name: Dmitry / age: 19 / profession: university student / location: ekaterinburg / reference: “Lenin” Jozo Kljaković, 1924
eroticised
domestic work and domestic workers are eroticized, in the sense that they are often depicted as stereotypical and cliché “objects” of sexual desire and of fetish. these stereotypes may seem harmless at first (and in some cases and contexts they might be), but they also point toward repression and toward corrupted power relations, which enable forms of sexual abuse. as such, “eroticized” may be too light or too beautiful a term here. however, as writer audre lorde points out in a short essay titled “the uses of the erotic: the erotic as power”, it is precisely because the erotic is beautiful (“our most profoundly creative source”, she calls it) that it is powerful. that it is powerful means that its power can be (re-)appropriated by the repressed and used in emancipatory ways.