Gauri Kasarla

Bonnie Ora Sherk’s Day in Captivity¹ 

    Sitting in a cage adjacent to tigers and lions at the San Francisco Zoo’s Lion House, feminist artist Bonnie Ora Sherk was served lunch at the same time as the zoo animals: 2 pm on a Saturday, better known as “feeding time.” In her cage was a table covered in a white tablecloth, a chair, a ladder leading to an elevated platform with a pillow, and a white rat occupying another cage on the floor. Feeding time at 2 pm for the big cats was open to the public–children and families would gather in front of the metal bars to gawk at the animals on display. However, on a Saturday in February of 1971, most visitors did not expect to see a woman in a cage being brought a series of plates catered by a famous restaurant in San Francisco while zookeepers fearfully inserted large chunks of red meat into the neighboring tiger cages.1 Quite frankly, zoo-goers probably had no interest in watching Sherk’s performance, entitled Public Lunch, as this was a far less interesting sight that they would be able to find at any restaurant in the neighborhood. However, it was this unexpected placement of Sherk within a cage usually reserved for tigers that urged individuals to evaluate the meaning of the woman behind bars and how her captivity compared to that of the zoo animals. 

    While Sherk animalizes herself by existing within the Lion House, she consciously separates herself from the tigers in a manner that exaggerates the differences in the ways humans and animals are treated. This is not to say that Sherk is some martyr who intentionally isolated herself from society to advocate for animal rights, but she took an interest in looking at animals as equals, while subjecting herself to their standards of living in captivity, albeit temporarily. Although Sherk never clearly stated her intentions for the performance, she said in response to Public Lunch, “I was one of the animals being fed on that day.”² Rather than having the animals stand in as a metaphor for a larger concept, Sherk identifies and communicates with the zoo animals in a manner that distances herself from the audience. When Sherk states that she and the animals were performers, but also “beings in our own right,” she places herself in direct conversation with the “exotic” encaged animals to first reveal how animals are exploited, and how the image of their subjugation is a useful strategy to envision the layers of oppression experienced by women.³ 

    In the 1970s when circus shows constituted the majority of performances involving animals, Sherk’s work diverged from the practice of forcing direct human-animal interactions. For instance, male artists like Joseph Beuys interacted with wild animals as means to sculpt social and political trajectories. Beuys’ I Like America and America Likes Me from 1974 consisted of Beuys wrapping himself in woolen felt and locking himself in a gallery with a coyote for a week.⁴In this performance, Beuys’ struggle with the wild coyote claimed to reconcile white, capitalist America–embodied by Beuys–and the indigenous peoples, as represented by the coyote.⁵ Beuys refers to his admiration of indigenous peoples, who allegedly nursed him back to life after his plane crashed in World War II.⁶ With this, Beuys does not seek to unveil the coyote’s character or intelligence. Instead, he assigns the coyote a persona to act on behalf of all indigenous peoples, who do not have a say in resolving the very dispute that displaced them. In his performances, Beuys transforms animals into primitive, prelinguistic forces that existed prior to human encroachment. Although Beuys considers himself to be an ecofeminist and criticizes the male domination and destruction of nature, it is important to also consider the manner in which Beuys reduces the coyote in his performance to a pawn, isolated from the coyote’s social environment.⁷ Quite literally, he does not extend indigenous peoples the courtesy of having a voice; they are only allowed a snarl, which Beuys views as enough to express their savage nature. In his performance, however, Beuys inserts himself as a personification of culture and human civilization, claiming to be the voice of reason in settling a centuries long debate. For male artists, the division between man and animal is quite distinct and definitive. By seeking to connect with the “essential spirit of the coyote,” which Beuys equates with indigenous communities, he conflates the two in a way that may be satisfying to him, but unproductive for both the coyote and indigenous individuals.⁸ 

