Judith Butler Masculinity

Judith Butler questions the notion that certain gendered behaviors are a result of learning the performance of gender behavior, that which is associated with masculinity and femininity. She argues that it is a social construction that is only true to the extent of it being performed. Gender as defined in Undoing Gender is a “practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint,” which is within a social context.
The stylization of the body, gestures, movements and enactments create these performances of a gendered self. Butler’s ideas on gender performativity can visually be seen the photographic pieces by Claude Cahun and Collier Schorr. Both artists utilized photography to create a direct and visual representation of their ideas on
Sometimes they explicitly look like a man or a woman, sometimes androgynous making it even harder to distinguish their persona’s gender. With their own body, Cahun reinvents how one perceives themselves, recreating their identity with every setting of a photograph.Theatricality and performance heavily influenced their work. In their work entitled What do you want from me? (Fig.1) Cahun poses in front of a camera creating a self-portrait through a double exposure. Two heads, emerge from the same body, a siamese twin becomes the focus the photograph. The faces confront each other, one is alert and looking off to the side of the photograph. The other head turns more inward, towards its twin figure. The other side of its face faces the opposite direction from the viewer and we only see one eye, seemingly disconnected and lulled. Cahun photographed themselves with a shaved head, adding a curious and strange quality to the surrealist photograph. The duality of the forms within the photography suggests a sort of split personality, two opposite minds in one body. The head on the left, the one that looks out of the frame, seems to be the one that’s haunted and tortured by the other figure thereby seemingly alarmed at the moment the photo was taken. The figure on the right emits a sort of mischievous affect, amplified by looking slyly and conniving at the other