Futurewomen
Aisha Jean-Baptiste, Felicia Holman, Meida McNeal, and Abra Johnson in Futurewomen (2015).
Futurewomen (2015)
Written by: Honey Pot Performance
Starring: Meida McNeal, Abra Johnson, Aisha Jean-Baptiste, Felicia Holman
Directed and produced by: Aymar Jean Christian, with Khadijah White
Each woman in Ma(s)king Her faces her own epic journey. Althea leaves her home in search of self-discovery. Wonder is banished from her galactic home to Earth. Isis is on a journey to save her people from a plague. Peppa is fighting the Haitian Revolution. The central question in the show is how these women can join their struggles, help each other find what they are looking for. It presents an impossible scenario. These women exist across time and space. They are completely disconnected. It’s a great set up for drama.
Ma(s)king Her is very different from the work I first saw by Honey Pot Performance: Juke Cry Hand Clap, a multi-media, participatory exploration of Chicago house music. In time and space, Juke Cry was more narrow, focused primarily on 20th Century Chicago. In style, its narrative was more obviously informed by an ethnographic process of gathering stories from Chicagoans about their experiences of house. At the time I was drawn to their interest in developing artistic narratives in collaboration with community, which I also was planning to do using web TV as an artistic medium.
I never would have guessed HPP’s next project would be a futuristic drama of epic proportions, but they were starting Ma(s)king Her when in late 2014 I approached Meida McNeal about OTV. Meida wanted to collaborate but stressed the need for it to be integrated to what they were already doing.
After telling me about Ma(s)king Her, I thought I could document its development with the help of Northwestern undergraduates. We initially had a great idea to engage online community in Ma(s)king Her by developing a companion alternate reality game, but we did not get funding to staff it. I was most drawn to the idea of alternate realities and the drive for characters to come together through them. It struck me that in America people are living through multiple realities, thus challenging collective progress, while also consuming manufactured realities through television. With a small grant from the University of Chicago, Futurewomen was born.
I knew it would require plenty of work to tell the story of how HPP develops stories with community. Even though Ma(s)king Her differs radically from HPP’s previous projects, they carried forward their method of working with other artists, scholars, and everyday black women to inspire the characters and the story. I thought this would be a fascinating process to chronicle and could open up a wider conversation about the politics of documentation on television. The second episode of Futurewomen takes us to the offices of the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, where a couple dozen of mostly black women, with some masculine-spectrum and gender nonconforming allies, came together to collectively think through the characters in Ma(s)king during the spring and summer of 2015. The space was intergenerational and interdisciplinary. The participants were students, seasoned scholars, performance artists, or just people interested in HPP or community-based artistic creation. Every person brought something different to piece. Each drew from their own experiences dealing with love, politics, oppression, and history. Most importantly, the process was designed to inspire. Every participant was tasked with imagining how one might exist in another world, in another time-space continuum. Thus, HPP’s characters were necessarily complex because each emerged from a multiplicity of subjectivities and imaginary impulses.
Futurewomen is alternate reality television because it presents reality as infinitely variable. The series starts with how each member of HPP views their practice and the story of Ma(s)king Her. Then it opens up the characters and story to a range of interpretations and influences from a wide range of community members. “Reality” is the ground on which we as humans endure conflict. We fight over what is really going on. Black women understand this better than most, as we have known since, at least, statements by the Combahee River Collective and Audre Lorde. Black women must push black men to understand the ways gender inhibits racial progress and push white women to understand the ways race inhibits women’s progress. Black women’s realities are intersectional. Every individual perceives reality differently. Art is a tool for collective understanding. Thus, black feminist art builds complex, intersectional understanding of our worlds.