    Beuys’ performance, three years after Sherk’s Public Lunch, is considered a valuable part of twentieth century art because it convinces individuals of our ability to heal the wounds of colonization and the exploitation of nature. Even though his performance with the coyote appears to be quite radical, this could be attributed to the manner in which Beuys places himself in harm’s way to charge the performance with a certain violence and element of danger to entice his audience. However, with this, the violence of wild animals is capitalized upon to sell his performance, while simultaneously attaching a savage, wild quality to the indigenous peoples he professedly defends. Beuys may be revered for his self-sacrificial attitude, but his performance in fact functions as somewhat of an egotistical approach to swiftly, and rather naively, resolve a conflict that peripherally relates to him. Sherk, on the other hand, does not rely on an oversimplification to conduct her performance. Rather, she embraces complexities to convey the areas where the female figure and zoo animals both overlap and diverge. Women, according to Sherk’s performance, fluctuate between representing both nature and culture, depending on the  setting inhabited. The female body is fractured by an expectation to fulfill the fantasy of being a nymph-like goddess, who can also pose for the cover of Vogue. Sherk strives towards understanding the tigers for who he or she is as an independent entity, without conjuring a spiritual metaphor to reconcile the nature and culture divide. Although Sherk seems to display problems, rather than easy fixes, her lack of attention could be due to a reluctance to believe that longstanding institutions, like zoos, are inherently oppressive. 

    Additionally, from within the cage, Sherk places herself, as a woman, on display. During colonization, women were relegated into the category of nature, such that they could be controlled and domesticated more easily. Although women carried individuals in their wombs who would become subjects within the empire, men claimed the privilege of attaching their name to children in a way that sought to denigrate the tangible relationship between mother and child. In doing so, women became powerless, empty vessels who were valued for the sake of reproduction, but little else.⁹ Yet, they were needed for their biological ability to perpetuate the cycle of captivity and without structures to incarcerate them, they would not stay. Therefore, when Sherk exists behind prison bars, this insinuates an institutional dependence on her imprisonment to maintain the integrity of patriarchal systems. Her intentional imprisonment subverts patriarchal authority, however, because she places herself within the cage before society can do so. When Sherk lives among the captive tigers, viewers inevitably view her as some highly coveted, exotic object. However, Sherk’s exoticism alone is not enough to warrant her being encaged. Rather, her imprisonment is indicative of the measures society takes to regulate women’s movements in public and private spaces. While Sherk’s gender may point towards the divine feminine and the personification of the earth, she no longer operates within that space because she is tainted by societal expectations. Sherk “re-wilds” herself in the zoo setting, while also reflecting the imposition of public opinions upon the private, female body. In doing so, Sherk asks us, as the audience, to consider society’s desensitization to women’s imprisonment within the domestic sphere. While Sherk imprisons herself, she retains elements of her femininity and connection to the outside world—one that tigers and lions bred in captivity may have never experienced. In this environment, Sherk and the big cats are provided for; they do not have to hunt for their own food, but this reliance upon other beings to continue living produces an uncomfortable realization. Beings that typically should not have to rely on help from other species now must, in order to survive. This relationship is magnified and blown up to become a public spectacle. The lions and tigers must adhere to certain behavioral standards for the sake of being fed; by residing within the zoo, they already become partially tamed, but even more so when they recognize that the people who imprison them are the same people who feed them. In some instances, food is used strategically to train animals and forcefully draw out behaviors or tricks that appeal to an audience; a necessity, like food, is manipulated to construct an environment purely to entertain zoo-goers. Ideally, animals should be able to eat whenever they are hungry, or whenever they can make a kill, but in this situation, the human consumer is prioritized over the animal. The 2 pm feeding time may not be what is best for the animals, but it certainly allows for larger audiences. 

    Although unwanted help takes on different forms for the wild cats and Sherk, the message seems to be the same in that zoo-goers, especially in 1971, may view “feeding time” as a routine element in the care of animals. Even when individuals pay to feed animals, like giraffes in zoos, the animal is contorted in a way to become the most profitable–the giraffe is a true performer.¹⁰ When feeding time in zoos is transformed to become a commercial venture, it generates “once-in-a-lifetime” experiences for zoo-goers, while displaying animals at their most vulnerable on a weekly basis. Food, for the lions and tigers, is used to evoke the animals’ wildness; hunger seems to be one of the only remnants that connects the zoo animals back to their wild roots. The only way for the animals to survive, however, is by eating from the palm of their kidnappers. In a strange, inhumane way, the survival of the fittest has been turned on its head when zoos coerce animals into believing that they thrive when at the mercy of their predators. The fittest are those who learn the hard lesson of not running from their predators, not biting the hand that feeds them, even when the hand in question should be bitten. 

