The Body as The Ultimate Canvas
By Santiago Echeverry | www.santiago.cn | ©2009
Most of our existence as human beings we have traditionally associated sexual identity with biological functionality. But it is very clear in history that if one of the traits of being human is having a language, the other one is the ability to redefine our gender, going beyond our reproductive instincts and creating fascinating and intriguing alternatives.
It is clear that certain societies in the past have expanded the tasks of their members, allowing them to assume or imposing on then a social gender identity that is different from their biological traditional roles. Native American tribes consider that certain individuals possess "two-spirits", the spirit of a man and a woman at the same time, and he/she can be allowed to assume whichever social role he/she chooses or is forced to assume[1]. These individuals were perceived as having special powers, and were revered in certain tribes, but in others they were just performing everyday normal tasks, just like any other member of their community. They would assume their roles permanently and would never step into their pre-determined biological functions.
But this was not the case of Shamans: they could temporarily transform themselves into animals or other human or divine beings - no matter what their gender was. Like a performance, in this case a spiritual ritual, the physical body becomes a temporary medium. And because of its sacred nature, the gender transgressions were pardoned[2].
There is another space where these temporary transgressions were also allowed. Multiple performance stages did not permit the appearance of women, for cultural or religious reasons. In the Middle Ages women traveling with performing troupes and acting on a stage were immediately considered prostitutes therefore female roles were played by young men. This tradition kept going way beyond Elizabethan and Shakespearean times.
In Japan, even though Kabuki was started by women, these were banned from performing on stage for moralistic reasons, creating the Onnagata, male performers impersonating female characters with extremely stereotyped appearances, make up and manners.
This other "sacred space", the theater stage, became the place for liberation of mores and transformations in a public closed environment. The Vaudeville, the Burlesque, and later the Cabaret saw the re-appearance of females on stage - mainly as sexual objects of entertainment - and also saw the consolidation of a tradition of "female impersonators", men who would act as women trying to fool the spectators. They progressively evolved into funny acts, where the "make up mask" would allow them to say things that would be considered as "politically incorrect" for a female. Just like in the catholic tradition's Mardi Gras carnival, the masks and costumes permit the liberation of the psyche.
Sigmund Freud and his school of therapists revolutionized the 20th century by opening the stage door and liberating all these self-expressions to invade the public space, not only during the carnival. You can see in the early actions of Dada, and later in Surrealism, a blurring line between social gender behaviors, and a public expression of sexuality that would have not been acceptable a few decades earlier. This is the first time traditional art sees gender roles transformed as work pieces. The artists, thanks to the re-definition of their role through the work of Marcel Duchamp, are no longer separated from their work. Their lives and the way they present themselves are part of their artistic creations.
This freedom will only be surpassed by the effect of the birth control pill invention. The subsequent sexual revolution in the 1960's spawned a more visible gender alteration culture. Fashion products and expressions became androgynous, and a complicated categorization of gender expressions appeared. The traditional female impersonator, whose main goal was to look as much as a woman as possible, breaks free from the constrictions of feminine clothes and prosthetics and assumes a radical appearance. Even though the term was coined in the 40's, it is only in the 60's that we see the first incarnations of what we consider "Drag Queens" today. The term "drag" means clothes in polari[3], a slang British dialect adopted by the gay subculture of this era. It was like a secret language used by an underground illegal community. Drag Queens and Kings - even though not all drag performers are gay or lesbian - were adopted by the traditionally repressed gay culture, seeing in them an outrageous tool to fight back and to ridicule the traditional standards of beauty and behavior in a more visible and public way. Extravagant costumes and make up allowed these performers to temporarily incarnate and channel - like shamans - through lip synching or with their own voices the presence and voice of popular entertainers that because of social restrictions would never appear in a gay or lesbian bar.
