DEFINE YOUR BEAUTY - Beauty Revisited is an extension of The Gender Portraiture Project bringing together photographic portraits with personal narrative into the context of American material culture and power. I ask participants: “How do you define your own sense of beauty? When you look inside yourself who do you see?” My work confronts society’s displacement of female identity. I am looking to open up possibilities of being. To discover how dominant societal expectations rule our gender. My goal is to have a critical mass of portraits reflecting gender variations and to show how birth, class, family, country of origin and ancestry, personal taste, body type, age and whatever other qualifiers are placed on us affect us. “Gender variations” does not necessarily mean trans, but can also be one’s interpretation of what is feminine or masculine. To think about times when we were awarded or punished in relation to our “appropriate” gender-like behaviors or looks.
In my studio, located in Stenton Guild, (4232-36 Stenton Ave, in the Germantown area of Philadelphia, PA), I have set up a portrait photography studio where people come in to talk about gender and have their portraits taken. I invite the public to share personal stories of gender stereotyping and be photographed. You can pose in your street clothes, an outfit from your personal collection, or we can work together to conceive of the ideal costume.
Stories told by participants are about being stereotyped. What is appropriate behavior in relation to perceived gender? How should we look? What are the expectations depending on class, ethnic heritage, and family background?
Instead of relying on clues relating to dress, one may choose to explore the physical body relating to gender expectations. For many of us attaining the “perfect” body is a symbol for the ultimate gender self. Many struggle with disfiguration and some accentuate what nature gave us. Others make do with what they have. As an artist, I am also looking for people interested in body critique - making commentary on the gender body.
Things I am thinking about as I prepare my proposal for Eastern State Penitentiary
Standards are set and norm is created - anything outside the norm is deviance - downfall of Catholic control in general resulting from Darwinism, Positivism and the birth of Sociology create new categories of social hierarchy based on morality and male dominance within civilized society….ramblings on…
Positivism as religion satisfies the need to normalize through both science and mythology - comparing empirical knowledge with a higher world order understood through creationism - not necessarily Christian but the belief of the supernatural such as Comte’s declaration that “all phenomena [is] produced by the immediate action of supernatural beings”
This leads Lombroso to use Aryan physiological characteristics as a base model and Anglo/European civilization as basis for social and moral norms. Cialis generic brand name differences
The normal woman as studied and put forth by Cesare Lombroso in the 1890’s. The notes below are based on Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman by Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero translated and with a new introduction and feminist commentary by Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson.
The Normal Woman is proven to be more primitive than man:
Measurements of the head
cranial capacity in weight - smaller in women
brachycephaly or broad-headedness in size - greater in women
dolichocephaly or long-headedness in size - greater in men
jaw size - greater in men
Measurements of thoracic cavity, cervical and lumbar parts, arms comparing body shape
Body hair length in relation to age
Weight and Height
Viscera, Fat and Blood
Measurements of white hair and baldness of middle class Europeans
I am conducting an independent research project in preparation for a proposal submission, to Eastern State Penitentiary, for an art installation - my proposal looks at phrenology and female criminology of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.Reaching back in time, as I so often do, looking for the origins of particular societal phenomena that baffle me… I have come across a philosophy coined by Auguste Comte - Positivism. My question is: How does the concept of ‘universality’ cause systematic oppression through the creation of deviance?(more…)
Thank you to all the participants of the first “Gender Talk” and to Heather Love for leading a very moving discussion. My hope is that the conversations will continue to move us within our daily lives as well as spread into others’.
Heather introduces the discussion:
“One of the things that seems interesting to me about the project is that it is through photography. So people are already talking about the difference between gender as something that people can see and something that is internal, what is on the inside - what people don’t see. I thought we could start by talking about what is gender? Is it that stuff that people see or is it something on the inside, or maybe that whole problem of the part on the inside and the part on the outside?”
Does the inside match what people see on the outside?
For some of us our hair helped signify gender, others said gesture was much more significant. Which in turn lead us into the dilemma of public display of emotion.
