Viewers are thus able to create their own fantasies by drawing on the way women are portrayed in Hollywood movies. Perhaps not surprisingly then, viewers tend to project stereotypical female qualities onto the women in the photos in accordance with the costumes and surroundings chosen by Sherman. Drawing out this idea, Judith Williamson argues that Sherman’s photographs are simultaneously “a witty parody of media images of women” and “a search for female identity” (40). In reality, each one is completely invented by the artist. Though Sherman is both the woman in front of the lens and behind it, she appears masked through make-up and costume, disguised to resemble familiar female stereotypes her women are images of women, “models of femininity projected by the media to encourage imitation and identification” (Owens 18).īecause Sherman’s tableaux are so detailed many viewers are fooled into believing that the photographs are imitations of existing movie stills. The photo visually portrays a woman assembling her identity, caught in the act of construction. 3.1), Sherman plays the role of a young woman studying her own reflection. In Untitled Film Still #2 from 1977 (see fig. She is unrecognizable from one photo to the next, changing her appearance as she tackles the different identities, each an illustration of a cultural representation of women. The series features Sherman posing as various female stereotypes from generic black and white Hollywood B films of the 1950s. Sherman’s career was launched with her Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980). These photographs portray struggles over women’s identity and the way we come to know and understand ourselves through cultural mediation, and can be critically analyzed using feminist social constructionist theories that challenge the notion of a fixed femininity. Although Sherman asserts that feminists do not inspire her photographs, many have adopted her works as the visual manifestation of their social constructionist tenets (Doy 258). One of these was contemporary media artist Cindy Sherman who, in her photographs, assumes the role of various female identities found throughout Western culture. Some female artists began to use their work as a means of re-representing female identity and deconstructing prevailing cultural expectations of femininity. At the forefront was Simone de Beauvoir, who believed that gender and female identity are not the expression of biological sex, but rather are constructed within a particular cultural framework (Beauvoir 52). Feminist deconstructionists argued that such pictorial representations have perpetuated Western society’s conventional understanding of femininity. As a part of this, the art historical canon was heavily criticized for its lack of female artists and widespread use of stereotypical images of women. “ Popular culture has the ability to define our understandings of femininity howeve these are nothing more than constructions, a series of performative acts."ĭuring the late twentieth century, non-essentialist feminist and cultural theory arguing that gender is a sociocultural construction began to emerge.
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