Anna Hite - Not Your Eden

Not Your Eden explores messages about femininity and feminism conveyed to young women growing up in the Deep South. As someone who was raised in this conservative, religious, cis-heteronormative, and very white environment, growing up has involved learning and unlearning what I know. This exhibition is an examination of these messages, their impact on my beliefs and values, and my path to shaking them off to form my own sense of self. This process is a necessary one for white women of the South, to shake off the trappings of restorative nostalgia of an imperfect past so an equitable future and realistic sense of self can be achieved.
The archive is explored in Not Your Eden, from childhood photos to milestone mementos. They are sites of critical exploration, joined by text, performance-based photography, and analog printmaking and photography processes. The discussion between analog and digital processes reflects the discussion between antiquated and modern ideas of femininity and the overlap between the two. Not Your Eden illuminates the gravity of social teachings both covert and overt, mundane and extraordinary. These works reflect internal struggles between the urge to perform femininity and my frustration over not fitting these ideals. Prints and other objects coalesce in nonlinear arrangements and address central themes involving gender socialization and feminine behaviors, such as pageantry, play and work, marriage and motherhood. They also address the subversion of this socialization through the divergence from or outright rejection of these behaviors, such as queerness and feminism.
The title Not Your Eden refers to the religious influence in Southern culture and its view of femininity. Women are, at once, both the virginal mother and the temptress of Eden. It also refers to the authority inherent in this ideology – whether that authority comes in the form of religion, family, or social expectations, or all of the above. This exhibition challenges this hegemonic authority, allowing women to reconsider their femininity and recontextualize themselves in a multifarious, open Southern feminism. Most importantly, this exhibition asks the viewer to consider how similar or different their experience of femininity in the South is to mine – as the overall message of the work is that there is no singular Southern femininity.

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Shown in Gallery 130 at the University of Mississippi in partial fulfillment of my Master of Fine Arts thesis.

April 10-14, 2023. Closing reception was April 14 at 5pm.