One of the most radical incarnations of drag performers/actionists were The Cockettes[4], a group of women, gay men and babies based in revolutionary San Francisco between 1969 and 1972. With their costume transformations, ambiguous sexualities and plays entitled "Journey to the Center of Uranus", "Les Etoiles de Paris" and "Hot Greeks", they opened the door for future performers such as Iggy Pop, Elton John, David Bowie, the New York Dolls and the glam culture. They even launched the career of Disco Era drag icon Sylvester. At the same time, moviemaker John Waters was using his actor Glen Milstead's drag alter ego in his early films, encouraging the creation of one of the most influential drag personas in history, Divine. Movies like Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974) are drag parodies of life in low budget kitsch. The influence of Divine can still be perceived in performers such as Lady Bunny, Lipsyncha, Miss Understood, Kevin Aviance and Iggy, among others mostly based in the USA.
Movies like Cabaret (1972) and La Cage aux Folles (1978), and then Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994) and To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything Julie Newmar (1995) opened the door for the appearance of Drag Queens in mainstream culture, to the point where RuPaul, a 6'7" exuberant performer, had his own talk show on VH1 in 1996.
In cities like New York, San Francisco and Chicago, an entire revival of the Vaudeville and the Cabaret started at the end of the 70's, also inspired by the Cockettes. These are mostly experimental performance art spaces dealing with gender ambiguities, singing and radical circus. Klaus Nomi started his career in these experimental spaces or "New Wave Vaudevilles"[5], incarnating the perfect spirit of sexually ambiguous performers with an amazing voice and technique.
Most of these Drag personas DO produce art, such as paintings, sculptures and original music, but their entire creations revolve around their own self-constructed altered images. It is more important to see the package as a whole than to focus on individual creations. Again, their lives cannot be separated from their creations because their creations require the performer to exist. Leigh Bowery, a fashion designer, artist and performer, used to say "I am Art". Famous for his extravagant clothes and attitudes, he was also Lucian Freud's favorite model. And it is in these nude portraits that you see the imperfect body of a thirty something year old man aware of his own fragility. Bowery - as well as Nomi, and many other performers of the 70's and 80's - died of AIDS in 1994.
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence[6], a charity and HIV/AIDS prevention group that started in the early 80's in San Francisco that focuses on the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered / GLBT community, uses an approach also inspired by the Cockettes that combines Drag Queen looks while preserving traits such as beards, moustaches, body hair and breasts, in the case of female members of the Order. This appearance is what is currently called "Gender Fuck", where traits of both genders are explicit. This transgression happens even on a conceptual level by allowing a man to become something traditionally unacceptable, a nun. The Sisters get their inspiration for their amazingly elaborate make-ups from Japanese Geishas and Kabuki performers. Following the tradition of religious orders, each Sister chooses his/her name in order to reflect the spirit and philosophy of the entire Order, as well as their own personality, using combinations such as Sister Erotica Psychotica, Sister Bea Attitude, Sister Hedra Sexual and Sister Unity Divine among thousands more.
A more permanent gender transformation has been sought throughout the ages using chemistry, medicine and barbaric methods. Eunuchs were created on purpose to become performers such as Farinelli. Castrated boys would be raised as girls, and women would get mastectomies and hysterectomies in order to become men, and perform different functions in their societies.
Even though sexual reassignment surgeries have been performed since the 1930's[7], it is only in the 1970's, with the Sexual Revolution that the technologies and legislatures become advanced enough to allow not only a functional physical transformation but also a legal recognition of these people. The term "transsexual" coined by German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld - the "Einstein of Sex"[8] - in the 1920's becomes more and more familiar thanks to actors, performers and artists, crossing over into traditional media.
Spanish actress and singer Bibi Andersen (born Manuel Fernández[9]) ‘fooled' critics and audiences who were completely unaware of her past as a man, going radically against the visible political statement of Drag Queens, but still being very influential through her public attitude. She appeared in several Pedro Almodóvar movies, with other memorable transsexual and transgendered characters, such as Letal in High Heels (1991), interpreted by pop singer Miguel Bosé.
