The Non Binary Body in Western Art and Culture (original) (raw)

My proposal is that whilst non-binary bodies have been represented throughout art history, they have usually been created by artists not outside the mainstream but thoroughly within it, therefore operating with the privilege that comes with being an accepted artist – and that those who did challenge the accepted order would see their work criticised, marginalised or erased altogether. This is due to such bodies being variously classified as ‘low culture’, transgressive, or representative of the Other. I view this condition as a manifestation of the dichotomy which cuts across Western political, social and cultural life: namely, the ‘high/low’ opposition rigorously interrogated by Stallybrass & White in The Poetics & Politics of Transgression. For Stallybrass & White, this “high/low opposition...is a fundamental basis to mechanics of ordering...in European cultures”1 in which the low is marginalised and rejected and yet paradoxically remains an essential component of the élite’s construction of itself. Thus, “the ‘top’ attempts to reject...the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover...that the top includes that low symbolically...”2; therefore “what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central (like long hair in the 1960s)3 ” and so becomes problematic when Outsiders attempt to express themselves in the imagery of their own perceived and constructed Otherness 4. Even well into the 20th Century, Piet Mondrian articulated the archaic attitude of the patriarchal heteronormative: “The female and the material...hamper the male tool of spiritual expression. A futurist manifesto’s proclamation of hate of the female is perfectly valid5.” Thus, this topic has very far-reaching consequences. 1 P Stallybrass & A White, The Poetics & Politics of Transgression, Methuen, London, 1986, p. 3 2 Ibid., p. 5 3 Ibid. Or, in the 2010s, the policing of gender-specific toilets, for example. 4 For example, the sort of outrage spewed against 1970s feminist artists (e.g Carolee Schneemann) who used their own naked bodies, menstrual blood, and other ‘taboo’ aspects of their femininity to create work critical of the patriarchal norm. 5 Quoted by M Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1995, p. 280. Wigley adds, in a summation of Foucault’s historical construction of homosexuality, “The threat posed is not women as such, but the feminine qualities identified with them that can be found within the man” (my italics). Wigley’s expressed irony is that to present masculine spirituality, men must master and employ the feminine zone of control: the surface, the appearance.