Angela Washko
Carnegie Mellon University, College of Fine Arts, Faculty Member
- Angela Washko is an artist, writer and facilitator devoted to creating new forums for discussions of feminism in the spaces most hostile toward it. She is an Assistant Professor... moreAngela Washko is an artist, writer and facilitator devoted to creating new forums for discussions of feminism in the spaces most hostile toward it. She is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Since 2012, Washko has operated as The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft - an ongoing intervention on communal language formation inside the most popular massively multi-player online role playing game of all time. A recent recipient of The Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art at the Frontier Grant from the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a Franklin Furnace Performance Fund Grant, a Creative Time Report commission, a Rhizome Internet Art Microgrant, a Danish International Visiting Artist Grant and the Terminal Award, Washko’s practice has been highlighted in Art in America, Frieze Magazine, Time Magazine, The Guardian (UK), ArtForum, ARTnews, VICE, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, the New York Times, The Creator’s Project, Dazed and Confused Magazine, Digicult, ArtInfo, Bad At Sports and more. Her projects have been presented nationally and internationally at venues including Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki, Finland), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Moving Image Art Fair (London and NYC), the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Institute for Contemporary Art Boston and Bitforms Gallery in NYC. Washko’s work is featured in the recently published book “Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the 21st Century” from The New Museum and MIT Press.edit
The internet has always been a boys club. Women who choose to delve deeper into the net than their email inboxes needn't look very far to find themselves bombarded by the proliferation of archaic negative gender-based stereotypes in... more
The internet has always been a boys club. Women who choose to delve deeper into the net than their email inboxes needn't look very far to find themselves bombarded by the proliferation of archaic negative gender-based stereotypes in almost every digital space, including online games, meme culture, forums, online journalism, YouTube, and beyond. Every major platform and communication model online appears to be a megaphone for men to remind women that women don't belong or that they are only allowed to participate if they accept their role as objects of admiration or quiet, non-opinionated users, in the event they aren't deemed attractive enough for the former role. It is not uncommon for women online to be stalked, to receive death threats, and to be doxxed. And it is implicitly accepted that women will be under constant scrutiny in most digital spaces, especially if they dare to question these pervasive misogynistic field conditions. These threats can be alarming even when exclusively digital, as women have been raped in online spaces as early as 1993 (Dibbell, 1993).
*Published by Nordisk Tidsskrift for Informationsvidenskab og Kulturformidling
*Published by Nordisk Tidsskrift for Informationsvidenskab og Kulturformidling
Research Interests:
This essay was originally published in the FIELD Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism. Tightrope Routines is an ongoing and frequently updated storytelling performance based on more than a year of exchanges between feminist artist... more
This essay was originally published in the FIELD Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism. Tightrope Routines is an ongoing and frequently updated storytelling performance based on more than a year of exchanges between feminist artist Angela Washko (me) and pickup artist, author, blogger and notorious manosphere leader Roosh V. The performance outlines the process from creating a platform to present parallel narratives to Roosh V's conquest stories by interviewing women who have had sexual exchanges with him, to interviewing the international " love tourist " himself, to becoming a subject of the work myself, to ultimately reassessing the original plan for the project. Initially operating within the vein of tactical media, socially engaged art and artistic activism – the performance presents the story of an artist's shift from goal-oriented activism to a more complicated and embodied ethnography of an online community extremely hostile toward and easily mobilized against women who self-identify as feminists. If feminists hope for feminism to have any relevancy in American publics broader than the art world, Tumblr and academia, they must adopt a model which is both empathetic to even the perspectives they disagree with and emblematic of the futures they aspire toward.
Research Interests:
By looking at the Paper Tiger Television collective's breath of work fusing art and activism, their commitment to communicating with broader publics than "the art world," their resilient and rich history, and their impact on subsequent... more
By looking at the Paper Tiger Television collective's breath of work fusing art and activism, their commitment to communicating with broader publics than "the art world," their resilient and rich history, and their impact on subsequent art practices, one can strategize ways to infiltrate popular culture through the contemporary decentralized information and media landscape as television becomes more and more obsolete and information consumption becomes more internet-based.
Research Interests:
This is a transcript of my interview with manosphere blogger, BANG guide author, and the "web's most infamous misogynist", Roosh V. Because of the abundance of writing about Roosh and by Roosh – what I really wanted to know after... more
This is a transcript of my interview with manosphere blogger, BANG guide author, and the "web's most infamous misogynist", Roosh V.