It is very interesting to see that two of the most influential musicians of the 70's also changed their genders through surgery, with two radically different attitudes. Electro-acoustic music pioneer and composer Walter Carlos - made famous for his Moog synthesizer interpretations of classical compositions and soundtracks for movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Clockwork Orange (1971) by Stanley Kubrick - became Wendy Carlos in 1972. But there is no mention to this surgery in her own biography, and after an appearance on Playboy magazine she chose to keep this as a private matter, afraid that her career might be affected by general misunderstandings about transsexualism[10].
Genesis P. Orridge, on the other hand, was always a ‘provocateur' and innovator. A pioneer of Industrial music, he was very influential with his experimental groups Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV. His political attitudes and accusations of Satanism forced him and his family to leave the UK and relocate to New York. After a series of surgeries, Genesis has tried to look more and more like his wife, Lady Jaye Breyer, getting breast implants and starting a project called ‘Pandrogeny', where the male and female biological differences are blurred through surgery[11], reminding the transformation processes of feminist artist Orlan. He now uses a new pronoun S/HE to refer to him/herself and continues his/her gender exploration with images, music and performances[12].
We can find another example of androgynous surgical transformation in singer Pete Burns[13]. For those of us who love 80's music, he is the leader of a band called ‘Dead or Alive' and a Reality TV celebrity in the UK. He has gradually transformed his features, inspired by fashion icons, to end up looking very much like Kate Moss with an amazingly well kept male body. His entire persona and career revolves around his looks and attitude, very much like an artist in a freak show - in this case the pop culture environment - that endures physical modifications - genetically inherited or self induced - in order to entertain a morbidly curious crowd. But in this case we are not talking about someone having the most tattoos or piercings on his/her body. We are talking about modifications that have a subversive nature per-se because they alter the traditional performance of individuals in a society. These are self-made statements that can shake societal structures.
Orlan - very much in tune with the spirit of the era when she was producing her art - challenged the traditional standards of femininity and beauty through her performances and body modification surgeries, remaining within the comfortable restraints of her biological appearance. But when Feminism becomes mainstream and loses political interest, we start seeing the birth of hybrid s/hemales, like all the artists that have been mentioned so far in this paper. Artists that permanently or temporarily modify their bodies - as a work of art - because they cannot separate their nature from their medium.
Susan Sontag stated in 1979: "To be a woman is to be an actress. Being feminine is a kind of theater, with its appropriate costumes, decor, lighting, and stylized gestures. From early childhood on, girls are profoundly mutilated (to the extent of being unfitted for first-class adulthood) by the extent of stress put on presenting themselves as physically attractive objects. Women look in the mirror more frequently than men do. It is, virtually, their duty to look at themselves-to look often"[14]
When women are raised to be physically attractive objects, it is implicitly said that it is to find a mate to perform their social role in preserving the human species.
But what happens when a man - incapable of biologically giving birth - steps into the shoes of a woman, with the same - or more elaborate in certain cases - costumes, décor, lighting and stylized gestures? Or when a woman chooses to turn into an individual that is mostly defined by external masculine characteristics?
These are the questions that arise in the works of artists like Maciej Osika[15] that uses digital and traditional tools to transform his self-portraits into icons of feminine beauty - inspired by classic movie divas like Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford. His work not only challenges the notions of gender roles in general, but also studies the fact of being ‘different' in a country like Poland, that after it's transition into capitalism turned out to be a very conservative and homophobe state, with many acts of public intolerance. The transformation of the artist allows him to "escape the narrow gender imprisonment prepared for them by Polish culture" (Pawel Leszkowicz)[16].
We can see a very similar approach in the works of Rose Tang[17]. She "was born twice, first as a boy, on the beautiful hills surrounding Taichung (Taiwan) in 1967; and then again, in Shanghai, at the turn of this century, as the most promising Chinese artist of her generation."[18]In her photographic works and writings she explores the culture shocksand intolerance in a culture that shaped her sexual transitions and identity.
