We tend to think that the drive to abolish distinctions between the sexes is a relatively recent phenomenon. Asked to date its beginnngs, most of us would likely pick the 1970s, coinciding with the first undergraduate gay and lesbian studies classes at UC Berkeley. But no. The impulse goes back further. It was championed by the British Marxist Christopher St. John Sprigg, writing under the pseudonym Christopher Caudwell. In the 1930s, he defended a vision of advanced society’s ultimate freedom from biological necessity.
Yasumasa Morimura, Daughter of Art History (1990).
Caudwell was only thirty when he was killed in action in the Spanish Civil War. He had already produced five books, each one flush with jumping off points for subsequent Marxist thinkers. His influential Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture remains a must-read for students of Marxist aesthetics.
Caudwell’s vision of the ultimate necessity of the collapse of sexual differences is aggressively on show in the work of Yasumasa Morimura, an international crowd-pleaser living in Osaka. His well-known appropriations of iconic paintings—here Manet’s The Bar at the Folies Bergère—illustrate perfectly Judith Butler’s term “performativity of gender.” By transforming himself into Manet’s barmaid, he declines the gender assigned to him, so the thinking goes, by society because of his sex.
Camp theatre has never been as blithe as it appeared. Insidious from the get-go, its surface entertainment value is ingratiating. Loosen up, folks. Only a total dork would spoil good fun. That is charm enough to disable the faculties of a well-meaning and complacent audience. Morimura, in beautifully crafted burlesques, puts himself on exhibit as the fruit of the old guard’s cultural decline. Behind its apparent whimsy, the work is deadly serious.
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Yasumasa Morimura. Self Portrait After Jodie Foster (1996).
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In the word-game world of gender studies, male sexuality—phallic power, in the literature—is benign if it is directed toward other men. A straight man is a class enemy; a gay man is . . . well, probably a size 14 or larger.
Guise and Dolls en femme at the millennium.
March 5th, 2013 | 7:30 am
Concise. Brilliant. Thanks. “Guise and Dolls” –Ha!
March 5th, 2013 | 4:44 pm
A mindset “deadly serious” though so comic in its irrationalities. On the one hand, gender is deemed a cultural construct supported by existing power structures; on the other, the journey of the transgendered is celebrated as the arrival into true identity, though the first idea renders the second a journey from illusory point A to illusory point B. And if gender is illusory, where does that leave gayness? It seems as a mere transitive stage in society’s progress into androgyny.
March 6th, 2013 | 7:19 pm
Of course, it is true that “traditional” (really, stereotypical) gender roles are not divinely, or even naturally, instituted. Men can be excellent fashion designers, schoolteachers, and nurses; women can be excellent mathematicians (the first female professor of mathematics in Europe, Maria Agnesi, was actually appointed by the pope), soldiers (Joan of Arc?), and doctors, lawyers, etc., etc.
What is not true is that sexual differentiation is a cultural artifact. Sexual differentiation is highly pronounced, actually, much more highly pronounced than in humans, in most species. Male sea eagles, for example, are given to hunting and bringing food to the nest, whereas the females tend to nurturing the young. Sound familiar? This is true of most species. In fact, it is the more highly evolved species, mammals, which exhibit sexual differentiation — bacteria and plants do not. Generally, the higher on the food chain you are, the more likely it is that you have sexual differentiation.
Therefore it is androgyny that is the artificial socio-cultural construct, not sexual differentiation. Like our avian friends, but unlike plants and bacteria, humans exhibit sexual differentiation. Again, this is something that has been selected for by evolution. Men are physically faster and stronger. Women have the ability to bear and nurse children. Both qualities are valuable, but are also inalterable aspects of the physical world.
Much like the division of labor in advanced economies, sexual differentiation represents a sophisticated evolution in accordance with natural selection.
March 6th, 2013 | 7:47 pm
“Therefore it is androgyny that is the artificial socio-cultural construct, not sexual differentiation.”
Thank you for that.
March 6th, 2013 | 8:27 pm
Perhaps the truly progressive might take to task the sea eagle, asking why, for thousands of years, it has allowed sexual differentiation?
The left loves nature, so why not follow nature?
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