Because of the abundance of writing about Roosh and by Roosh – what I really wanted to know after following his output for so long was how women responded to and regarded his performance – his performance of masculinity, his sexual performance, his courtship performance. Did it really work? Also – Roosh’s framing of these women makes it clear that he believes he is manipulating them to some degree with his game, however I imagine their experiences are much more complex and much more interesting than Roosh’s one-sided story of conquering victims with logic and reason would ever allow it to be.
I was also frustrated by most of the writing I found about him, other manosphere members, and pick-up artists — these men should be subject to serious critical analysis. The dogmatic shaming approach that has been taken so far to address their issues with women has certainly had impact (the recent public shutdown of Julien Blanc’s practice is a good example) but this approach often fails to address the larger cultural and structural issues that create a perceived need for the services and spaces that these men provide. It is also assumed by members of the manosphere that we feminists only listen to the opinions of those who agree with us, and are incapable of having empathy for anyone else outside of our “bubble” (the same arguments that are often being made about the manosphere). Each side takes turns taking shots at each other through internet news media. I was hoping to take a more empathetic approach to understanding Roosh’s work, even though I disagree with his views wholeheartedly. I know that taking a black and white stance feels better for news media and is easier to understand – but I’m going to go gray on this one.
I am interested in how a practice like Roosh’s becomes a lens to view one’s experiences and the substantial following that has also found this framing useful to explain their shortcomings and perceived everyday injustices. Kathleen Blee’s Inside Organized Racism looks at the ways in which women have been targeted and recruited into extreme racist groups by leaders who have strategically learned to explain their traumatic experiences as racially motivated. I found her book to be an interesting parallel to the practices of manosphere networks. People in Roosh’s field write sex strategy guides, facilitate conferences and run huge marketing schemes to teach men to decode the contemporary woman and explain men’s struggles to succeed emotionally, sexually, and socially as the direct result of increasingly independent women and contemporary feminism.
Because of the abundance of writing about Roosh and by Roosh – what I really wanted to know after following his output for so long was how women responded to and regarded his performance – his performance of masculinity, his sexual performance, his courtship performance. Did it really work? Also – Roosh’s framing of these women makes it clear that he believes he is manipulating them to some degree with his game, however I imagine their experiences are much more complex and much more interesting than Roosh’s one-sided story of conquering victims with logic and reason would ever allow it to be.
I was also frustrated by most of the writing I found about him, other manosphere members, and pick-up artists — these men should be subject to serious critical analysis. The dogmatic shaming approach that has been taken so far to address their issues with women has certainly had impact (the recent public shutdown of Julien Blanc’s practice is a good example) but this approach often fails to address the larger cultural and structural issues that create a perceived need for the services and spaces that these men provide. It is also assumed by members of the manosphere that we feminists only listen to the opinions of those who agree with us, and are incapable of having empathy for anyone else outside of our “bubble” (the same arguments that are often being made about the manosphere). Each side takes turns taking shots at each other through internet news media. I was hoping to take a more empathetic approach to understanding Roosh’s work, even though I disagree with his views wholeheartedly. I know that taking a black and white stance feels better for news media and is easier to understand – but I’m going to go gray on this one.
I am interested in how a practice like Roosh’s becomes a lens to view one’s experiences and the substantial following that has also found this framing useful to explain their shortcomings and perceived everyday injustices. Kathleen Blee’s Inside Organized Racism looks at the ways in which women have been targeted and recruited into extreme racist groups by leaders who have strategically learned to explain their traumatic experiences as racially motivated. I found her book to be an interesting parallel to the practices of manosphere networks. People in Roosh’s field write sex strategy guides, facilitate conferences and run huge marketing schemes to teach men to decode the contemporary woman and explain men’s struggles to succeed emotionally, sexually, and socially as the direct result of increasingly independent women and contemporary feminism.
Research Interests:
In my first essay for a series commissioned by ANIMAL NY, I outline how trying to find women who've slept with infamous pick up artist Roosh V to create a platform for their experience became an opportunity to interview the "the web's... more
In my first essay for a series commissioned by ANIMAL NY, I outline how trying to find women who've slept with infamous pick up artist Roosh V to create a platform for their experience became an opportunity to interview the "the web's most infamous misogynist" himself.
Research Interests:
Why Talk Feminism in World of Warcraft is a text analysis of three years spent creating performances, interventions, and discussions about community language formation and inclusivity as The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral... more
Why Talk Feminism in World of Warcraft is a text analysis of three years spent creating performances, interventions, and discussions about community language formation and inclusivity as The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft.