Examining the Engendered Body: Exploring the Body in Five Parts

click on the titles to skip to those chapters or click on .doc to download file Gender Performance In Context by Carole Cheh (.doc) Masculine, Feminine, Cindy Sherman by Justin Izbinski (.doc) Gender as Performance in the Work of Nan Goldin by Cynthia Wilson (.doc) Cultural Genitals - Goodbye Seventies by Jean Robison (.doc) The Multiplying and Compounding Forces of Complexity by Camilo Cruz (.doc) Performance by Camilo Cruz (part 2) (.doc) Gender as a 4th Dimensional Context of Interface by Michael Bernard (.doc) Performing Masculinity by Jeff Foye (.doc) ____________________________________________________________________ Gender Performance In Context If we accept the notion that gender is a stylized construct instead of a fixed identity, we must also accept the corollary idea that the performance of gender is subject to profound contextual influences. The act of performing gender at San Francisco’s freewheeling, all-inclusive Trannyshack in 2005 is radically different from the act of performing gender in New York’s progressive, but still male-dominated, art scene of 1965, which is also different from the act of performing gender for the still camera in the 1920s. These acts all contain extensive differences in motivation, intention, inflection, content, and reception. Judith Butler speaks to just this situation in “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” She begins by asserting that “gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity. Within this repetition of acts, which bears some similarity to theatrical performance, lie a host of possibilities for gender transformation. The possibilities put into play at any given time or place are “necessarily constrained by available historical conventions.” In fact, each body is “a continual and incessant materializing of possibilities… reproducing a historical situation.” With this useful model as our guide, we can begin to look at different periods in our recent history to survey how some bodies may have materialized the transformative possibilities available to them. The 1920s produced some surprisingly sophisticated gender manipulations via the photographic image. European artists like Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Hannah Höch, and Claude Cahun posed in drag, documented their drag-performing friends, or constructed gender-ambiguous collages. To look at these photographs is to be amazed at how fresh they look, how crisply gender is parodied, and how freely it is toyed with. This was the time of the Dada movement, following the first world war, when things in Europe were less stable and less “normative’ than usual. It was also a time of fascination with the new medium of photography, and the possibilities that it offered with its facsimiles of reality. This small window of time and space perhaps offered an unusually liberal experimental milieu. The 1960s were a more complicated time to perform gender. Although America was awash in experimental fervor and new democratic ideals, it was still mostly in the thrall of 1950s Eisenhower-era sex roles. Even as the civil rights movement forged better circumstances for people of color, men were still expected to be men, and women were expected to be women. The feminist and queer rights movements had not erupted yet. In the avant-garde art scene, which is typically ahead of the rest of society, some small inroads were made for gay or feminine men. Many of the prominent visual artists of the time—Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns, among others—were gay or bisexual, and that fact did not turn heads as it might have in the previous generation. Nonetheless, sexism was still rampant in the art world, just as it was in progressive social circles. The men could experiment with drag, but the women still had to be “real women.” Progressive women artists who lived through this period, such as Carolee Schneemann and Yayoi Kusama, have bitter things to say about it to this day. In the present era, we are privy to altogether different circumstances. In San Francisco, one of the gender-transformative meccas of the world, a nightclub phenomenon called Trannyshack has been dominating Tuesday nights out for the last decade. Here, the fluidity of gender is a given, and the farthest reaches of gender performance are explored with abandon. Pre-operative and post-operative transsexuals are worshipped in a variety of permutations, and heterosexual “genetic” women take the stage to perform as drag queens. Thanks to the social progress made over the last four decades, Trannyshack is a safe, open place that enjoys enthusiastic support. It is also far from the only place to go to “materialize incessant possibilities.” A popular restaurant called Asia SF features an all-Asian staff of male-to-female transsexuals who serve fabulous California-Asian cuisine and perform hourly atop a red runway bar. Now in existence for seven years, Asia SF’s colorful website proudly touts their “world-famous gender illusionists,” and offers multiple options for party bookings. Another bar called Pal, no longer in existence, boasted an anime theme but tended to attract a strong “baby dyke” scene. The listings go on and on. We might like to think that progressive attitudes toward gender have evolved along a continuum, gaining greater momentum as time goes on. However, even the brief foregoing examples show us that the process is most likely a cyclical, not a linear one. Gender experimentation has probably been subject to alternating periods of permissiveness and oppression since there were two genders to bend. This is a fitting pattern for its evolution, since so much of the discourse surrounding gender studies is geared toward breaking down the binary system and other products of linear, patriarchal Western thinking. One can only hope that the arcs of the cycle continue to widen as time goes on, with a place like present-day San Francisco serving as a benchmark for the next round of growth to surpass. Perhaps we are on the brink of reaching a gender utopia, where if there are any “historical constraints” left, it is only the pressure to top the gender performer who preceded you. ____________________________________________________________________ Masculine, Feminine, Cindy Sherman “Gender is but the instance of a larger regulatory operation of power.” Scholar Judith Butler sees gender as a social construct or a norm that is perpetuated by people in society who accept their role and perform up to it. Within the performance of gender lies a certain legitimacy of what is considered masculine and feminine as each regulates and plays up to each other. No one is truly masculine or feminine, but each performs to the gender that they assume and/or are designated with after birth. As women fought for equal rights, a certain naïveté came about as men feared that women would become just like men and lose their femininity because women were suppose to act a certain way. According to Butler, “Gender is not exactly what one ‘is’ nor is it precisely what one ‘has’.” Our bodies have defined our gender: phallus/male, vagina/female. The concept of gender as a performance has become evident in works of art and more specifically in the photographic works of Cindy Sherman. “The medium of photography yields the perfect arena for the play of gender and sexuality . . . Photography’s strong aura of realism and objectivity promotes a fantasy of total gender transformation, or conversely allows the articulation of incongruity between the posing body and its assumed costume.” Cindy Sherman takes on an image in the choice of wardrobe, hairstyle, and makeup that she uses in her photographs, which become a “theater within a theater” where each one of these images is constructed and becomes an identity. Sherman explores the identities of various women in her Untitled Film Stills series. These characters of women make us question what we consider women to be in relation to society and the photographs themselves, and together they illustrate that gender is a performance. In Judith Williamson’s essay, Images of “Woman”: The Photography of Cindy Sherman, she comments, “Sherman’s pictures force upon the viewer the elision of image and identity which women experience all the time: as if the sexy black dress made you be a femme fatale, whereas ‘femme fatale’ is, precisely, an image…” What is meant by this is that women (more so than men) are faced with a difficult choice with identity especially in the choice of clothing as it will reiterate a certain identity or social code of a particular woman. Sherman’s photographs make the viewer reconsider what constitutes a ‘woman,’ not through the outer presence of those depicted in the photographic space, but from the viewer’s own introspection. In her Untitled Film Still series, Sherman plays with a certain visual style that appropriates a femininity of an earlier particular time, either the damsel in distress or the woman lost. Through this process the woman is constructed in the images through social signifiers of what makes a ‘woman’. Amelia Jones in her essay for