    When Sherk performs at the zoo, she surrenders to the rule of her oppressors, subjecting herself to the same constraints as the big cats. Regardless of her human status, by existing within the cage, she cannot eat whenever she pleases like her human audience. She is fed whenever it is convenient for the zoo and the zoo-goers, and her actions would change considerably were the audience not present. The same could be said about the lions and tigers, who may tailor their behavior according to the environment created during feeding time. 

    When Sherk exaggerates the divisions between humans and animals by having a catered meal brought to her, her performance nods to women’s dependence upon “breadwinners” or any form of help to sustain their own existence. Additionally, the woman in the cage is provided for and cared for, but only conditionally. When analogizing this to the domestic realm in the 1970s, women were traditionally housewives while their husbands worked, leading to a transactional relationship where women’s unpaid domestic labor was reciprocated by their husband’s affection, care, and frequent outbursts. In Revolution at Point Zero, Silvia Federici writes, “In the same way as god created Eve to give pleasure to Adam, so did capital create the housewife to service the male worker physically, emotionally, and sexually, to raise his children, mend his socks, patch up his ego when it is crushed by the work and the social relations (which are relations of loneliness) that capital has reserved for him.”¹¹ While men were financially compensated for their labor, Federici comments on how women’s contributions to the household were uncompensated and unrecognized. 

    In Sherk’s situation, the catered meal indicates that she is not expected to make lunch for herself, but she exists within an environment that needs her alive. She is not provided for because the zoo or their zookeepers genuinely care about her, but only because the premise of the zoo requires animals being alive and being displayed. Uniquely, however, Sherk as opposed to an exotic animal, is such a common sight, such that it seems the zoo does not have a responsibility to feed her. They appear to outsource this task to a neighboring restaurant; Sherk consciously animalizes herself but is presented with gourmet food that suggests she is too high maintenance to ever survive within captivity. However, this reveals that captivity takes on different forms and may not conform to our preconceptions. Even though “American women have luxuries that women in other times and lands have never dreamed of,” Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique argues that women’s unfulfillment and inability to identify the source of their disappointment is testament to how well their oppression is disguised.¹² While many dismissed women’s concerns by attributing them to boredom, Friedan comments on this recurring dissatisfaction with life: “If the cage is now a modern plate-glass-and-broadloom ranch house or a convenient modern apartment, the situation is no less painful than when her grandmother sat over an embroidery hoop in her gilt-and-plush parlor and muttered angrily about women’s rights.”¹³ The cage itself has undergone superficial changes, but it is constricting all the same. Many levels of oppression act upon Sherk and the animals, such that the physical boundaries between them are gradually eroded. Even though Sherk has the agency to communicate with audience members, understand their comments, and ultimately leave the cage, she is an item of display within a different context. Her natural presence attracts attention that is not motivated by an interest in her, as an independent entity, but how including her within a certain canon or catalog can function as a means to a greater end, which usually aligns with increased publicity or financial gain. 

    Sherk’s inspiration for her performance came from a stay at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City as a guest of Conde Nast.¹⁴ When chosen by Mademoiselle magazine as a Woman of the Year for 1970, Sherk was in New York to attend the awards ceremony. By becoming one of the Mademoiselle girls, Sherk was swallowed into a magazine that advertised hair products with the motto “If your hair isn’t beautiful, the rest hardly matters” and model training marketed as “Be a model. (or…just look like one).”¹⁵ When Sherk is honored and included in a magazine that emphasizes the need for women to buy products to cater to male interests, she is expected to live up to their rather superficial standards. 

    For breakfast one morning at the Waldorf, Sherk ordered a poached egg, toast, and coffee from room service, and they wheeled in an elaborate set-up that Sherk called “extremely elegant, but excessive.”¹⁶ There were approximately twenty-five covered dishes on a table covered in white tablecloth, and Sherk said in an interview that by the time she had found her poached egg,  it was cold. Later that day, Sherk took a walk in Central Park and ended up at the original Lion House built in 1934, at the Central Park Zoo, and “the rest was history.”¹⁷ While the architecture of the Waldorf rooms is much different from the zoo cages, Sherk’s actions are still somewhat dictated by Mademoiselle; her oppressors are different from those at the zoo, but they showcase Sherk’s intelligence only after recognizing her ability to adhere to traditional beauty standards. The magazine cares for her by putting her up in a room and displaying her as an accomplished woman to their audiences, but this care and support demands a level of compliance from Sherk in exchange. 