Reality television about black women does not succeed here. Love and Hip Hop, one of the most popular reality franchises on television that has single-handledly kept VH1 culturally relevant, features a range of black women – increasingly, albeit slowly, with queer, butch and transwomen as well. Love and Hip Hop has 3 separate shows (Atlanta, New York, and Hollywood) just as the Real Housewives had 2 featuring black women (Atlanta and Potomac) as did Basketball Wives (Altanta and Los Angeles). As the name implies, these shows focus on women’s relationships to men and the capital and power possible when they are able to enmesh themselves in men’s lives and labor. Many of the women are single and own businesses, and though the narratives occasionally focus on their careers, family and parenting, and the legal/police struggles, most of the drama revolves around men’s approval. Across reality shows, these women perform their gender normatively – they are mostly thin or hour-glass shaped, with long wigs and weaves, living glamorous lives that allow them to take hours out their day to film scenes in full make-up and designer clothes. These women mostly fight with each other and often for men’s attention. Expressions of sisterhood and solidarity are some of most affecting moments in reality TV, but they are few and far between.
Futurewomen reveals the fiction of black womanhood purported by reality television, and in doing so extends long traditions of black feminist video art and film to the TV and digital landscapes. Jacqueline Bobo’s history of black women film and video makers finds they “have engaged questions of resistance and social oppression as a vital part of their work” (14) and have used documentary “to reach Black people with responsible depictions of Black life” (12). Yet bringing community into the process of production expands this legacy by acknowledging black women as “cultural readers,” as Bobo writes, who bring multiple meanings to media texts, enacting what Rebecca Wanzo identifies as “black aca-fandom,” as yet invisible.
I had the chance to represent Honey Pot’s alternate reality to the fullest. I documented the live show, but by that time I was already running out of money for OTV and could not find a student editor to help. I was also dissuaded by the show’s composer Renee Baker, member of the legendary AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), who told me that she was wary of releasing the project with unmixed live music. I didn’t have the funding to finish the sound either and did not want to besmirch the AACM, whose legacy of collectively improvised composition inspired OTV.
Renee Baker (right) at a workshop performance of Ma(s)king Her.
My dream of entering the world of Ma(s)king Her went away for 5 years. The pandemic presented a unique opportunity and inspired me to revisit the project. In 2021 I approached Honey Pot about filming a virtual reading of the series with professional actors. I was hoping to experiment with new models for showcasing experimental performance in a pandemic, and Honey Pot was already filming our versions of their work. We were wondering how we could continue to gather and experience groundbreaking, experimental stories when doing so threatens our health?
Adia Alli in Futurewomen: Season 2.
I approached Sydney Charles, a brilliant actor who I had seen in a number of shows and who an emerging director in the theater scene. Within a week, Sydney had read Honey Pot’s complex script multiple times and was excited to share her interpretation of the narrative. She brought four incredible actors, Chicago’s rising stars, but the pandemic delayed production for over a year. We navigated trying to film the project amid COVID surges, deaths in our families, and busy schedules of these in-demand actors as society opened up.
We got it done in summer 2022 and released the next year, after the “end” of the pandemic (in truth, summer 2023 still saw surges in COVID, suggesting our virtual theater experience was not so late after all).
If we are to imagine black futures through TV, we need to follow Audre Lorde and use a different set of tools than the industry, which currently relies on black artists performing authenticity without acknowledging their work in scripting reality TV narratives. HPP and Futurewomen show us how we must as a community write ourselves and our futures into being. This work of writing can be performed but those performances must be acknowledged, valued, and given the agency to shift representation to new times, spaces, and bodies. HPP shifts our never-ending debates about representation in television from the actors onscreen to the systems that develop their labor. It posits an alternative system against the drive to accumulate capital toward the imagination of collective paths to liberation. Through black feminist performance and alternate realities HPP offers a roadmap toward black feminist television.
[i] Jacqueline Bobo, Black women film and video artists. New York, NY: Routledge, 1998.
[ii] Jacqueline Bobo, Black women as cultural readers. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995.
[iii] Rebecca Wanzo, “African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan Studies,” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 20, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2015.0699.