the retrospective of Cindy Sherman, Tracing the Subject with Cindy Sherman, bases Sherman’s work around the projective eye or gaze as it is more commonly known. She lays out, “three ways in which its victims take their place relative to it: they internalize this penis-like eye, constructing themselves as passive effects of its propulsive force; they aggressively enact themselves according to the very rules it has established; or they confuse its potentially disempowering effect by throwing the gaze back on the viewer.” It is through this process of performance in Sherman’s work that she is able to breakdown the codification of the projective gaze. The viewer reads the picture and eventually reads into the picture. Through this reading of the images, the viewer reiterates what is culturally and socially known as femininity through mannerism and dress. The viewer becomes an accomplice to the social renderings of what composes a woman. Williamson states, “In a way it is innocent: you are guilty, you supply the femininity through social and cultural knowledge,” a sentiment with which Butler would agree. The recognition of one or all of these women as a character shows that they already exist and are all ‘essentially feminine,’ but that they’re all different, as well, thus proving that the concept of ‘essentially feminine’ does not exist. By naming them film stills, Sherman evokes an imagined narrative within her work. With this narrative comes an effect of the feminine being acted upon. She later goes on to say that this is a deconstruction of one of the images from an assortment that we put on women. It is within these images, however, that Sherman further deconstructs the image and identity and forces the viewer to reconstruct from the lexicon of feminine identities. Women who view her work might not necessarily buy into the image as a true to life representation of themselves because it is not a true vision of women, but on the other hand, male viewers might accept the image as such. And thus femininity as a character has just been performed. How one comes to these conclusions is the learned cultural knowledge of what attributes a woman should have and act as. Our understanding of each picture is found in our heads through stereotypes and assumptions, and it is through this recognition that we come to see how an ideology works ‘not by undoing, but by doing’. This series of works, as well as many other Sherman images, plays with the idea of a woman playing a woman, or a woman in drag. If Sherman depicted herself in all of these photographs it would be one woman’s identity instead of playing with the notion of how women are depicted and how they should be defined. But what Williamson finds to be the real story is not only the woman, but femininity itself. In all of the images, either clear or unclear, femininity is explored through fear, suspicion, vulnerability, anxiety, and uncertainty but this image is imaginary and fragmented and found in “the social fabric of our thoughts and feelings.” This stressing of femininity shows it for what it really is: not only as a false social construct, but also as a binary for the other social construct, masculinity. “It is so important to stress the difference not because ‘femininity’ is just a bad false two dimensional construct that is forced upon us (even if it feels that way) but precisely because, ultimately, it isn’t any one thing at all. It can only exist in opposition to something else, like one half of a seesaw.” Femininity exists as a binary to masculinity. “Sherman…dissolves herself into exaggerated and so apparently fake femininity.” A woman playing a ‘woman’ seems somewhat redundant as far as visual interpretation is concerned, but it is through this doubling effect of femininity that it makes itself seem “constructed” and “strange”. By putting herself in the photographs in which she performs, Sherman proves that femininity is an effect that gives way to an illusion, “The way the later images move towards, not simply sexual ambiguity (as if that were an identity) but a juxtaposing of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ identities, seems to demolish once and for all the idea that either of these is something that can be fully inhabited…” As we see Sherman performing and taking on the identity of other women, the notion of cross dressing comes to mind. The formal name for someone who usually dresses in clothing of the opposite gender is a transvestite. “He or she may wear one item of clothing of the opposite sex in a fetishistic way or may enjoy wearing a full outfit, from wig to high heels.” Although Sherman is not of the opposite sex in the Untitled Film Stills, she is playing off the notion of gender performativity that one finds in transvestites or in drag as it is commonly known now. In her book, Transvestites & Transsexuals, Deborah Feinbloom states that “one must always remember the assumption of setting--a time, a place, and an audience. In various settings the same act can have multiple and different meanings.” She uses a couple of examples in which a man who wears female clothing for a role in a play is not considered a transvestite anymore than a man who wears female clothing to a costume party. Feinbloom finds that we never question one’s sexuality because we usually make an assumption based on the external appearance of a person. She also finds that these notions of sex are made at birth and are reinforced throughout our lives, as Judith Butler also believes. The performance of drag has come to have a “camp” aesthetic. Scholar Richard Docter finds that people in drag violate the societal rules of gender conformity. A person is expected to present themselves consistent with their anatomical sex and are not suppose to be ambiguous. (Docter, 4) Through research he has found that there is an incompatible difference between someone’s anatomical sex and their gender identity. He agrees with Judith Butler, finding gender to be a “hypothetical construct.” Docter also raises another fascinating idea of cross dressing as a temporary escape or avoidance of stress and boredom. Those who dress in drag are trying to satisfy something within themselves that they see in others. These issues related to drag are reiterated in Sherman’s photographic works. Perhaps the artist identifies with all of these women or none of them. With the works that came directly after Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, there seems to be a certain androgyny. Dualism arises in the pictures that either make the image very masculine or very feminine. Some might say that this type of performance in the artwork might reiterate the notions of what is feminine. Amelia Jones states that, “Sherman’s entire body of work performs the sexual subject as an effect of the other (the ‘fleshed’ body/self whose identity is a projection of its embodied and desiring observers.” The gendered performance of the body as a subject is situated through the other.” This reliance on the other binds the notions it is trying to take apart. But by inhabiting all these identities, Sherman puts herself in control of her identity outside of a social construct. According to Judith Butler, the body, in its performativity, is a type of speech or language. Sherman’s drag performance reiterates that the impersonation of the masculine or the feminine can be assumed. As for taking on these identities, Sherman provides us with the idea that anyone can be all of them, or none. This proves that gender is something that can be performed because of its transferability. There is no point in continuing the exploration because the true ‘woman’ does not exist. And in the works following the films stills, we begin to see an ambiguity of gender or androgyny. The construction of the binary is, therefore, purely dependent on each other and totally interchangeable as is made visible in the photographic works of Cindy Sherman. ____________________________________________________________________ Gender as Performance in the Work of Nan Goldin “A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary . . . the prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.” -- Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera In 1991 Nan Goldin spent an afternoon photographing friends as they prepared for, and took part in, a gay pride parade. The photographic series records the gender transformation of three individuals through drag performance, and includes the work Misty, Taboo! and Jimmy Paulette Dressing. By donning “feminine” coded attire and other accoutrements such as wigs, jewelry and make-up, the drag queens in Nan Goldin’s work perform, and therefore create, the “feminine” gender of the two-sex system. Yet, while performance places them securely within the binary male/female gender system, it also fractures the same system by “undoing” gender through slippage. The binary and the idea of the normative both rely on gender as an innate or intrinsic characteristic based on one’s birth sex. In other words, if a child is born with male sex organs, he will also innately possess, or develop, a “normative” masculine gender. There are at least two problems with this viewpoint. The first lies in what Anne Fausto-Sterling has proven in her studies of the intersexed: that sexual difference itself is not strictly a male/female duality. Therefore, if gender is based on the sexed body, it follows that gender can not be defined as a strict duality or binary. The second problem is that although sex is understood as a physical or natural attribute, gender is typically thought of as a cultural construct. As such, gender is created through enactment; it is played out on the surface of the body as well as through coded actions. Because gender is outside the body, it remains fluid, changeable. The fluidity of gender is nowhere more evidenced than in Goldin’s images of transvestites. In one particular photograph of Goldin’s, Taboo! sits in the middle of the room and is the only figure completely dressed. Misty is to the left in a state of undress, still in undergarments with no wig and incomplete make-up. Jimmy Paulette is to the right of Taboo!, wig and make-up in place, but wearing only underwear and a girdle. In the midst of transformation, slippage exists here purposely. We are without a doubt viewing men, yet they are in the process of becoming women. The play of slippage in gender is ever present throughout the set of photos, suggesting that such slippages may be the only things “natural” about gender. Even when presenting the completed feminine transformation, the viewer knows that these are “physically” male bodies. The fact that slippage occurs here seems to imply that “non-normative” gender exists, which also implies that gender is non-performative. However, examining the construction of “normative” or binary gender disproves this, as well as illuminates societal biases not only based on the construct, but necessary for its continued existence. During an interview published in The Haraway Reader, Donna Haraway states that, “Gender is a verb, not a noun… (and) is always about the production of subjects in relation to other subjects, and in relation to artifacts.” So the construction of gender not only exists through “doing,” but through interaction each person involved is further defined by the contact. This is the basis of social construction, the idea of gender as performance, but something as fluid as this concept seems impossible to reconcile with the unremitting norms of our binary gender system. Yet, the same system has given rise to the normative, and ensures that the system is maintained. It is only through the constant repetition of normative gender performance that the binary gender system continues to exist, and those with an investment in the system not only willingly maintain it through “correct” performance, but use gender policing of performance as a way of preserving the construct. By privileging certain performances as ‘normal,’ other performances such as those enacted by transvestites in Goldin’s photograph become labeled as “abnormal.” This places those individuals within the borderland described by Gloria Anzaldúa as “a vague and undetermined place” created by an unnatural boundary. These borders are unnatural because they are based on binary, dualistic thought, which is itself unnatural. By placing individuals in this position, not only is the legitimacy of their gender called into question, but their identity becomes suspect. If we are to rise above such “classification trouble”, we need to accept that gender, much like identity, is constantly changing. It is fluid and subject to shift depending on the performance as well as the interaction of those performing. To overcome the binary gender construct it must be understood that all gender is “authentic” or genuine, because “through performativity, dominant and non-dominant gender forms are equalized.” Misty, Taboo!, and Jimmy Paulette all perform legitimate gender. Even drag, thus, or maybe particularly drag fits neatly into the feminine of the binary system. It is only through slippage that their gender performance could be construed as non-normative. It must not be forgotten, however, that slippage exists only on the mistaken belief that gender is somehow connected to a “natural” essence within the body, one that is intrinsic to an individual. In order to invalidate the binary gender construct, it must be understood that all gender is performative, and therefore all gender is legitimate. Once this is accepted, perhaps those who perform “non-dominant” genders will no longer be marginalized, or relegated to the borderlands. ____________________________________________________________________ Cultural Genitals - Goodbye Seventies “My ideal wife would have a lot of bacon, bring it all home, and have a TV station besides.” “ So I guess everybody has their own time and place when they turn themselves on. Where do I turn on? I turn on when I turn off and go to bed. That’s my big moment that I’m always waiting for.”1 -- Andy Warhol The “androgynous ideals” of 1960s and 70s fashion in the west initiated release from the rigid hyper-gendered sex bomb and macho binary system of the 1950’s. This breaking up of expectations and oppressive norms is exciting but seems to remain on the surface. The boyish woman and the girlish man are allowed to perform in music and fashion, but a deeper casting off of gender rules is taking longer. These days, gender performance is looser: I can wear pants to school without issue. Yet, it is still problematic for a man to wear a skirt or dress in the public realm, and many other transgressions are simply not allowed. The problem manifests in social awkwardness, discrimination and even murder. My questions for this essay revolve around the expectations and ramifications of gender performance. There are distinctions between acceptable cross-dressing (pop music, theatre) and cross-dressing seen as a dreadful transgression, which leads to severe societal punishment, as in the case of Brandon Teena, a twenty-year-old “woman” known as Tina Brandon, who was murdered for “passing” as “man.” How far have we come in re-dressing gender performance? Why have figures like Boy George and Michael Jackson become accepted, even idols, while politicians must remain traditionally gendered? What about others to come? I speak of gender as something to “escape” from. I see a multitude of redefining, deconstructing and generally breaking out of the norms attached to gender assignment in society. Why are we pushing and pulling on gender in the public and private realm? What did the androgynous pop stars of the 70’s and 80’s do for us? What sorts of escape do we long for? What is it like to exist without a gender? Andy Warhol was the androgynous ideal without the ideal. As a pop star who manipulated the culture machine, his life was a performance of anti-performance. He was a Superstar and a Nobody. In the 60’s and 70’s, he redefined expectations of art making, as well as gender roles. In a sense, he pushed the envelope of gender performance rules by seemingly removing himself from the game. He presented an ambiguous sort of asexual persona to the public. He somehow carved out a niche of non-gender. I find this big evasion fascinating. I’d like to start with Andy as a model of gender-avoidance in the public eye and try to uncover why and how we perform the way we do. How will the rules change and what would happen if “gender” broke down altogether? In the 2004 documentary film, Absolut Warhola, relatives of Warhol comment on fame, unemployment, politics, vodka, music, pop art and life in general. In this small Slovakian town where Andy’s parents were born and raised, gender roles are traditional and appear to be unmoving. Warhol’s aunt states that Andy never got married because he took care of his mother and he didn’t have time to leave a family to visit his relatives in the town of Mikova. Many other family members and neighbors adamantly deny that Warhol was a “you-know-what.” His cousin confirms, “No homosexuals have ever come from Mikova.” The people of his origin are respectful and loving to Andy’s memory and work, and we are assured by his ninety-year-old aunt that, “If he lived here, we’d have forced him to get married …even against his own will.” Though he was born in Pittsburgh, it is from this particular place of traditional categories that Warhol emerged as a destroyer of category. His artwork is a manipulation of the forces of appearance and representation. He revealed soup cans and Marilyn Monroe’s image as icons instead of literal representations. And his work doesn’t stop with paintings, prints, sculpture and film. His Factory, writings and general presence in the public realm attest to a complex way of life: he was always living on an edge outside of any strictly bounded category. The way that he performed gender is tantamount to his exposure and creation of icons. He had an apparently ambivalent way of loving and criticizing the world simultaneously, and he acted out his love for glamour and beauty (big hitters in gender performance) in a similar way. His clothing, wigs and manner of speaking show equal attention to male and female forms of beauty and desire evading easy categorization. He occasionally appeared in drag. Perhaps, this was just another form of morphing his identity in the public eye. Perhaps Andy Warhol was Andy Warhol’s greatest creation. From a 2005 vantage point, Warhol’s seemingly asexual persona looks like a well-crafted program of gender role avoidance. The possibility of another gender (an other non-gender?) that can be performed and celebrated looks like a window out to a system beyond the binaries of man/woman, husband/wife, and so on. Nevertheless, I have to wonder what it means to perform and therefore exist in an “asexual” state. I won’t pretend to psychoanalyze Andy Warhol, but I don’t believe he was an asexual person (is there such a person?). He certainly had desires. He began as an outsider and continued to position himself as such. Did this grant him access to his own desires, or was he denied a “livable” life as Judith Butler describes it? Butler indicates, “the social norms that constitute our existence carry desires that do not originate with our individual.” 