It is also the case of Canadian artist Kent Monkman, better known as Miss Chief Share Eagle Testickle[19]. Miss Chief is the flamboyant drag queen alter ego of an openly gay artist that belongs to the Indian Cree tribe[20]. In his paintings, he uses the romantic style of 19th century white explorers portraying the lavishness of Canadian landscapes. But there is a very post-colonialist twist: if the viewer notices carefully, the only humans depicted are usually a white man being sodomized in a submissive sexual position by an Indian man[21]. The roles are reversed and the colonizer is willfully dominated by its victim, in an enjoyable act of cultural and sexual vindication[22]. The stereotyped images of Natives in America are blown to pieces when the same Native men wear pink high heels and escape running hand in hand with their white cowboy partners[23].
Even though hermaphrodites were revered as sacred by certain cultures such as the Greek - because they unified the love between both sexes in one single body - other cultures considered them as monsters and performed very dangerous medical procedures to correct what were considered errors of nature and destabilizing elements in a society. The Romans determined the roles of everyone in their society based on their biological gender. They had no idea what to do with these individuals because they challenged "the Classical notions of order and social demarcation" [24] and forced them into exile.
Transgendered artists are the living proof that social demarcation processes are alive and active in our societies. In order to surmount these limitations, they are de-structuring, magnifying and stretching these same processes. By using the ultimate medium, their own bodies and their temporary or permanent transformation, they are proving that boundaries are no longer found in their environment, and it is only in the self-hybridization process that turns these individuals into "new hermaphrodites" that the exploration for new realms of creativity and self-expression are found. The limits imposed by our own biological existence and the restrictions generated by centuries of traditions open the door for transformation, where the limit is the human body of the creator, and the roles it consciously assumes in his/her/its society.
This creator becomes a temporary or permanent Shaman that incarnates the fears of today's world. They can channel the anxieties regarding our roles in the survival of the species and deter and transform them into political statements that challenge the notions of identity, sexuality and the functionality of gender.
Are these simply open expressions of sexuality? Mere acts of self-gratification and provocation? From an outsider's point of view they may appear that way, but from the artist's point of view, these are just ways of asserting his/her own individuality in a society that keeps getting more and more fragmented.
By Santiago Echeverry | www.santiago.cn | ©2009
Most of our existence as human beings we have traditionally associated sexual identity with biological functionality. But it is very clear in history that if one of the traits of being human is having a language, the other one is the ability to redefine our gender, going beyond our reproductive instincts and creating fascinating and intriguing alternatives.
It is clear that certain societies in the past have expanded the tasks of their members, allowing them to assume or imposing on then a social gender identity that is different from their biological traditional roles. Native American tribes consider that certain individuals possess "two-spirits", the spirit of a man and a woman at the same time, and he/she can be allowed to assume whichever social role he/she chooses or is forced to assume[1]. These individuals were perceived as having special powers, and were revered in certain tribes, but in others they were just performing everyday normal tasks, just like any other member of their community. They would assume their roles permanently and would never step into their pre-determined biological functions.
But this was not the case of Shamans: they could temporarily transform themselves into animals or other human or divine beings - no matter what their gender was. Like a performance, in this case a spiritual ritual, the physical body becomes a temporary medium. And because of its sacred nature, the gender transgressions were pardoned[2].
There is another space where these temporary transgressions were also allowed. Multiple performance stages did not permit the appearance of women, for cultural or religious reasons. In the Middle Ages women traveling with performing troupes and acting on a stage were immediately considered prostitutes therefore female roles were played by young men. This tradition kept going way beyond Elizabethan and Shakespearean times.
In Japan, even though Kabuki was started by women, these were banned from performing on stage for moralistic reasons, creating the Onnagata, male performers impersonating female characters with extremely stereotyped appearances, make up and manners.
This other "sacred space", the theater stage, became the place for liberation of mores and transformations in a public closed environment. The Vaudeville, the Burlesque, and later the Cabaret saw the re-appearance of females on stage - mainly as sexual objects of entertainment - and also saw the consolidation of a tradition of "female impersonators", men who would act as women trying to fool the spectators. They progressively evolved into funny acts, where the "make up mask" would allow them to say things that would be considered as "politically incorrect" for a female. Just like in the catholic tradition's Mardi Gras carnival, the masks and costumes permit the liberation of the psyche.