    Sherk attempts to get zoo audiences to view her as an animal, but by being a “Woman of the Year,” she is expected to dress and act a certain way to exude an effortless sexual allure and beauty that in fact requires a lot of invisible labor and continuous investment. As an artist trying to make public her work, she probably appreciated the award from Mademoiselle, but by being a “Woman of the Year,” it becomes apparent that she is immediately perceived as a woman before she is recognized for her ecological art. By existing simultaneously among the pages of the 1970s magazine and the cage in the San Francisco Zoo, she is expected to uphold the standards that Mademoiselle requires while also rejecting this culture of control. While this may be a misinterpretation of the magazine’s intentions, their advice and advertisements on how women can improve their bodies must have encouraged women to direct attention inwards onto themselves to magnify their flaws that they perhaps did not consider flaws until reading this magazine. The manner in which women develop insecurities about traits that have been passed down by their ancestors for centuries parallels how animals within zoos are suddenly expected to correct an innate wildness encoded in their DNA. Both woman and animal become aware of qualities within themselves that threaten societal order. When certain behaviors and ¹⁷ "Bonnie Ora Sherk," characteristics are deemed unacceptable, both species are not appreciated for who they naturally are, but who they are forced to become–against all odds (133). 

    The audience of Public Lunch is incapable of viewing Sherk’s unadulterated actions; before anything reaches the viewers, Sherk appears to be conscious of acting lady-like. With her rather conservative, flowy black dress and attention to etiquette when eating lunch, Sherk may be hyper aware of how society is incapable of separating her performance from her gender. During a time when magazines like Mademoiselle were quite popular, women’s bodies were dissected to such an extent that there was a heavy pressure to become the most desirable. In Mademoiselle's June 1970 edition, bustline developers were advertised with testimonials from women who said, “I increased my Bust Measurement from 35 ½ ” to a Full 39” in just 8 weeks.”¹⁸ Women are expected to change characteristics that are not biologically mutable in order to satisfy beauty standards, so Sherk, after being championed by Mademoiselle, may have felt obligated to clutch on to her appearance because the bar was already set so high. In terms of Sherk being appointed a “Woman of the Year,” her contributions to ecology and art are valued equally to her appearance. As such, in her performance, Sherk retains her usual appearance and poised movements because she has learned that this is how she earns recognition and value in society’s eyes. After being identified as a mademoiselle, there appears to be a conflation of identity with gender. Even when producing art that does not explicitly reference themes of femininity and sexuality, Sherk’s work becomes inherently gendered. With this, Sherk occupies a difficult position between woman and animal—an unfathomable idea for Mademoiselle. Especially in the case of Public Lunch, Sherk must animalize herself in a manner that preserves her femininity. 

    The animals, however, are expected to sacrifice a degree of ferocity and wildness when living in captivity. The San Francisco Zoo’s Lion House, built in 1940 through the Works Progress Administration, has had two tiger attacks in 2006 and 2007, by the same female tiger Tatiana.¹⁹ As seen in Public Lunch, the enclosures for tigers and lions were mere metal cages, with prison bars separating them from zoo-goers. The cages themselves were incredibly small, considering the size of the tigers, and did not employ glass to separate spectators from the animals. Instead, the prison bars allowed for increased provocation by audience members, who had the ability to permeate the barrier by throwing various objects into the cage. Although the Lion House has since been remodeled, public feeding time proved to be a safety concern as a zookeeper had her arm severely injured when Tatiana grabbed her arm during a public feeding time. Additionally, in 2007, three young men were mauled by Tatiana, one of whom was killed, after throwing pine cones and sticks into the tiger’s outdoor enclosure.²⁰ In the end, Tatiana was shot by police officers in efforts to rescue the remaining two injured men. 

    The structure simulated during feeding time at zoos condones the provocation of wild animals, and criminalizes them for their “wildness.” For instance, zoo audiences were made uncomfortable after noting that the tigers, before and during feeding time, viewed small children as prey, observing how the tigers’ gazes lingered upon easy targets.²¹ Although this is an understandable concern, the tigers are said to be making a human audience uncomfortable, even when the tiger is abiding by the zoo’s schedule, which prioritizes human consumers. Waiting to be fed through prison bars, the tiger’s well-being is set aside to accommodate spectators. 