2 Warhol placed himself at the “forefront of ‘gender fuck dressing,’ in which identity, especially gender identity, was conceived as an impersonation, a role, a put-on.” 3 The question that I ask myself as an impersonator in my own way is where does the performance end and existence begin? I think there is not a clear distinction, if any. Where does that leave you and me, consumers of popular culture and also pioneers in a forever-new territory of societal performance and norms? As Anne Fausto-Sterling states, “physical genitals form a poor basis for deciding the rights and privileges of citizenship …rather it is social gender that we see and read.”4 The rights and privileges of society are many and varied, ranging from employment opportunities to a general pursuit of happiness. As Donna Haraway suggests, “gender is a verb, not a noun.”5 The way we are allowed to do gender circumscribes what rights and privileges we have access to. Unless, we take “doing gender” into our hands. Candy Darling, a star of Andy Warhol’s films, performed drag, dressing in the way that Lana Turner and Kim Novak had done as a way to “show the world, in the most beautiful way, that beauty didn’t belong to those who were born with it.”6 In a sense, she was performance scripting her own social gender. Andy Warhol believed in Darling’s re-shaping of beauty and helped make it real by casting Darling in films like Women In Revolt and Flesh. Lou Reed wrote a song performed by the Velvet Underground that illuminates the struggle to perform against the social norms, leaving one with seemingly no option other than to exist in a lonely place. Candy says I’ve come to hate my body And all that it requires in this world Candy says I’d like to know completely What others so discretely talk about Candy says I hate the quiet places That cause the smallest taste of what will be Candy says I hate the big decisions That cause endless revisions in my mind I’m gonna watch the blue birds fly over my shoulder I’m gonna watch them pass me by Maybe when I’m older What do you think I’d see If I could walk away from me7 In a particularly poignant moment of Absolut Warhola, Andy’s doppelganger appears in the town of Mikova. He is a Ruthenian speaking tall, thin, denim-clad facsimile of Warhol. He is mysteriously returning to his ancestral home. The reverence that the cousins and aunts have for the memory of Andy does not carry over to this peculiar figure. They laugh as he awkwardly mounts a horse in an unmasculine display. There is a palpable sense that the community, which claims him as their own, would have ostracized Andy. Acceptance was not high in Pittsburgh in Warhol’s childhood either. What do we discover as we push away from cultural expectations and into uncharted places where gender is a fiction like race and class? These social realities help us define and identify. What is it like to be truly removed from these structures, to “walk away from me”? ____________________________________________________________________ The Multiplying and Compounding Forces of Complexity The Los Angeles Superior Court recently reclassified all of its employees in order to eliminate inconsistencies in work duties and job titles. This “re-class,” as we called it, made me an “Administrator I-Y-rate.” Making my “Administrator I-Y-rate” experience all the more interesting is the fact that I am a younger “Chicano” court administrator, who also conducts non-traditional/non-operational court work. On top of my new employment status, I am also trying to ‘become’ an artist as well as maintain my activist roots, be single for the first time in fifteen years, and run a scholarship foundation for law students. The issue of identity has never been more complex in my life. This essayer is autobiographically rooted. My personal questions about passion and career are this paper’s inspiration to explore complexity in identity. First, I look briefly at complexity theory, paying special attention to the notion that the interaction of elements creates outcomes and feedback. This “feedback,” it is argued, is the foundation upon which the development of human identity lies. I then look at several art and written pieces to reveal how “feedback” determines identity, but more importantly how “feedback” is a compounding force. By talking about identity and complexity in terms of ‘compounding forces,’ this chapter aims to provide further visualization to the notion that multiplying progressions are the defining characteristic of various gender artists. My interest in complexity also sets the conceptual agenda for the approaches I take in exploring the justice system through my photography, which will be discussed in the conclusion of this chapter. Paul Cilliers’s work, Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems, offers an excellent overview of the characteristics of complexity. Cilliers folds complexity theory back onto postmodernism, a movement that acknowledges the insufficiency of a single, reductive explanation for complex phenomenon. According to Cilliers, complexity in the world is defined by interaction among constituents of a system and interaction between that system and its environment. This interaction cannot be fully understood simply by analyzing components of a whole. Cilliers’s definition of complexity is followed by a description of ten formal characteristics detailing how interactions of “constituent” parts take place. Complex systems are discussed as interactions that rely upon certain conditions including, but not limited to, the presence of a large number of elements, the non-linearity of elements, and the lack of equilibrium amongst elements. Among the various characteristics that are described in Cilliers’s definition, his sixth trait of complex systems is most salient to me in terms of identity development. This sixth factor is described as “loops in interactions” with the effect that “any activity can feed back into itself, sometimes directly, sometimes after a number of intervening changes.” Cilliers states that such recurrency is “feedback” in both negative and positive situations. The processes of recurrency can also reveal themselves in the act of multiplicity. In other words, Cilliers’s “feedback” can also be thought of as elements that are multiplying themselves to the “N th” power. As a way to visualize multiplicity in art, we should look at binary dualist constructs. Man Ray’s “Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Selavy" is a good place to begin. Rrose Selavy appeared in 1920-21 on perfume packaging for a line of “Eau de Voilette.” The photograph was taken by Man Ray and is of Marcel Duchamp dressed in drag as his alter ego and ‘author’ of various Dada artworks in the early 1920s, Rrose Selavy. The photograph is intended to mock mass culture, in this case commercial advertisements. However, in blurring the distinction between reality and illusion as well as male and female, the work becomes much more a case of “complexifying” binary dualisms. Duchamp portrays his subjects as multivalent rather than closed and oppositional. This suggests that subjects are in a constant mode of complementary redefinition, or ‘feedback’, in relation to opposites. Duchamp’s Rrose creates the visual context for future artists to introduce additional dimensionality to gender identity. From the time of Duchamp’s “Rrose” until now, many authors and artists have argued for perspectives that emphasize complementary relations. One important example is the ethnic studies movement that began forty years after Rrose Selavy. Arguing against Western notions of binary dualisms, many scholars of color and other progressive intellectuals affirmed previous cultural and artistic philosophies that prescribed to phenomenology and ontology as complementary in essence. For instance, in American Indian studies, there is significant research on nondiscrete notions of nonbinary and complementary constructs. Anne Waters’s article, “Language Matters: Nondiscrete Nonbinary Dualisms,” describes how many Native Americans today, as well as environmentalists, are looking ‘back’ to the indigenous ontological realms as a way to direct what the human place in the world should be, which, of course, is a place of responsibility and complementary existence with nature. Other works by writers and artists attempt to compound binaries into identities that suggest multiplicity. Judith Butler’s work argues that femininity has “multiple possibilities” and that it should not be thought of as a response or in compliance to a singular male viewpoint. By discussing “feminisms that are left out of the picture” (i.e., those that have emerged within marginalized contexts), Butler illustrates the notion that multiple locations produce new sites for information. Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura compounds the complexity in identity experience even further by creating works from the standpoint of multiple locations. In the 1990s, his “Self-portraits as Art History” series reinvented various Modernist masterpieces by inserting himself in drag and disguise as the main figures in the works. Morimura’s “Playing with Gods III: At Night” (1991) is his recreation of Cranach's "Christ on the Cross" (1503). In Morimura’s version, Asians--who appear as tourists and who possess his likeness—are placed in the sacred scenery of the crucifixion. The crucified “Christ” figures are substituted by Japanese versions of blue-eyed Barbie dolls. The image is designed in the form of a 3D tableaux and results in the deconstruction of Western symbolism relative to the feminine ideal, as well as the traditional beliefs about Christ and sacrifice. The redefining of traditional European iconography serves as Morimura’s vehicle to insert the more contemporary and pressing issues that characterize the multiple nature of human and identity experience. In this computer image, Morimura shows how the complex systems of race, gender, nationality, hybridity and cloning undermine notions of binary dualisms and fixed identity, thereby compelling the viewer to try perceiving the world from multiple locations rather than a singular standpoint. In 1995 Morimura produced “Doublannage,” which was his own interpretation of Duchamp’s “Rrose Selavy.” In this work, he multiplies Duchamp’s ‘dualistic’ paradigm by including ethnic and cultural identities to the main subject. Morimura’s doubling of hats and arms highlights the act of multiplication. By placing hands and arms of different colors together, and through the use of exaggerated white makeup on the face, Morimura suggests the presence of race and ethnicity in the development of the subject matter’s sexual identity. The title, “Doublannage,” implies the act of duplication, as well as the need to magnify what was originally intended in Rrose Selavy so that the reality of multiple subject positions could be better understood relative to current times. As we see, works about identity take place within the context of various subject positions. Works that reveal multiple oppression experiences illustrate quite powerfully the complex and multiplying effects inherent in identity. In Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographics of Encounter, Susan Stanford Friedman discusses identity experiences resulting from geographic placement, globalization and hybridization. Arguing for feminists to reconsider the central privileging of gender as the key marker of identity and oppression, Friedman suggests a shift from essentialist thinking to the new geographics of identity. She describes several discourses in the geography of identity including “multiple oppression” or “double jeopardy.” Multiple oppression paradigms emerged during the 1970s and 1980s with a focus on “oppression as the main constituent of identity and leads to the additive naming of victimization on the basis of race, class, religion, sexuality, national origin, ableness…” “Multiple oppression” has defined much of the Chicano art that prevailed up until the millennium. This perspective is particularly evident in the work of Chicana lesbian artists. One such artist is Alma Lopez, who uses a variety of media, including photography, painting, and digital collage, to offer colorfully vibrant and provoking narratives about her experiences as a Chicana lesbian from East Los Angeles. Her work is known for utilizing traditional Mexican symbols, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe, as a way to explore her own relationship to the iconography of her culture. Lopez’s digital imagery looks at the constraints of religion and culture as it relates to her sexual identity. The digital composite titled “Heaven” contains poetic and spiritual images of love between two Latina women. In this piece, the struggles of being a lesbian in Latino culture is expressed through the tradition of a retablo or ex-voto, which is a Mexican prayer painting typically done on tin. By doing this, Lopez uses specific Latino cultural artifice as her vehicle to assert her multiple identity experiences of sexuality and gender. The piece Lopez is best known for is “Our Lady” (1999), a digital composite for an exhibition titled “CyberArte: Tradition Meets Technology,” which showed at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The exhibit consisted of four Latina artists, including Lopez, whose visual work included imagery containing traditional Mexican iconography produced using digital technology. The “Our Lady” image shows a Chicana in her forties as the Virgin Mary with her belly and legs exposed. She stands in a pose of cultural and gender ‘defiance’ on a black crescent moon held by a bare breasted female butterfly angel. The in-your-face attitude of “Our Lady” about the multiple struggles of bi-cultural/bi-national Latina lesbians quickly became a target of protest by many Latino men and the Catholic Church. Laura Aguilar is a Chicana Lesbian photographer who, like Alma Lopez, comes from the border areas of the southwestern United States. Whereas Lopez uses Latino religious iconography to investigate Chicana lesbian identity, Aguilar’s physical shape serves as the vehicle for her exploration into the experience of multiple oppression and identity. Compounding the complex and multiple identity experience of being a Chicana lesbian, Aguilar is also considered obese, perhaps even grotesque, by traditional societal standards. Moreover, she suffers from dyslexia, so reading, writing, and comprehension have been a lifelong struggle for her, as well. Aguilar embodies the experience of multiple oppression discussed in Friedman’s writings. Aguilar photographs herself nude as she poses in natural settings in and amongst rocks, water, vines, sand and other elements of the environment. Her works make her multiple identities the subject matter within a natural background. She forces us to see her multiple oppression as something different and something much more beautiful than what is commonly perceived when society thinks of Chicanas, lesbians, obese women, and women who suffer from mental illness. Aguilar has a deep reverence for nature and her place in it. That land is such an aspect of her work contributes to the exploration of natural and geographic dimensionality to herself, in addition to her own complex physical identity. In Boderlands: La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua discusses the idea of borders and recalls Jose Vasconcelos’s philosophical arguments that a fifth race embracing the four major races of the world defined the identity of the Mexican people. This “combining” of race is referred to as mestizaje, which she argues, can be both a source of strength and insecurity. The meztiza consciousness that Anzaldua represents is a direct challenge, based in cultural and ethnic pride, to the imposition of border areas that are ‘unnatural’ because of their insistence on binary and dualistic structures. Those whose identities are caught in the boderlands are the people who are precisely marginalized and criminalized because they do not fit into one category of identity. The mental state arising from this context results in insecurity and indecisiveness. She states that “The meztiza’s dual or multiple personality is plagued by psychic restlessness.” Aguilar’s multi-dimensionality is a representation of the boderland experience Anzaldua describes. Her “beautification” of multiple oppression is her strategy to undermine borders and the “insecurity” that face people who live in the borderlands. In her photography series about Latina lesbians, Aguilar emphasizes positive energy that provides the opportunity to explore the beauty, strength and dignity that she associates with the lives of Latina lesbians. By producing photographs that allow Latina lesbians to share themselves openly, by providing role models that break negative stereotypes, and by helping to develop improved understanding, Aguilar’s work calls into question the mentality of righteous, pure and fixed perspectives. Through analyzing the ‘compounding forces’ of gender art, I hope to have contributed to the idea that works demonstrating gender complexity are made more complex by the act of multiplicity. From Duchamp to Aguilar, each piece described in this paper was followed by another piece that exacerbates and