Professor Heather Love, of University of Pennsylvania’s English Department, has graciously agreed to lead our first Gender Talk session. In preparation participants are asked to think about the following questions:
–How often do you think about gender? Is gender an important part of your self-image? Why or why not?
–How do you express your gender? How important are clothing, haircut, gesture, behavior, etc?
–What do you think was most important in forming your gender as a child? For instance, your family’s opinion/comments? Interactions with other children? The media?
–Is your gender something that you have seen as stable across your life? Or have you gone through a lot of changes in how you experience your gender? If so, what has caused those changes?
–How do you think other people perceive you in terms of your gender? How well does that perception match up with the way you experience your gender? Are there parts of your gender identity that other people can’t see?
–What other aspects of your identity do you think are significant in determining the way other people see your gender? How is your racial, class, or ethnic identity bound up with your gender?
–Do you see your sexuality as being closely tied to your gender identity or not?
–What are things that you enjoy about your gender? What is frustrating or difficult about your gender?
–Can you imagine a world without gender difference? Is that a world you would want to live in?
Laureen says I am the most elusive of the people she’s photographed. I guess because my relationship to gender, my body, and sex is still unraveling, even at this reasonably late point. Like so many things in my life, I often don’t know where to stand or get a frame of reference.
It was interesting to me the shift I felt from the first photo session to the second. In the first, I was largely just “a guy in a dress” even though I did my best to twist myself into interesting, if not attenuated shapes that would make my body look more traditionally feminine. I think I was out to prove it was OK for me to be here doing this. I did the shoot mainly as an experience experiment. (more…)
I have been playing around with the image of the sheela-na-gig in my mind and decided to explore that image in some of these photos. It is an image that combines power and vulnerability, and because of my own ambivalence about being a woman, which has been equivalent with being violated for much of my life, this exposed power allows me to embrace a femininity that I would never have allowed in the past.
I have been thinking of the exposed, exaggerated vulva of the sheela-na-gig as a symbol of controlling and embracing the strength of the feminine. In the past, my relationship with my own sexual/gendered self was filled with disgust. I viewed my own body, my sexuality, as a scar, evidence of all the past abuses I had suffered and all the ways that I allowed myself to be violated. Now I am beginning to embrace my sexual body for its power. I am learning to see myself as feminine when in the past, I resisted femininity, feeling exposed and weak. These photos speak to my newly-forming visions of the feminine as powerful.
Before you read this excerpt, I must say it makes me feel incredibly uncomfortable and angry… the presumption is, a “transsexual” or “transvestite” is sexually repulsive to normal humans as Baudrillard describes former porn star La Cicciolina as devoid of all sensuality — “a numbed android who by virtue of this very fact was perfect raw material for a synthetic idol”. (The idol Baudrillard refers to is Madonna, the virgin.) There is a sardonic quality to his work as Baudrillard uses the transexual body to argue the myth of sexual liberation. However the lack of voice given to the individual who chooses to transition from one sexual identity to another, reflects that all too familiar strategy of using ‘the other’ as an example. Furthermore, this is not a discussion on sex as a category of male-female but sex as an activity altered through the use of prosthesis. So why not use breast implants and dildos as an example - implants are clearly designed for the pleasure of the sexual partner or flaneur as nearly all feeling is removed from the breast during the surgical procedure and the object of desire is grossly exaggerated to ensure clear view from quite a distance. See Orlan and the Work of Art in the Age of Hyper-mechanical Organic Reproduction.
Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil
excerpt from pgs. 2o-25 (more…)
Wow - coming out….I “came out” back in 1999 when I was 36 years old. I remember thinking: “I have never felt so feminine in my life!” After years of struggling to wear lingerie to please a man, I was thrilled to adorn my body with the very same piece of clothing for the pleasure of a woman. That was the beginning, until the butch/fem thing crept into my dating life and once again, I did not want to seem fem for the sake of the existence of masculinity. I am spiteful… Included in my journey is getting sober, going to therapy both physical and talk. In the past 8 years I have gone through an incredible roller coaster ride.