    Simone Forti, an American postmodern artist and minimalist dancer observed animals’ “gestures of captivity” when visiting the zoo.²² Forti observed that in small enclosures where movement is intensely restricted, there are only so many combinations of movements that can be made. When watching the tigers pace back and forth from one side of the cage to the other, audience members recognize the ways animals move to pass the time of day, and how there are not an infinite number of possibilities within a space so small. Forti sought to embody the despair and varied energies she picked up from zoo animals by making drawings, which she later used as inspiration for minimalist dances that she performed from the comfort of her own studio, or apartment.²³ Forti does not seek to replicate the captivity of zoo animals; Sherk, however, intentionally places herself behind bars to experience the gestures of captivity. In doing so, she directly experiences and thus, conveys how egregiously zoos limit the rights allowed to animals. 

    Instead of using the tigers as muses that tangentially relate to abstract, minimalist movements, Sherk adopts her own gestures to rewrite, in human terms, what it looks like for an individual to exist under the same conditions. By pacing back and forth in the cage while smoking a cigarette, Sherk parallels the gestures of the tigers, while also revealing how she has access to an outside world and human liberties, like writing and smoking. Within this contained environment, Sherk’s possession of cigarettes indicates that she has contact with an outside world and reminds viewers of her agency in leaving whenever she pleases. 

    However, Sherk stated that when leaving the zoo, she brought the white rat, encaged on the floor of her cage, back to her studio.²⁴ The image of the “cage within a cage” complicates who is truly imprisoned and presents a dilemma of whether Sherk is implicated in perpetuating captivity. If Sherk has possession of her own rat to feed and take care of, is she incarcerated to the same extent as the tigers and lions? If Sherk has the ability to set the rat free, but does not, does this make Sherk an oppressor? Sherk said of the rat, “I named her Guru Rat and she became my teacher.”²⁵ While Sherk becomes interested in studying the native intelligence of animals, it seems that the imprisonment of the rat within her cage is a method to regain and reinforce her humanity. Sherk separates herself from her oppressors, but is incapable of fully identifying with the oppressed. As a result, she maintains her own structure of power because “the existence of the oppressed is necessary” to Sherk’s own existence.”²⁶In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire notes that the oppressed adapt to structures of domination such that they prefer conforming to “their state of unfreedom” over pursuing “the creative communion produced by freedom.”²⁷ Because it is easier to conform to structures of authority rather than defy them, Sherk seems to be complacent with her oppression, understanding that while she cannot escape captivity, she can create her own structure to partially liberate herself. However, this liberation comes at the cost of becoming an oppressor. 

    Similarly, these layers of incarceration are applicable to the format of heteronormative households in the United States during the 1950s to 1970s. Under capitalism, men worn down by their jobs and bosses unleashed their pent up anger from work on their families, specifically their wives. As aptly put by Silvia Federici in Revolution at Point Zero: 

“You beat your wife and vent your rage against her when you are frustrated or overtired by your work or when you are defeated in a struggle (but to work in a factory is already a defeat). The more the man serves and is bossed around, the more he bosses around. A man’s home is his castle and his wife has to learn: to wait in silence when he is moody, to put him back together when he is broken down…”²⁸ 

    Instead of liberating oneself from the grip of capitalism and abusive work conditions, men morph into their oppressors. It is simply more convenient to adopt the behaviors of one’s oppressors as opposed to vocalizing one’s discontent with the system currently in place. Sherk, like husbands fed up from work, distracts herself from her own imprisonment by subjecting the rat to her same, if not worse, conditions. 

    By taking residence within the cage, however, Sherk is able to understand the encaged animals on a deeper level than the spectators. After Sherk finishes eating, she climbs up the ladder to an elevated platform and lies down on her back, facing the tiger in the cage in front of her. The tiger is still eating his lunch, but for a second, he stops, perhaps aware of Sherk’s presence directly across the bars. As Sherk lies down in her long, black dress, she does not seem particularly concerned with the tiger’s ability to see up her skirt. She is probably aware of her increased visibility to the tiger, but this creates a vulnerability that further separates her from “feeding time” bystanders. The tiger does not see her in the same way as her audience, and does not force her to conform to the same behaviors. 

