Sleepwalking Slowly: Kat Eng and the Feminist Art of Living Labor in Common Time

It is a frigid day in New York City, and KAT ENG, a multimedia artist and activist based in Minnesota on Anishinaabe and Dakota territory, is sitting in front of H&M's flagship store in Times Square (Fig. 1). Wearing nothing more than a short-sleeved polo shirt, a long-sleeved undershirt, loose pants, a beanie, and a dust mask, she is hunched over a makeshift station, sewing on a machine that is propped up on a green plastic crate. Both hands are directly out in front of her as she performs the same repetitive motion over and over again. While her right hand is steadily running the spinning wheel, her left hand is holding down and sliding the product—her daily wage in dollar bills. For a span of eight hours, she sits, sewing slowly and meticulously without bathroom or stretch breaks.¹

Before us, Eng stands in as a worker and animates the process of labor otherwise invisible to us and kept within the walls of the factory, tightly linking her presence as a worker to the clothes on sale in the retail store behind her. Although it is difficult to make out her face, she may resemble someone in our own lives who works on an assembly line, or one of the countless racialized women at work featured across news outlets and documentaries that provide glimpses into global factories. While she embodies physical attributes typically associated with Asian women—most notably stamina, discipline, docility, and dexterity—her speed of production is slow, lagging in contrast to capitalist demands for productivity as well as notions of Asian labor as excessively efficient.²

Figure 1.

Kat Eng, Less than Three. New York, New York. January 17, 2014. Photo by Kyle Depew. Courtesy of the artist.

Yet, Eng's slowness invokes neither a slowing down nor a refusal of work akin to autonomist Marxism's anti- and post-work politics, which insists on more unproductive time beyond work for rest, play, and idleness.³ Rather than focusing on a reprieve from, a refusal of, or an end to work—though all necessary—this essay centers this performance art piece by Kat Eng, whose slowness brings our attention to the racialized and feminized worker who remains at work ongoingly. I approach slowness, in this performance, as an aesthetic practice that is counterintuitive, attuning spectators to a feminist temporality that is oriented not toward a grand break from the conditions of low-wage flexible labor but toward remaining at work within it.⁴

Her performance counters a rich history of feminist performance art, particularly during the 1960s and '70s, that aimed to prompt women to get up, break out, and join the fight to reclaim women's time and subjectivity beyond work.⁵ As Rebecca Schneider explains, the feminist endeavor within this tradition has "long labored in the effort to wake sleepwalkers—to incite active subjects where patriarchal worldviews had calcified passive objects."⁶ The figure of the sleepwalker is not only feminized but also, though not directly stated, racialized. We may be reminded here of the ways racialized and feminized bodies, and Asian women more specifically, are perceived as inherently passive, polite, apolitical, and servile—always willing to work and thereby too slow to wake up and catch up to proper feminist politics. As such, "they occupy the time of the after," as Summer Kim Lee astutely notes, appearing "to have arrived late to politics" or, as we will see in this performance, to have yet to arrive to it (or never at all).⁷

If proper feminism—as practiced by the tradition and, by extension, second-wave feminists of the time—incites and inhabits an active stance toward a liberatory end to work, this essay underscores a feminist stance that is seemingly inactive and passive—not yet awake to join the fight against work. In what follows, I turn to Eng's Less than Three (2014) to explore what appearing to remain passive might enable within the scene...