multiplies previous notions of gender complexity. The authors cited here were interspersed throughout the paper to add to the conceptual basis about complexity and gender being tackled by the artists. Ideas about multiplicity and complexity are interesting to evaluate against the experiences I have working as a full-time administrator in the justice system. As an employee of the Los Angeles Superior Court, I see and experience first-hand how the traditional system of justice in America operates on the lofty hopes of law, truth, and objectivity. Justice is most successfully undermined by those same humans who are charged with enacting it. The works of art and the readings from this class about complexity, as well as my own comprehensions as a result of this paper, lead me to more questions and concerns about the mission of our justice system. The emotional reactions I have towards my work environment, whether they are negative or positive (I do have some hope for justice), are the factors leading me to pursue complexity as the basis for my Masters thesis in studio art. My interest in describing identity complexity as a multiplying and compounding force is rooted in my desires to create imagery that portrays the presence of subliminal, hidden and complex forces in judicial space. By assigning imagery that ‘grows and multiplies’ to the incorporeal forces of bias, power, discrimination, and other factors at play, I am hoping to uncover complexity and at the same time challenge the arguments for objectivity in justice-making. __________________________________________________________________ Gender as a 4th Dimensional Context of Interface Instability can be triggered by the querying of the classical notions of truth, reality, objectivity, transcendence, autonomy, or originality. These conservative positions conform with those of a consumer society fixated on objects and their symbolic-economic, strategically articulated values (authenticity, originality, expensiveness). The contradiction of contemporary pluralism reveals itself in this area: one demands unrestricted access to new technologies yet at the same time avoids accepting, or refuses to accept, those radical changes resulting from the cultural integration and use of these very technologies. The deconstruction of traditional artistic values and their aesthetics evidently began at the center of art itself the instant its methods were added to those of digital technologies.1 The Abu Ghraib abuse scandal photos were taken at the prison in late 2003 by U.S. guards utilizing privately owned digital cameras. Private image production by military personnel was a widespread activity that had seen scant limitation by the government regardless of the explosive potential inherent in the access to and documentation of places and events where normal civilian journalism had absolutely no presence. The past tense is used here, because although no official release of policy change has been announced, it is difficult to imagine that the practice continues unrestricted in the wake of these events. Digital imagery has been stamped and filed by the Department of Defense as a troublesome, multi-faceted creature comprised of a revealing and extended level of access, ownership rights obscured by martial law, and a participatory, documentary medium capable of convicting individuals and armies simultaneously and globally through contextualization. The ability of these images to exist and move independently requires an investigation of the new phenomena of ‘We Media’ and the vehicle it occupies. The blogosphere, the online realm of participatory-journalism, dispatched the images of Pfc. Lynndie England as the new poster-child for nearly every applicable perspective possible towards gender-roles, the U.S. Military’s command structure, and the violation of human rights two days before the same images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib landed in the headlines of nearly every major news publication around the world. This networked distribution of the images through virtual space and the resulting systemic reaction was merely a preface for the pending ‘traditional media’-circus. The gender performance, transformation through capture, transmission, and re-contextualization of the images via this new participatory interface is most interesting when paralleled to Marcel Duchamp’s theories of the 4th dimension developed in a transititory period overlapping his readymade art objects and the increasingly more complex work that followed. The explorative application is justifiable in two respects. Primarily, the digital format (images, video, simulation, renderings, etc.) is gaining acceptance as a readymade since it is ultimately just code. These assemblages of 1’s and 0’s result in “manufactured objects of little intrinsic value that are given meaning through appropriation and contextualization rather than the inherent meaning from the expressive craft with which they are fashioned.”2 Second, while Marcel Duchamp was bound to the notion of revolutionizing the art process and its relativity to the position and perspective of the viewer, he also proved continuously meddlesome in subjects of gender performance and true authorship as he problematized his work by way of alter/gender/ego Rrose Selavy. “Duchamp’s is the distinctly modern realization that necessarily precedes alternative (e.g. feminist and queer) sexual identities, and makes them possible in the first place: the identification of gender also as a surface no less constructed than that of language or of painting.”3 The first element of further examination is the concept of Pfc. Lynndie England as a corporeal style, a gender performance of sorts contained within the image. The photographs in circulation have been critiqued from pop-culture pulpits as those “of a ‘liberated’ American female – a frighteningly ugly beast with short hair, pants and boots, not to mention a gun – forcing Muslim men to play the bottom role in smarmy leash-and-whip S&M scenes.”4 Perhaps a more revealing vantage point would allow the viewer to conceptualize that these images merely contain a projection which is an “affect of a corporeal signification. In other words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce [project] this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause.”5 Judith Butler’s theories regarding the body as a surface, as a point of interface, allows us to question whether the expressed gender-role or identity of England in the photo is ‘real’ or merely a displayed ‘imaginary.’ The ‘real’ requires a more elusive, omniscient interpretation that is not discernable, while the visible ‘imaginary’ is the result of “fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means.”6 In a sense, the representation of Lynndie England that we see is a projection that cannot be labeled as a ‘true view’ to the underlying source. The ‘imaginary’ does becomes the ‘real,’ however, through contextualization, to the viewer whose vantage point does allow them to see the lexical real. This concept of an ‘other,’ or more revealing, vantage point of Lynndie England’s gender-identity than that projected in the photographs serves us as a springboard into Duchamp’s theories of the 4th dimension. We must first establish the dimensions of objects in the most basic forms found in this model and then comprehend the image existing and moving within them in a complex manner. The definition of the 4th dimension is diverse in its exact wording depending on which scholar you choose to embrace. It relates to time, context, perspective, and indeterminate coordinates. It suggests a location that cannot quite be deconstructed into an exact set of numbers through any sort of exact formula. 1st Dimension = a Line, linear (Length) 2nd Dimension = a Shape of any outline, flat (Length x Width) 3rd Dimension = a Form of any surface , mass (Length x Width x Height or Depth) 4th Dimension = a 3-D Form + ‘other’ variable (time or context or maybe perspective, or…) Figure 2 : The 3 physical dimensions. To truly show 3-D in this illustration we would need a real statue and to represent the 4th dimension we would need Pfc. Lynndie England herself to the left of this page. It is humorous that a theory can exist in the field of science that is so widely accepted as undeniable, and remain so unresolved all at once. Regardless of its exact definition, Duchamp believed that the 4th dimensional ‘other’ variable renders an object that exists in four dimensions physically unrepresentable except by its shadow, which would be a three-dimensional representation. One of the dimensions is removed (the 4th dimension) and the object is back into the comforts of our easily comprehended physical world. This reductive relationship is easily understood when one thinks of their own actual shadow. It is an image or stencil of the body, but it lacks depth, it has no mass, it is ‘flattened’ into a two-dimensional representation of the body’s three dimensional form. Likewise, a photograph can readily be accepted as a two-dimensional object composed of length and width, a ‘shadow’ as Duchamp would label it, of a