Photo Credit: Aziza Murray
Encountering Masculinity
Encountering Masculinity, explores masculinity through the lens of the performative theory of gender. I examine men’s clothing beginning with my own family for a generational perspective and then men from different world ethnicities and geographies. I ground my exploration in clothing because of my interest in how textiles create a boundary between intimate space and the outside world, creating a space of resistance. I collect textiles that I observe in participants' clothing to create quilted pieces, cutting apart pieces of patchwork and sewing them back together, placing seams from the back of one set of patchwork into the front of current patchwork, demonstrating my own labor, referencing labor movements in the textile industry, and making visible the intersection of capitalism with masculinity.
Interviews with participants inform the quilts’ forms, embroidery, and free-motion quilting details. I create movement and space by using mobiles to suspend the pieces, informed by Emmanuel Lévinas’s ethics and Latin social dance. Lévinas’s ethics are based on a face-to-face encounter, when we acknowledge the Other and our obligation to their well-being, above our own freedom. Latin social dancing is a relationship of bodies in space with an obligation to partners and others on the dance floor. While lead and follow roles have historically been gendered as masculine and feminine, respectively, people are now dancing with no regard to gender. As in the ethical encounter in which we cannot assume gender, dancers cannot anticipate movement but must rather be present and respond to physical communication from their partner.
Photo Credit: Aziza Murray
