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Abstract:
Visual culture – art, film, entertainment, advertising – are saturated with images of normative heterosexual masculinity. They form visual narratives that project a largely coherent kind of masculinity where heterosexual men are shown to be creative and powerful; they initiate heroic action, take the moral high ground and preserve traditional roles and the status quo. This widely extensive visual field, peopled with normative images of masculinity, also affects and infiltrates the domain of art exemplified by Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism which, to the present day, continues to project masculinity as the originator and pioneer of aesthetic value. This essay reviews feminist and queer artists’ image making that appropriates the myth of homogeneous masculinity and turns it into a medium for a variety of creative and hybrid explorations. I argue that Deleuzoguattarian concepts such as becoming-woman and becoming-imperceptible help us to understand this molecularisation of masculinity. And importantly in the other direction, these feminist and queer image makers allow us to understand and explore more fully these concepts.
Notes
1 Deleuze and Guattari 277.
2 Colebrook 11.
3 For an in-depth study of some of the synergies and divergences between Irigaray's and Deleuze's philosophies, see Lorraine.
4 Braidotti, “Ethics” 24.
5 As Cohen argues: “in queer politics sexual expression is something that always entails the possibility of change, movements, redefinition, and subversive performance – from year to year, from partner to partner, from day to day, even from act to act” (202).
6 Such a notion stems from Linda Alcoff's suggestion that the category “woman” could be rethought as an expansive multiplicity of subcategories that bear a “family resemblance” to each other.
7 Crawford 141.
8 Greenberg 87.
9 Quoted in Jones, Body Art 68.
10 Colacello 342. See also Weinberg. Weinberg also sees Warhol's oxidation paintings as an act of transgression against abstract expressionism and treats the subject of urination, particularly gay examples, as something that has been ignored in art history.
11 Jones, Body Art 92. I am indebted to Amelia Jones's treatment of Pollock, Boadwee and Kubota, to which I add analyses of Warhol, Chadwick, Morimura and Haring using a Deleuzoguattarian theoretical framework.
12 Butler 157.
13 Nigianni 4.
14 For this quote and images see <http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/the-collection/browse-artwork/15828/teine-samoa-samoan-woman>.
15 See also the contrasting work of Micha Cárdenas who describes herself as an “artist, hacktivist, poet, performer, student, educator, mixed-race trans femme latina survivor who works at the intersection of movement, technology and politics” (http://www.pactac.net/CDS/resources/people/cardenas.html). And Della Grace Volcano, who writes:
As a gender variant visual artist I access “technologies of gender” in order to amplify rather than erase the hermaphroditic traces of my body. I name myself. A gender abolitionist. A part time gender terrorist. An intentional mutation and intersex by design (as opposed to diagnosis), in order to distinguish my journey from the thousands of intersex individuals who have had their “ambiguous” bodies mutilated and disfigured in a misguided attempt at “normalization”. I believe in crossing the line as many times as it takes to build a bridge we can all walk across. (http://www.dellagracevolcano.com/statement.html)
16 Rose 75.
17 Gombrich 109.
18 Deleuze and Guattari 291.
19 Callois 130.
20 Braidotti, “Ethics” 2.
21 Braidotti, “Affirming.”
22 Braidotti, “Ethics” 24.
23 Colebrook 22.
24 Butler 173.
25 For Butler, while recognition is mired by systems of power, it is a problem for those who have been marginalised from political representation to use a “differential distribution of recognizability.” For her, recognition is linked to a critical awareness of who is allowed to be “recognizable” and to specific analyses of scenes of recognition. See Williga 139.