Wearing Culture by Heather Orr

Wearing Culture by Heather Orr

Author:Heather Orr
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781607322825
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Published: 2014-04-13T16:00:00+00:00


In the case of the seventeen known colossal heads, while three heads can be shown to correlate tentatively with other, gendered figures, the heads themselves illustrate no clearly sexed or gendered features such as beards (Table 7.2; see also Follensbee 2000b:387–412, 2009a:105–6, table 4.6). Given that these are verisimilar portraits of powerful individuals, however, the necessity of identifying them by sex or gender was likely rendered moot.

Among the relief images (Table 7.2), the androgynous figures have generalized faces as well as generalized, sexually ambiguous bodies; they also tend to be posed in awkward positions, in which the limbs and garments appear to be placed specifically in order to obscure all possible sexed and gendered features. The clothing worn by these figures is likewise gender-ambiguous, consisting only of garments that are either unique or that are associated with both male and female images. Alternatively, the body and garments may be distorted in such a way that identifying the costume as male- or female-gendered is rendered virtually impossible. The figure on La Venta Monument 19, for example (Figure 7.33), wears a unique serpent headdress that envelops the head, along with gender-ambiguous garments of a cape, a collar, armbands, and leg bands. The figure’s left arm is twisted forward in an awkward position, obscuring both the chest and the front of the figure’s torso garment. The torso is very elongated and curved, obscuring whether the torso garment is the usually-male-gendered wide belt worn high on the waist along with a male-gendered wrapped loincloth with several pendant flaps or cloth tassels, or a female-gendered low-slung, hip-hugger belt with a pendant apron, or a female-gendered, low-slung short skirt with a “carwash” type fringe as seen on La Venta Stela 1 (Figure 7.25).25 The generalized faces along with the intentional and somewhat insistent asexuality and gender-ambiguity of such images suggests that these figures may not have represented specific individuals, but perhaps ungendered characters or roles that were fulfilled by different individuals—and that were not restricted by gender.

Figure 7.33. La Venta Monument 19 (drawing by the author).



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.