The Sadness of the Supermarket: A Lament for Certain Girls
performance, 2020

In the supermarket where hunger meets plastic wrap / in the supermarket’s sensorium, where my sadness is a strange gondolier.” Organized along the principles of Cartesian space, the supermarket separates producer from consumer and humans from one another. A product of suburbanization born of both racist red-lining and gendered structures that cordon off collective life, this rationalized promise of abundance contains anxiety, sadness, and alienation. The Sadness of the Supermarket: A Lament for Certain Girls blows up the banal emotion of the grocery to operatic proportions. Says Anne Carson in The Gender of Sound, “Woman is that creature who puts the inside on the outside.” Say Certain Girls, “The first thing everyone did / was destroy the cash registers.