Re: [-empyre-] "feminine" identity

[tracey@byte-time.net]

Hi Stacia and thanks for bringing this part of the topic into play.

When I was putting together the topic, I was partly thinking about
some of the things I have explored in my own practice in the past.  In
particular, there is a performance I did in 1995/1996 titled Scalpland
- where I clippered my hair and used that act as a metaphor for the
colonisation of land and the construction of 'feminine' identity.In
this work, I also referred to the pseudo science of phrenology as a
signifier of the connections of colonial mapping between land and body.
(http://byte-time.net/projects/scalpland.html)

The idealising of the feminine and your comment about the Sims being
like a 'virtual' dollhouse is sort of depressing - as these types of
criticisms reinforce that certain behaviours and 'toys' are gendered.
I am not really a gamer perse, but when we first got a PS2, the males
in my household would get quite upset and competitive when I would
beat them at Tekken or Need for Speed - as if I was emasculating them!

Anyway - who is to say that many of these girls playing sims are
actually boys :-)



Quoting Stacia Yeapanis <stacialy@yahoo.com>:

> So, it seems we haven't much touched on the
> particulars of "feminine" identity. This is an
> interesting issue for me in my work, because I don't
> focus on it specifically and would never say that it's
> something I set out to make work about. But, I cannot
> deny that there are many traditionally "feminine"
> signifiers in my work.
>
> For one, I can't ignore that in my Sims videos and
> photographs, I am presenting an idealized female body
> as my avatar and that that virtual body is often
> warped and broken apart and penetrated my itself and
> other objects (as in "Glitches are Signs"). I once got
> an interesting read of these photographs as a critique
> of the female body as represented in video games. I
> like that that read is there, but it wasn't something
> I set out to do.
>
> Also, in the gaming world, I get the impression that
> The Sims is often criticized as nothing more than a
> virtual dollhouse. And that there is a large
> concentration of female players, as opposed to other
> games. This is not a fact I can back up. Just an
> impression from perusing the web.
>
> "Everybody Hurts" focuses on mediated tears and
> imagery of sadness. Does this play into the simplified
> idea of the feminine as hyper-emotional? And the
> embroideries of said images refers to a traditionally
> feminine pasttime, which was historically a tool for
> training young girls how to be proper women, but has
> recently been appropriated as a political action in a
> lot of recent art. Many ethnographic studies have
> historically focused of fandom and active viewership
> as a feminist action.
>
> With all this said, I don't set out to construct or
> perform a "feminine" identity. These are natural
> outshoots of who I am. I just wanted to bring this up
> for discussion and ask Jill and Barbara to talk about
> how they respond to that part of this month's topic.
> Do y'all think of your performance work as "feminine"
> in any way? How do notions of the "feminine" drive
> your work or bring it to a screeching halt?
>
>
>          
> ___________________________________________________________________________________
> You snooze, you lose. Get messages ASAP with AutoCheck
> in the all-new Yahoo! Mail Beta.
> http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/mailbeta/newmail_html.html
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre




----- End forwarded message -----