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- Volume 5, Issue 2, 2020
Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture - Fashioning Queer Identities, Sept 2020
Fashioning Queer Identities, Sept 2020
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Border crossing: Grayson Perry’s queerly utopian English journey
More LessIn 2012, British contemporary artist Grayson Perry undertook a journey from Sunderland in northern England to the Cotswolds in the south. His stated aim was to explore the relationship between class and taste in twenty-first-century Britain. This journey was screened on the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 as a three-part documentary entitled All in the Best Possible Taste. Throughout his journey, Perry uses his observations and interactions with those he meets to produce a series of six large tapestries, The Vanity of Small Differences (2012). These tapestries, inspired by Hogarth’s series of paintings entitled A Rake’s Progress (1733), trace the meteoric rise, and tragic fall, of a fictional character Tim Rakewell, whose ascension through the social ranks ends in a rather violent death (this narrative echoes that of Hogarth’s equally fictional Tom Rakewell). In my article, I analyse Perry’s documentary, and in particular the artwork, which he produces as a part of that documentary, using concepts borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Michel Maffesoli and Louis Marin, among others. I argue that Perry’s purported exploration of the relationship between British (or rather English) class and taste is in fact primarily concerned with two other things: first, Perry’s own status as a contemporary artist – a desire to portray himself as a ‘latter-day Hogarth’, if you will; and second, contemporary art’s capacity to be both relevant to society and popular among members of that society. Ultimately then, via his performative exploration of subjectivity in this documentary and indeed elsewhere in his work, Perry ‘queers’ not just masculinity, but also, and perhaps more importantly, received notions of national, social and artistic identity.
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Reverse tomboy: (Re)definitions of gender fluidity through sensory engagement with material culture
More LessThis narrative case study explores how material culture, in the form of dress, grooming and accessories, is utilized to establish a gender-fluid presentation of the self. It focuses on Tim Mustoe, a 42-year-old heterosexual creative living and working in London, whose embodied practice contributes to the problematization of gender normativity through a disruption of culturally established links between appearance, gender and sex. The study considers how a particular form of non-spectacular cross dressing is used to integrate into a work environment and also operate within a non-queer social environment. The study explores the affective power of material culture in the reification of subject position and as a means of resilience and empowerment through everyday practice and also considers its significance on a social, intersubjective level. The methodology used for this case draws on sensory ethnography and includes a queer reflexive turn to consider parallels and contrasts between my own and Tim’s experience and practice. Conceptualizations of subjectivity, sex, gender are considered in relation to those on material culture, and the study draws on scholarship related to cross-dressing in the United Kingdom. Tim identifies as a man, as do I; however, his embodied practice and gender identification proffer a particular response to culturally embedded norms relating to the binaries of sex and gender. Therefore, in relation to male femininity, I propose the notion of feminizing as an amendment to the concept of femaling, which assumes the identification with or transition to a cisgender position. This study explores the phenomenology of dress as an expressive tool of gratification and as a means of integration for which the imperatives of professionalism, age and respectability are key factors.
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The Fairy Gokmother: Representations of gender and sexuality in the Qdos pantomime Cinderella
By Sally KingAlthough cross-dressing is a long-standing pantomime tradition, recent pantomimes have featured a male actor playing a traditionally female part while not cross-dressing. An illustration of this is the part of the Fairy in a version of Cinderella developed by production company Qdos Entertainment and performed at the Milton Keynes Theatre in 2017–18, while being toured elsewhere in previous and later years. Casting British celebrity fashion consultant Gok Wan as the Fairy had transgressive potential to promote empowering and positively disruptive attitudes towards gender. Wan the celebrity, in a similar way to the Fairy in Cinderella, uses psychological transformation, with a helping hand from clothes, to give women more confidence in their bodies. However, the overriding focus of the pantomime was on signalling Wan’s homosexuality while dispelling it as harmless. Clichés about gay men were reinforced in the production and paratexts, particularly through the approach to transformation, the use of costuming to frame Wan as Other, the language around being a fairy and the emphasis on male friendship as opposed to romance. When each of these aspects is compared to alternative representations in other popular and widely circulated versions of Cinderella, the reductive nature of this pantomimic portrayal becomes clear, irrespective of Wan’s degree of complicity.
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Half an hour ago I was a white-haired Scotsman: Wibbly wobbly gender in Doctor Who
More LessThis article explores the ways in which the Doctor’s regeneration into a woman in the long-running British television show Doctor Who challenges traditional gender and sexual binaries. It examines both the Doctor’s actions and costuming, as well as a variety of ways in which the show had previously disrupted traditional hegemonic discourses about binary gender.