flattened, three-dimensional spatial arrangement that originally included depth. Lynndie England, as depicted in these photographs, is not even a body in the 3rd dimension, but merely a flattened shadow. When the observer instinctively sees the image as the physical spatial arrangement it represents by adding the third-dimensional element of depth back to the photograph, in their mind, the image has been used as an interface. Asking the viewer to take the next step in recontextualizing the image, moving it into the 4th dimension, is unnecessary. It is inherent to our nature and to an extent indeterminable due to complexities of the individual observer. The formulation of a 4th dimensional view is dependant on the reconstitution of an ‘other,’ 4th dimensional variable or variables, but not necessarily ‘the other’ or ‘others’ that were present at the moment the image was produced. Since a true 4th dimensional perspective is elusive and must, in the words of Duchamp, be “circumhyperhypo-embraced or grasped all around at once… as if with the hand and not seen with the eyes,”7 the viewer is intrinsically deprived of information given the reductive starting point of the photograph. Applying Duchamp’s theory to the physical Lynndie England depicted in the photographs through Butler’s model of ‘surface,’ we are able to qualify her visible or captured gender-performance as corporeal style, and that style as a two-dimensional ‘shadow’ (with simulated 3rd dimensional depth) of her fourth-dimensional being/identity: a complex and truly ungraspable entity. This does not mean a formulation of that 4th dimension entity has not been made by the observer; it has happened in spite of the lack of attainable 4th dimensional clarity. The interactive and far reaching nature of the online, participatory community of the blogosphere is the vehicle in this model to expand this process to a societal level. The blogosphere is a social phenomenon, a shifting internet-wide social network formed by two-way links resulting in endless interfaces. A compounding natural reciprocation of the reductive process of flattening dimensions now takes over. This results from the additional interfacing of the digital arena or virtual space exponentially problematizing the observations of the spectator, embedding inconsistent and shifting norms, tropes, and other accompanying ‘virtual baggage’ of the network such as captions, headlines, and misrepresented editorial. The element of ‘other space’ (the blogosphere) must be figured into the recontextualizing of the new ‘real’ representation of Lynndie England. This network’s ability to affect the image as a variable is indeterminable, given the complexities of the system itself. Yet, these images have moved across this network to the individual, and it is difficult to deny that systemic distortion is inherent to this existence within and traveling of, unrestricted virtual space. This journey that these digital photographs of Pfc. Lynndie England have completed results in a new model of digital readymade interfacing. In this case, the 4th dimensional return is not exactly the forte of the process given the multiple shifts; however, the path has been traversed. Through reduction of dimensionality, distribution without limits, timeless archiving, and observation in less than unbiased forums these images have been recontextualized on multiple levels. A new ‘Lynndie England,’ with applied, yet definitively distorted, 4th dimensional attributes of gender, morality, intent, desire, and power, has been calculated individually and systemically through the network, regardless of the impossibility of the equation even having a solution. __________________________________________________________________ Permforming Masculinity . . . our narrative of second-wave origins might more accurately say that while identity served at times productively to isolate woman’s difference from man and to generate a collective identification in the face of that difference, the imperative toward differences among women—the race, class, national, and sexual dynamics of women’s engendering—has from the outset unsettled any easy collapse of women into a monolithic or unified construction. 1 The concept and lived reality of masculinity has become increasing complex largely due to feminist inquiries aimed at disarming many naturalized concepts that ultimately reinforce patriarchal domination. The first-wave position of feminism was that men reserve the possibility of having an identity for themselves relegating women to mere object status with the role of reinforcing and reflecting the identity of men. Second-wave feminists abandon essentialist notions of identity to mine the idea that we are defined through the action of difference, following Saussure’s model of language. This strategy cracks the monolithic mass women have been lumped into by traditional patriarchal culture where they functioned as ‘other’ in order to stabilize male subjectivity. In making this move, feminism opens the possibility of recognizing many positions within gendered identities where classically there had been only one; considerations of race, class, and sexual orientation further de-centered any essentialist domain. Unfortunately, this move against patriarchy brought with it a new essentialism: masculinity as a stable mass vs. the play of difference within women, which only further reified the notion of those who identify at the center of masculinity as ‘just guys.’ The strange result of this critique of patriarchy is that masculinity, which was a field fairly disinterested in self-examination, is further obscured from critique by those interested in questioning the formation of cultural identity and gender in the first place. …the poststructuralist challenge to the category of women in order to define how the broad critique of identity as a coherent referent for feminism has worked to reconfigure formative assumptions about the relation between sex and gender. This reconfiguration has profoundly challenged ideals of corporeality as gender’s natural domain of truth, making possible considerations of gender’s performativity apart from normative mapping of bodies, identities, and desire. 2 The aim of this paper is to present the concept of performance as central in the project of unpacking what lies beneath traditional concepts of masculinity. First, the idea that gender or identity is constituted through performance opens the possibility of conceiving of the field in terms of complexity, where constituent parts are always in motion and defining themselves in relation to other positions through difference. Secondly, performance implies a field that allows opposing positions articulated through the demonstration of skill. The question of one’s masculinity can then be rearticulated as an individual’s skill at representing their position in relation to the complex field of masculinity. The importance of corporeal determination in designating gender diminishes underneath the individual’s skill in articulating their position in relation to established concepts of masculinity. 3 At first, the idea of performance may seem to imply the adoption of actions or behaviors not identified with one’s ‘self,’ the idea of an actor taking on a role. So the logic would follow that if we accuse people of performing their genders they must be forwarding a lie or conceit. This reduction can be avoided by simply opening the concept of performance to any action undertaken with some consideration and not just unthinkingly done. The difference between doing and performing, according to this way of thinking, would seem to lie not in the frame of theatre versus real life but in an attitude—we may do actions unthinkingly, but when we think about them, this introduces a consciousness that gives them the quality of performance. 4 One quality common in many variations of masculinity is the position that actions are just being done, even or especially when complex thought and consideration have taken place. What lies behind this drive to conceal? The mechanism behind this behavior of naturalizing or concealing can be understood within the framework of performance through recognizing the power of repetition. Perhaps the greatest theatrical spectacle of all time, the Catholic Mass, is the best historical example of performance’s power via repetition. Sunday after Sunday, this rite has been performed long past the point where its presence and power have taken on the feeling of always having been there and naturally extending into the future. Many acts or performative gestures indicating masculinity take on this sense of timelessness, of just being a guy, but at some point these acts were consciously developed or learned from role models to be repeated until “natural,” thereby constituting the identity or personality of the individual. …all performance involves a consciousness of doubleness, through which the actual execution of an action is placed in mental comparison with a potential, an ideal or a remembered original model of that action. 