    Lindsay Kelley writes on Public Lunch in comparison to Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, arguing that Sherk does not feel naked or shameful in front of the tiger.²⁹Derrida does feel ashamed, however, when his sex is exposed, standing naked in front of his pet cat.³⁰ Sherk does not seem to view the big cat as a threat in terms of the animal’s ability to identify or judge her sex. Perhaps Sherk views the attachment of one’s sex with hyper-sexualization and desire as a uniquely human construction. Sherk writes: “As I was lying down, gazing through the beautiful skylight above, viewing the clouds and birds flying overhead, the tiger in the adjacent cage, got up on his haunches and peered over at me. I thought, ‘This tiger is perceiving me; he is looking at me. What is he seeing? What is he thinking? What is he feeling?’”³¹1 

    Sherk is more concerned with the rational capabilities of the tiger and his curiosities as opposed to explaining her own feelings of shame or discomfort upon the tiger’s examination. In a setting where Sherk is already being surveilled by spectators, their cameras, and zookeepers, the tiger cannot be the force that makes her uncomfortably perceived; he may be the only one that understands the levels of imprisonment at work. Irrespective of the tigers being intelligent mammals, Sherk’s actions within the cage indicate that her transparency and display in front of the tigers is less dangerous than in front of her human audience, who might revel in the exposure of her sex. The tiger does not reduce women to their sex in the same way that certain audiences—like Mademoiselle magazine—do. 

    Sherk’s physical placement is closer to the tigers than to the zoo-goers, creating a relationship between Sherk and the animals that supersedes the dynamic between the beings in the enclosure and the spectators. In Why Look at Animals? John Berger argues that animals do not look at people in zoos; they do not return the gaze of the human.³²Instead, in overwhelming environments, quite similar to “feeding time,” the look of the animal, who is immunized to this routine encounter, flickers across the audience. Berger writes, “But always its lack of common language, its silence, guarantees its distance, its distinctness, its exclusion, from and of man.”³³

    The inability of human and animal to communicate through language does create a divide, but Sherk disallows herself from communicating with her audience in a way that brings her closer to the neighboring tigers. Although she can still understand the commentary of the audience, she does not engage or respond, replicating the behavior of the animals. In this instance, the refusal or inability to use language allows for the tiger to perceive Sherk—a privilege that spectators cannot have. According to the Companion Species Manifesto, the premise of a dog’s unconditional love is attributed to human narcissism.³⁴ Donna Haraway argues that “Inter-subjectivity does not mean ‘equality,’” rather it means “paying attention to the conjoined dance of face-to-face significant otherness.”³⁵ Employing this rhetoric to analyze Sherk’s performance, reciprocal interactions between Sherk and the tiger do not involve issues of property or ownership. Instead, Sherk and the tiger perceive their respective otherness in a manner that re-models both parties. The tiger’s eye lingers upon Sherk because she, like himself, is a being dropped in a foreign environment, incapable of responding to the audience. 

    While Sherk does not directly respond to the audience, she writes down her thoughts on a Waldorf Astoria notepad. Sherk called the irony of this “irresistible,” considering her position in a metal cage in contrast to her stay at the Waldorf. However, Sherk goes further to address that even though she exists within the same space, she must be viewed differently by default, because she is human. Regardless of how hard Sherk may have tried to minimize the differences between woman and animal, she perhaps realized that the physical differences will always be perceived by society, presenting an opportune moment to comment on this division. 

