masquerade

For this project we were asked to produce a series of portraits that explore the performative aspects related to the presentation of the self. Judith Butler’s book ‘Gender Trouble’ deals with sexuality not as a social form but as a performance within society to determine one’s social status and bearing within the construct of social acceptability. Therefore a woman’s role is a constant, for example, woman is always the other of man. Freud’s theory of man, woman, masculine, feminine which Butler called the Grand Narrative privileged a certain few. That within the normal confines that coherent set of genres were produced was problematic and that variation to the normal produced a new set of fragmented identities. Outside the mother/ father scenario other influences came to bear and a third identity would emerge.

“Butler argues that we all put on a gender performance, whether traditional or not, anyway, and so it is not a question of whether to do a gender performance, but what form that performance will take. By choosing to be different about it, we might work to change gender norms and the binary understanding of masculinity and femininity”. (www.theory.org.)

Taking Butler’s ideas I chose a performance style of looking at the conceived ideas of male, female and androgynous forms and creating the images through one character. By using one character it allowed me to explore Butler’s notion of ‘performance’ as a conscious choice to show that we can choose how we are perceived by manipulating preconceived ideas of gender that are already present within society. I chose to use a young model for my project because of their un-stabilized identity and because they at the stage of still developing what it is that will become their identity. Also, as Irmas (2006) wrote, the people being photographed find themselves playing a role. Even though as a photographer you have control over lighting, setting, camera, background etc, ultimately the photographed, not the photographer, would be the one who will perform the masquerade in the sense that they know it as. However, as a photographer in creating a title for the sitter to perform inevitably somewhat of the character of the photographer will be encased in the performance of the sitter, once again adding to the whole complex social gender performance.

My first caption given to the sitter was that of ‘male’, choosing carefully not to influence them with other words such as man, masculine etc allowing for free expression and in my case only there to provide what the sitter thought they needed to achieve this caption. Once the session began and after an initial period of technical and posturing issues it settled down to the sitter concentrating on relaxing and finding the essence of the character within themselves. This played out into a cross section of cowboy, gangster and their father. For both the female and androgynous portraits the same set of rules were applied with the sitter interpreting and playing a role in a way in which they thought best perceived the female role and the androgynous role.

During the production of the portraits it was mainly content that influenced form; one of the many reasons being the preconceived ideas on both the sitters and my part of what is male/female and androgynous in form. The final artefacts in achieving what was specified in the brief, in retrospect given the same brief again a more elaborate setting and form to add to the content in terms of the performative aspects could improve it related to the presentation of the self. I would include more props to enable the sitter more scope in acting out their performance. The strengths of the finished product were that the portraits convincingly display the three gender identities, which can be attributed to the use of a younger model that as yet is not definite in their choice of their performance in society, as mentioned previously.

References
http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-butl.htm