Erotic Ambiguities by McDonald Helen

Author:McDonald, Helen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-134-69667-3
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Plate 25 Della Grace, Jack’s Back, 1991, black and white photograph, 19.5 cm × 28.5 cm.

Plate 26 Della Grace, Hermaphrodite Torso, 1998, black and white photograph, 12 cm × 16.5 cm.

The only sign of performativity in this picture is a softly scribbled pattern across the chest, which appears to be a game of noughts and crosses using symbols that resemble those for male and female. It is a game in which there are no winners or losers, since the signs are not properly formed, have been defaced and are inchoate. As an inscription on the body, it is a self-reflexive gesture, and a pattern of aesthetic adornment, both of which derive erotic power from ambiguity. This ambiguity is compounded by photography’s fiction of actuality, which is undermined by the fact that it is not clear whether the pattern is on the surface of the body, or superimposed on the photograph. Thus, by implicating herself in the ambiguity of these representational processes, Grace suggested that, in terms of gender, the subject was indeterminable. This in turn raises the question of whether ‘this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender’ (Butler 1990: 7). Sex is a function that is psychological and biological in ways that cannot be completely disentangled, and, as Elizabeth Grosz noted, there is a remarkably high incidence of hermaphroditism in the general population. Grosz added that ‘The morphology of external genitalia does not provide a clear-cut delineation of the differences between the sexes, even if it does provide the primary criterion used for determining the sex of the neonate’ (Grosz 1994: 216–17). Hermaphrodite Torso subtly delineates the structure of this dilemma, the imprecision of the criterion and the instability inherent in sex. At the same time, by granting the model ‘dignity, power and beauty’, it announces ambiguity as an erotic space and a positive outcome for the body’s participation in gender games.

However, the foregrounding of gender ambiguity complicates feminist strategies such as a revisioning of the female body in art that might counter processes of ‘normalisation’ in contemporary Western culture. Such processes can be observed in the fact that the popular media, especially in the areas of advertising and fashion, facilitated the new generation’s ‘recognition of itself’ in the term queer. My example of the models in The Face, in Chapter 4, demonstrated this. While the ‘queering’ of fashion and advertising may be construed by some as a benefit that commodity capitalism provides for marginalised sexual identities, it also stymies feminist resistance to and criticism of capitalist techniques of seduction, which might serve ultimately to oppress many women. For feminist artists, the dominant role played by the visual media in promoting these techniques is especially challenging. The male models in The Face were eroticised according to a tradition that equated the female body with the object of ‘the gaze’. As I explained earlier, these male models were feminised through the deployment of visual codes of seduction, such as gestures, expressions and partial nudity, and with the aid of techniques of display – such as lighting, cropping and point-of-view.

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