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Kiss the Boys and Make Them Die

Margaret Stratton

1994 00:30:00 United StatesEnglishMono

Description

Kiss The Boys And Make Them Die explores how memory, sexuality, and the self are created and enforced through the family story. The video chronicles how the social act of loving women becomes channeled into narratives of incest, desire for the mother, loss of the father, separation from the family, death and self-destruction. In this work, sexuality, difference and language are paralleled with haunting memories of a childhood ghost that both desires and hates women. Finally, Kiss The Boys And Make Them Die is a story of childhood trauma, and the adult need to exorcise the past and create an independent self.

About Margaret Stratton

Margaret Stratton works in both photography and video. Her first videotape, Kiss The Boys And Make Them Die (1994), was awarded Best New Film or Video of 1995 from the Canadian Film Board, the Directors Award from the Black Maria Film Festival in Los Angeles, First Place Best Experimental Work at University of Oregon Queer Film Festival, and Juror's Choice at Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh. Her videotapes have been screened at festivals and venues nationally and internationally. She has received five National Endowment for the Arts Awards in three categories: Photography, Installation, and New Genres. Her photography has been published in Reframings: New Feminist Photographies (Temple University Press, 1996), Art, Document, Market, Science: Photography's Multiple Roles (Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, 1998), and Lesbian Art in America (2000).