Danielle Dean

No Lye

No Lye by Danielle Dean documents a group of five women, including Dean herself, confined to a small, cramped bathroom, communicating only by using slogans culled from beauty advertisements (“beauty is skin deep”, “naturalise, it’s in our nature to be strong and balanced”) and quotes from political speeches (“we must protect our borders”, “we are fighting for our way of life and our ability to fight for freedom”). The result is a fragmented conversation that defies legibility. As sounds of a possible conflict rise from outside, the characters work together producing what looks like explosives from soap, towels, and an unmarked blue liquid. As the women implicate their own bodies into the narrative, the inherent gendered power in the vocabulary they are using is compounded. The rhetoric of beauty and politics become porous and interchangeable: both are attempting to control women’s bodies. The lye in the title references hair-relaxing chemicals primarily used by black women to straighten their hair, but also the duplicitous language in the film. A homophone of the word lie, it again points to the misleading propaganda we willingly submit to.