 5, 2023
by: Anna Backman Rogers , October 5, 2023
At 15.50pm on 29 May 1969, Lene Adler Petersen and Bjørn Nørgaard staged an intervention at the Danish Stock Exchange. Here, Anna Backman Rogers offers a humorous commentary on the feminist and anti-capitalist politics of their iconic happening entitled ‘The Expulsion from the Temple/Female Christ’.
*
It’s less than a minute
in the last hours of trade,
and some men have stopped
playing with themselves
(if only for a little while).
She walks slightly elevated
across a mahogany pool
buffed by commerce,
Italian wool, fine leather, and bluster
to cold, slippery gleam and
silently, lightly bears her domestically-spun cross,
no burden at all in fact—
she has no intention of carrying the sins of this world.
Her nakedness causes
some to look away—
a sorry misapprehension
having to do with her dignity,
though she never asked to be saved.
Some issue injunctions:
such a fine sense of logic!
They tell her
she cannot do what she is already doing,
she must undo what is already done.
And then some
miss the grand narrative altogether,
thinking about it only later on
and out of context
(to be predicted).
Yet just for this singular moment
and with the most transparent of tricks
she, who knows there are no better angels to hear her plea,
removes herself from the market.
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