5 Fred Pfeil, in his book, White Guys, takes a cultural studies approach common to most writers working on masculinity, and specifically white masculinity, by surveying the field of popular representations in the 80’s and 90’s of white men. This sampling provides evidence or models to the body of ‘white guys’ as to how they should or do act. The model of performance allows us to view this material as source for future reference, but also as reflecting themes present in culture at that time. Pfeil gives particular attention to the films Lethal Weapon and Die Hard as widely popular and ultimately complex in their projection of masculinity. He finishes his analysis of these films with a “. . . warning sign reminding us that if, as activists and theorists, we find ourselves uninterested in the task of seeking to manage, mine and redefine that white-straight-working-man sign, other groups and forces will certainly be more than willing to shoulder the task for us, and in ways we are unlikely to approve.”6 Simply put, popular representations of masculinity present a less than fixed or ideal picture; rather the central themes of these films appear to deal with the struggle to maintain traditional constructions of masculinity. Masculinity in popular representations still seems to be about the distance between ideal and lived reality. Performance enters as a vehicle to further problematize traditional notions and at the same time build new possibilities as to the formation of masculinity. The key here is that performance always takes place in the body. To recognize the conscious consideration of these gestures made within the body as constituting identity lowers masculinity from the transcendent realm of thought or mind to the classically feminine or even lower, to the realm of the body. One of the pillars of western culture is thereby eroded: the hierarchical relationship of mind over body, and the position of valuing masculinity over femininity via that construct. To take on the idea of performing as more than merely a feminine act opens the potential for masculinity to continue to grow and expand, finding value in potential emergences rather than classical precedents. This simple theoretical shift could provide a route to leave behind oppressive notions such as domination and conquest as integral to masculinity. Gender, race, class, and ethnicity start to flatten out to various shifting positions in a field of complexity, their meaning and value derived in the connections and interrelations we build every day in the consideration of our acts: in the performance of our selves. __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ FOOTNOTES Gender Performance in Context 1 Butler, 270. 2 Butler, 272. 3 Ibid. Masculine, Feminine, Cindy Sherman i. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 41. ii. Ibid.,, 42. iii. Jennifer Blessing, Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1997), 8. iv. Ibid., 81. v. Judith Williamson, “Images of ‘Woman’: The Photography of Cindy Sherman,” in Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology 1968-2000, ed. Hilary Robinson, (Boston, Massachusets: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2001 ),453 vi. Ibid., 454. vii. Jones, 35. viii. Williamson, 456. ix. Ibid., 453. x. Ibid., 454. xi. Ibid., 456. xii. Ibid. xiii. Jones, 37. xiv. Ibid., 39. xv. Williamson, 458. xvi. Deborah Feinbloom, Transvestites & Transexuals: Mixed Views (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1976), 16 xvii. Ibid.,18. xviii. Ibid.,132. xix. Richard F. Docter, Transvestites and Transsexuals: Toward a Theory of Cross-Gender Behavior (New York: Plenum Press, 1988), 4 xx. Ibid., 74. xxi. Jones, 40. Gender as Performance in the Work of Nan Goldin i. Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands: La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute/Spinster, 1999), 25. ii. Ed. Hamburger Kunstalle. Emotions and Relations (Koln, Germany: Taschen Verlag GmbH, 1998), 30-31. iii. Anne Fausto-Sterling. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 51-54. iv. Kunstalle, Plate 47. v. Donna Haraway. The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 328. vi. Blessing, 72. vii. Anzaldua, 25. viii. I am playing off Judith Butler’s title Gender Trouble viv. Butler, Undoing Gender, 208. Cultural Genitals - Goodbye Seventies 1 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol(From A to B and Back Again), New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975. p 46 & 81. 2 Butler, Undoing Gender, New York: Routledge, 2004 p. 2. 3 Blessing, 70. 4 Fausto-Sterling, 113. 5 Haraway, 328. 6 Richard Pandiscio, Interview (April 1996), www.looksmarthighschool.com/p/articles 7 Lou Reed, Candy Says (1969). The Multiplying and Compounding Forces of Complexity i. Paul Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems (London: Routledge, 1998), viii. ii. Ibid., 4. iii. Ibid. iv. Blessing, 20. v. Anne Waters, American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 103. vi. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 196-197. vii. Blessing, 86. viii. Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographics of Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 20. ix. Alma Lopez, Our Lady, (2002), www.AlmaLopez.net/OR/artstate.html x. Bill Smith, The Natural – Laura Aguilar, in the flesh (LA Weekly online: Jan. 10-16) xi. Gloria Anzaldua, Boderlands: La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute/Spinster, 1987), 100. xii. Laura Aguilar Women Artist of the American West-Lesbian Photography on the U.S. West Coast 1972-1997, www.cla.purdue.edu/WAAW/Corinne/Aguilar.htm Gender as a 4th Dimensional Context of Interface 1. Claudia Gianetti, “Endo-Aesthetics”, Media Art Net, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/aesthetics_of_the_digital/endo-aesthetics/1/. 2. WTJ Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 85. 3. Edward D. Powers, “Fasten your Seatbelts as we Prepare for our Nude Descending”, Tout-fait, The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, (Issue 5, 2003), http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_5/articles/powers/powers1.html. 4. Matt Taibbi, “Ms. America”, Rolling Stone (Oct. 20, 2005): 48. 5. Judith Butler, GenderTrouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 173. 6. Ibid. 7. Stephen Jay Gould and Rhonda Roland Shearer, “Boats and Deckchairs”, Tout-fait, The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, (Issue 1, 1999), http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_1/Articles/boat.html. Permforming Masculinity 1. Robyn Wiegman, “Unmaking: Men and Masculinity in Feminist Theory” in Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory, ed. Judith Kegan Gardiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p.342. Ibid., 32. 3. Marvin Carlson, Performance, a Critical Introduction. (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) p.2 4. Ibid., 4. 5. Ibid., 5. 6. Fred Pfeil, White Guys, Studies in Postmodern Domination & Difference (London and New York: Verso 1995) p.33 __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ BIBLIOGRAPHY Gender Performance in Context Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1990. 270-282. Blessing, Jennifer, et al. Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997. Tomkins, Calvin. Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time. New York: Doubleday, 1980. Masculine, Feminine, Cindy Sherman Blessing, Jennifer. Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance In Photogrpahy. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1997. Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Docter, Richard F. Transvestites and Transsexuals: Toward a Theory of Cross-Gender Behavior. New York: Plenum Press, 1988. Feinbloom, Deborah. Transvestites & Transsexuals: Mixed Views. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1976. Jones, Amelia. Cindy Sherman: Retrospective. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997. Williamson, Judith. ”Images of ‘Woman’: The Photography of Cindy Sherman.”’ In Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology 1968-2000. Ed. Hilary Robinson. Boston: Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2001. Gender as Performance in the Work of Nan Goldin Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands: La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute/Spinsters, 1987. Blessing, Jennifer. Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1997. Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York & London: Routledge, 2004. Haraway, Donna. The Haraway Reader. New York & London: Routledge, 2004. Ed. Hamburger Kunstalle. Emotions and Relations. Koln, Germany: Taschen Verlag GmbH, 1998. Plate 47. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Zbikowski, Dorte. “My Life is my Work.” Emotions and Relations. Ed. Hamburger Kunstalle. Koln, Germany: Taschen Verlag GmbH, 1998. Cultural Genitals - Goodbye Seventies Buttler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Haraway, Donna. The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. Mechanical Animals’ lyrics. http://www.nineinchnails.net/news/articles/mech_anim_lyrics.html#14 Orlan, Lecture and presentation at Otis College, October 20, 2005. www.orlan.net