To do so, Sherk intensified the differences between her lunch and that of the tigers. Her meal, which was catered by Vanessi’s Restaurant in San Francisco, included a grilled steak, a salad, a partial loaf of bread with butter, a cup of coffee, salt and pepper shakers, and silverware.³⁶ One by one, a total of five plates and cups are brought by the zookeeper, who takes his time leaning into the cage and carefully placing each plate on the floor. Unlike the slot that closes immediately after the chunk of meat is pushed into the tiger cages, Sherk’s plates are moved with no rush and the window appears to be kept open, because she is not considered a real threat. Instead, her performance is seen with a bit of humor, as one man in the audience is shown laughing and shaking his head for a split second.³⁷ 

    Although Sherk leans into the lavish display of excess that contradicts the interaction between zookeeper and tiger, this juxtaposition points towards the human desire for luxury and intricacy, even when depriving other beings of basic decencies. By making both relationships drastically different, Sherk suggests that the distinction in the ways we treat humans and animals is rather arbitrary. We drew a line in a way that irreversibly designated human beings as superior, and followed up by exacerbating this difference to an extent that we can no longer understand the violation of nonhuman rights. By training elephants and killer whales for entertainment purposes, we have reached a point of no return where these animals are exploited for commercial gain, and individuals viewing these performances have become desensitized to the imposition of anthropocentric values on animals. So, when Sherk performs every day activities within a space usually reserved for more exotic tigers and lions, zoo-goers do not take an interest in her because she is not entertaining. However, this emphasizes how we entrap animals in a box and gawk at them performing their quotidian activities in a foreign environment. As Sherk states, by placing the female figure within an unexpected space, she activates the environment and urges audience members to conceive of “feeding time” differently–in terms of the violation of animal rights and the subjugation of women.³⁸ In this feeding time, however, both Sherk and the tigers experience a hunger that food cannot fill. 

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Footnotes
 

¹ "SiteWorks: San Francisco performance 1969-85," University of Exeter SiteWorks,
²  "Bonnie Ora Sherk," in Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, 132.
³  "Bonnie Ora Sherk," 132. 
⁴  David Adams, "Joseph Beuys: Pioneer of a Radical Ecology," 26-34. 
⁵  Adams, “Joseph Beuys,” 33. 
⁶ Marie Watt, "In Conversation with Marie Watt: A New Coyote Tale,” 125. 
⁷ Adams, “Joseph Beuys,” 32.
⁸  Adams, “Joseph Beuys,” 33. 
⁹  Anne McClintock, "Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest," Journal of the History of Sexuality, 29.
¹⁰  "Don't Feed the Giraffe," World Animal Protection,  https://www.worldanimalprotection.us/blogs/dont-feed-giraffe.
¹¹  Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, 17.
¹²  Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (n.p.: W. W. Norton, 1963), 26.
¹³  Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 28.
¹⁴  "Bonnie Ora Sherk," 132. 
¹⁵  Mademoiselle, 1970, https://archive.org/details/mademoiselle7071jannewy/page/n1418/mode/1up?view=theater. 
¹⁶  "Bonnie Ora Sherk," 133.
¹⁸  Mademoiselle, 1970, https://archive.org/details/mademoiselle7071jannewy/page/n1418/mode/1up?view=theater.
¹⁹ The Associated Press, "Tiger escapes at S.F. Zoo, kills 17-year-old visitor," NBC News, December 25, 2007.
²⁰  Jaxon Van Derbeken, "Survivor admitted yelling at S.F. tiger, documents say," Chron, January 17, 2008. 
²¹ Patricia Yollin, "Zoo's public feedings of big cats praised, condemned by experts," SF Gate, January 16, 2007 
²²  Julia Bryan-Wilson, "Simone Forti Goes to the Zoo," 28.
²³ Bryan-Wilson, “Simone Forti,” 46. 
²⁴  "SiteWorks: San Francisco," University of Exeter SiteWorks. 
²⁵  "SiteWorks: San Francisco," University of Exeter SiteWorks.
²⁶ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), 58. 
²⁷ Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 48. 
²⁸  Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, 18.
²⁹  Lindsay Kelley, "Food," Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities: The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies, 2018. 
³⁰  Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 4. 
³¹  "Bonnie Ora Sherk," 132.
³²  John Berger, Why Look at Animals? (2009), 28. 
³³  Berger, Why Look, 6. 
³⁴  Donna Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, 33.
³⁵  Haraway, Companion Species, 41. 
³⁶ "SiteWorks: San Francisco," University of Exeter SiteWorks.
³⁷  "Bonnie Ora Sherk, Public Lunch 1971," video, Vimeo, https://vimeo.com/420122632. 
³⁸  Bonnie Ora Sherk, "Q & A: Bonnie Ora Sherk and the Performance of Being," BAMPFA, https://bampfa.org/news/q-bonnie-ora-sherk-and-performance-being.

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