Sigmund Freud and his school of therapists revolutionized the 20th century by opening the stage door and liberating all these self-expressions to invade the public space, not only during the carnival. You can see in the early actions of Dada, and later in Surrealism, a blurring line between social gender behaviors, and a public expression of sexuality that would have not been acceptable a few decades earlier. This is the first time traditional art sees gender roles transformed as work pieces. The artists, thanks to the re-definition of their role through the work of Marcel Duchamp, are no longer separated from their work. Their lives and the way they present themselves are part of their artistic creations.
This freedom will only be surpassed by the effect of the birth control pill invention. The subsequent sexual revolution in the 1960's spawned a more visible gender alteration culture. Fashion products and expressions became androgynous, and a complicated categorization of gender expressions appeared. The traditional female impersonator, whose main goal was to look as much as a woman as possible, breaks free from the constrictions of feminine clothes and prosthetics and assumes a radical appearance. Even though the term was coined in the 40's, it is only in the 60's that we see the first incarnations of what we consider "Drag Queens" today. The term "drag" means clothes in polari[3], a slang British dialect adopted by the gay subculture of this era. It was like a secret language used by an underground illegal community. Drag Queens and Kings - even though not all drag performers are gay or lesbian - were adopted by the traditionally repressed gay culture, seeing in them an outrageous tool to fight back and to ridicule the traditional standards of beauty and behavior in a more visible and public way. Extravagant costumes and make up allowed these performers to temporarily incarnate and channel - like shamans - through lip synching or with their own voices the presence and voice of popular entertainers that because of social restrictions would never appear in a gay or lesbian bar.
One of the most radical incarnations of drag performers/actionists were The Cockettes[4], a group of women, gay men and babies based in revolutionary San Francisco between 1969 and 1972. With their costume transformations, ambiguous sexualities and plays entitled "Journey to the Center of Uranus", "Les Etoiles de Paris" and "Hot Greeks", they opened the door for future performers such as Iggy Pop, Elton John, David Bowie, the New York Dolls and the glam culture. They even launched the career of Disco Era drag icon Sylvester. At the same time, moviemaker John Waters was using his actor Glen Milstead's drag alter ego in his early films, encouraging the creation of one of the most influential drag personas in history, Divine. Movies like Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974) are drag parodies of life in low budget kitsch. The influence of Divine can still be perceived in performers such as Lady Bunny, Lipsyncha, Miss Understood, Kevin Aviance and Iggy, among others mostly based in the USA.
Movies like Cabaret (1972) and La Cage aux Folles (1978), and then Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994) and To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything Julie Newmar (1995) opened the door for the appearance of Drag Queens in mainstream culture, to the point where RuPaul, a 6'7" exuberant performer, had his own talk show on VH1 in 1996.
In cities like New York, San Francisco and Chicago, an entire revival of the Vaudeville and the Cabaret started at the end of the 70's, also inspired by the Cockettes. These are mostly experimental performance art spaces dealing with gender ambiguities, singing and radical circus. Klaus Nomi started his career in these experimental spaces or "New Wave Vaudevilles"[5], incarnating the perfect spirit of sexually ambiguous performers with an amazing voice and technique.
Most of these Drag personas DO produce art, such as paintings, sculptures and original music, but their entire creations revolve around their own self-constructed altered images. It is more important to see the package as a whole than to focus on individual creations. Again, their lives cannot be separated from their creations because their creations require the performer to exist. Leigh Bowery, a fashion designer, artist and performer, used to say "I am Art". Famous for his extravagant clothes and attitudes, he was also Lucian Freud's favorite model. And it is in these nude portraits that you see the imperfect body of a thirty something year old man aware of his own fragility. Bowery - as well as Nomi, and many other performers of the 70's and 80's - died of AIDS in 1994.