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Tarrying with the elephant: Queer villainy and aesthetic pleasure in Steven Klein’s photography
More LessThrough a close reference to Steven Klein’s photo spread ‘John Robinson’ for L’Uomo Vogue in 2003, this article tracks the appearance of the fictional character of the queer villain in fashion editorial photography. It discusses specifically how the register of ‘affectlessness’ is embodied and aesthetically performed by the queer villain. Affectlessness is contextualized within the repertoire of neutral affects that were circulated in fashion photography in the late 1990s and early 2000s as an aesthetic stance that counteracted the normative depictions of ‘happy feelings’ in commercial imagery as well as normative styles of masculinity. Affective states of sadness, alienation and neutrality were enacted beginning in the 1990s primarily by androgynous and sexually ambivalent figures: the stylized representation of such states signalled a challenge to binary ways of embodying and performing masculinity and femininity. After a critical reading of ‘John Robinson’, the article concludes by tracing a speculative trajectory for thinking about aesthetic pleasure in relation to queer amoral characters in fashion visual narratives.
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Prince the provocateur: The disruption of masculinities through the style of Prince Rogers Nelson
More LessOften revered as one of pop culture’s most erotic and sexually charged beings, Prince’s influence within fashion and gender expression is now being fully realized academically. Many fans have long linked their admiration to the Purple One with their own personal sexual awakenings, citing the musician’s overt displays of sexual liberation as being key within their own development. Although Prince never self-identified as queer, his fearless expression of self through fashion, performance and lyrics continued to defy traditional hegemonic masculinities throughout his career spanning across four decades. This article will discuss Prince’s varying disruptions of masculinities through his career. It must be noted that this study is not an expansive critique; rather, this article will focus upon three pivotal sartorial moments within Prince’s career that have played a defining part of his legacy as one of popular culture’s most revered and celebrated gender non-conforming stars. All three outfits represent a defining moment within Prince’s career from his emergence into pop stardom, mainstream success and the comeback following an arduous relationship with his record company. Through examining the musician’s wardrobe, this article will underpin the many ways in which Prince slashed gender assumptions through clothing and paved the way for many performers within the queer community after him.
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‘Art’s in pop culture in me’: Posthuman performance and authorship in Lady Gaga’s Artpop (2013)
Authors: Nathalie Weidhase and Poppy WildeTen years after her eccentric entrance into the pop scene with ‘Just Dance’, Gaga’s image is now markedly less edgy, in part due to her current focus on her film and TV acting career which requires a different image. In her musical work, Gaga is known for referencing artists that came before her in her music and music videos, and she has previously pushed the assumed boundaries between pop and art. This bricolage of influences often gives rise to claims of inauthenticity where rapidly changing and subversive image has left critics questioning who the ‘real’ Lady Gaga is. Moving beyond limited and value-laden discourses of authenticity, we instead suggest that her performances exemplify a posthuman approach to art and/as subjectivity. In the posthuman view, one’s ‘self’ is not a singular, static, autonomous individual, but a subjectivity that is emergent; an entanglement between entities, both human and non-human. Posthuman theory consequently troubles dualistic binaries, such as those between male/female, self/other, subject/object and human/machine/animal. This allows for a critique of anthropocentric hierarchies, instead arguing for a rhizomatic acknowledgement of the different entities in the subjectivities that emerge. We suggest that Lady Gaga’s work on her 2013 album Artpop exemplifies this approach, as Gaga fashions her body to resemble artworks and wears visual references to (female) artists that came before her. She incorporates different objects, machines, animals and others into her performances, thereby embodying a posthuman subjectivity. This work therefore signifies a reconsideration of what it means to be an audio-visual-artist and challenges not only the sanctity of self, but also the Romantic model of the male artist and singer-songwriter which persists in much popular music media criticism. However, problematically anthropocentric approaches remain throughout via Gaga’s foregrounding of self, and her current return to more muted performance styles might be seen as indicative of the difficulties of living a posthuman life in a humanistic society and marketplace.
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Star Trek: Discovery, USA
More LessReview of: Star Trek: Discovery, USA
creator Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman, 2017–present, CBS
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Interview: Quarantined, queerantined: But make it fashion
Authors: Doris Domoszlai-Lantner, Anna Zsófia Kormos and Frank NewDuring the height of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Doris Domoszlai-Lantner, a New York-based fashion historian and archivist, and Anna Zsófia Kormos, a Budapest-based designer and fashion researcher, created QUARANTINE S/S20: an Instagram-based digital archive that documents garments and ensembles worn during the initial first wave lockdown and the subsequent months. Frank New, a visual merchandiser and stylist, participated in the QUARANTINE S/S20 project, documenting his experiences with fashion and the ways in which it intersects with queerness and the LGBTIQ community throughout the pandemic. Domoszlai-Lantner and Kormos interviewed New to gain a deeper understanding of the themes, questions and issues the New York multihyphenate addressed in his submissions to the project, as well as those he posted about on his social media accounts. In response, New interviewed Domoszlai-Lantner and Kormos to find out more about the project, its goals and milestones, and what they have learned about the fashion system during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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