Deconstructing Panty Pennants and Revealing Absent Presence

More multifaceted than the mere titles we maintain—as daughters, sisters, wives, and teachers, for example—sexuality is a part of our identity worth exploring and honoring. Women’s stories, gathered in a questionnaire, highlight sexual identity in Panty Pennants —an exhibition held in late 2012 at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center in Kansas City, Missouri. The author uses a process of thinking with deconstruction to explore various texts from the exhibition. In doing this, she learns to hear silence, to see women as multi-dimensional, and to disrupt culturally learned hierarchies of unearned privilege and oppressive power for purposes of gender equity and social justice.