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence[6], a charity and HIV/AIDS prevention group that started in the early 80's in San Francisco that focuses on the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered / GLBT community, uses an approach also inspired by the Cockettes that combines Drag Queen looks while preserving traits such as beards, moustaches, body hair and breasts, in the case of female members of the Order. This appearance is what is currently called "Gender Fuck", where traits of both genders are explicit. This transgression happens even on a conceptual level by allowing a man to become something traditionally unacceptable, a nun. The Sisters get their inspiration for their amazingly elaborate make-ups from Japanese Geishas and Kabuki performers. Following the tradition of religious orders, each Sister chooses his/her name in order to reflect the spirit and philosophy of the entire Order, as well as their own personality, using combinations such as Sister Erotica Psychotica, Sister Bea Attitude, Sister Hedra Sexual and Sister Unity Divine among thousands more.
A more permanent gender transformation has been sought throughout the ages using chemistry, medicine and barbaric methods. Eunuchs were created on purpose to become performers such as Farinelli. Castrated boys would be raised as girls, and women would get mastectomies and hysterectomies in order to become men, and perform different functions in their societies.
Even though sexual reassignment surgeries have been performed since the 1930's[7], it is only in the 1970's, with the Sexual Revolution that the technologies and legislatures become advanced enough to allow not only a functional physical transformation but also a legal recognition of these people. The term "transsexual" coined by German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld - the "Einstein of Sex"[8] - in the 1920's becomes more and more familiar thanks to actors, performers and artists, crossing over into traditional media.
Spanish actress and singer Bibi Andersen (born Manuel Fernández[9]) ‘fooled' critics and audiences who were completely unaware of her past as a man, going radically against the visible political statement of Drag Queens, but still being very influential through her public attitude. She appeared in several Pedro Almodóvar movies, with other memorable transsexual and transgendered characters, such as Letal in High Heels (1991), interpreted by pop singer Miguel Bosé.
It is very interesting to see that two of the most influential musicians of the 70's also changed their genders through surgery, with two radically different attitudes. Electro-acoustic music pioneer and composer Walter Carlos - made famous for his Moog synthesizer interpretations of classical compositions and soundtracks for movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Clockwork Orange (1971) by Stanley Kubrick - became Wendy Carlos in 1972. But there is no mention to this surgery in her own biography, and after an appearance on Playboy magazine she chose to keep this as a private matter, afraid that her career might be affected by general misunderstandings about transsexualism[10].
Genesis P. Orridge, on the other hand, was always a ‘provocateur' and innovator. A pioneer of Industrial music, he was very influential with his experimental groups Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV. His political attitudes and accusations of Satanism forced him and his family to leave the UK and relocate to New York. After a series of surgeries, Genesis has tried to look more and more like his wife, Lady Jaye Breyer, getting breast implants and starting a project called ‘Pandrogeny', where the male and female biological differences are blurred through surgery[11], reminding the transformation processes of feminist artist Orlan. He now uses a new pronoun S/HE to refer to him/herself and continues his/her gender exploration with images, music and performances[12].
We can find another example of androgynous surgical transformation in singer Pete Burns[13]. For those of us who love 80's music, he is the leader of a band called ‘Dead or Alive' and a Reality TV celebrity in the UK. He has gradually transformed his features, inspired by fashion icons, to end up looking very much like Kate Moss with an amazingly well kept male body. His entire persona and career revolves around his looks and attitude, very much like an artist in a freak show - in this case the pop culture environment - that endures physical modifications - genetically inherited or self induced - in order to entertain a morbidly curious crowd. But in this case we are not talking about someone having the most tattoos or piercings on his/her body. We are talking about modifications that have a subversive nature per-se because they alter the traditional performance of individuals in a society. These are self-made statements that can shake societal structures.
Orlan - very much in tune with the spirit of the era when she was producing her art - challenged the traditional standards of femininity and beauty through her performances and body modification surgeries, remaining within the comfortable restraints of her biological appearance. But when Feminism becomes mainstream and loses political interest, we start seeing the birth of hybrid s/hemales, like all the artists that have been mentioned so far in this paper. Artists that permanently or temporarily modify their bodies - as a work of art - because they cannot separate their nature from their medium.
