ʌnˈplɛzənt                                  the files of unpleasant women

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ʌnˈplɛzənt, meaning: she did not make herself small enough. She did not apologize for taking up space. She said the thing, held the line, left the room without explantion. Pleasantness is supposed to be a virtue — neutral, universal, human. But it is not neutral. It is gendered, classed, raced, political. The pleasant woman smiles when she is angry. She qualifies her opinions before she offers them. She regulates her emotions to deescalate. She thanks you before she disagrees. Pleasantness, in the form demanded of women, is a technology of containment. It keeps us legible, manageable, and, most crucially, unthreatening.

This project begins with a refusal: to treat unpleasantness as a flaw in need of correction. Instead, it treats it as a practice: sometimes chosen, sometimes thrust upon a woman by the simple fact of her refusal to disappear or agree. 
Each file in this archive holds a portrait and a question: 
How has your unpleasantness already served you and others?
The question is deliberately past tense. Because she already has been and she knows the cost. But she also knows what it gave back; to herself, to society, her kids, other women, to a room that needed one person to say the thing no one else would say.

A file, by definition, is a record. It holds evidence. It is kept. These files are an act of keeping what has too often has been discarded as difficult, dismissed as shrill or hysterical, deleted from the official account of who counts as a good woman. 
These files insist that the unpleasantness was and - now more than ever -  IS, in fact, the point. 
And that the women described as difficult or inconvenient were and still are - now more than ever and more often than not - simply the first ones to notice something was wrong. And impolite enough to say so out loud.