Susan Sontag stated in 1979: "To be a woman is to be an actress. Being feminine is a kind of theater, with its appropriate costumes, decor, lighting, and stylized gestures. From early childhood on, girls are profoundly mutilated (to the extent of being unfitted for first-class adulthood) by the extent of stress put on presenting themselves as physically attractive objects. Women look in the mirror more frequently than men do. It is, virtually, their duty to look at themselves-to look often"[14]
When women are raised to be physically attractive objects, it is implicitly said that it is to find a mate to perform their social role in preserving the human species.
But what happens when a man - incapable of biologically giving birth - steps into the shoes of a woman, with the same - or more elaborate in certain cases - costumes, décor, lighting and stylized gestures? Or when a woman chooses to turn into an individual that is mostly defined by external masculine characteristics?
These are the questions that arise in the works of artists like Maciej Osika[15] that uses digital and traditional tools to transform his self-portraits into icons of feminine beauty - inspired by classic movie divas like Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford. His work not only challenges the notions of gender roles in general, but also studies the fact of being ‘different' in a country like Poland, that after it's transition into capitalism turned out to be a very conservative and homophobe state, with many acts of public intolerance. The transformation of the artist allows him to "escape the narrow gender imprisonment prepared for them by Polish culture" (Pawel Leszkowicz)[16].
We can see a very similar approach in the works of Rose Tang[17]. She "was born twice, first as a boy, on the beautiful hills surrounding Taichung (Taiwan) in 1967; and then again, in Shanghai, at the turn of this century, as the most promising Chinese artist of her generation."[18]In her photographic works and writings she explores the culture shocksand intolerance in a culture that shaped her sexual transitions and identity.
It is also the case of Canadian artist Kent Monkman, better known as Miss Chief Share Eagle Testickle[19]. Miss Chief is the flamboyant drag queen alter ego of an openly gay artist that belongs to the Indian Cree tribe[20]. In his paintings, he uses the romantic style of 19th century white explorers portraying the lavishness of Canadian landscapes. But there is a very post-colonialist twist: if the viewer notices carefully, the only humans depicted are usually a white man being sodomized in a submissive sexual position by an Indian man[21]. The roles are reversed and the colonizer is willfully dominated by its victim, in an enjoyable act of cultural and sexual vindication[22]. The stereotyped images of Natives in America are blown to pieces when the same Native men wear pink high heels and escape running hand in hand with their white cowboy partners[23].
Even though hermaphrodites were revered as sacred by certain cultures such as the Greek - because they unified the love between both sexes in one single body - other cultures considered them as monsters and performed very dangerous medical procedures to correct what were considered errors of nature and destabilizing elements in a society. The Romans determined the roles of everyone in their society based on their biological gender. They had no idea what to do with these individuals because they challenged "the Classical notions of order and social demarcation" [24] and forced them into exile.
Transgendered artists are the living proof that social demarcation processes are alive and active in our societies. In order to surmount these limitations, they are de-structuring, magnifying and stretching these same processes. By using the ultimate medium, their own bodies and their temporary or permanent transformation, they are proving that boundaries are no longer found in their environment, and it is only in the self-hybridization process that turns these individuals into "new hermaphrodites" that the exploration for new realms of creativity and self-expression are found. The limits imposed by our own biological existence and the restrictions generated by centuries of traditions open the door for transformation, where the limit is the human body of the creator, and the roles it consciously assumes in his/her/its society.
This creator becomes a temporary or permanent Shaman that incarnates the fears of today's world. They can channel the anxieties regarding our roles in the survival of the species and deter and transform them into political statements that challenge the notions of identity, sexuality and the functionality of gender.
Are these simply open expressions of sexuality? Mere acts of self-gratification and provocation? From an outsider's point of view they may appear that way, but from the artist's point of view, these are just ways of asserting his/her own individuality in a society that keeps getting more and more fragmented.