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Jill Soloway on the Female Gaze: A Video Essay

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Jill Soloway on the Female Gaze: A Video Essay

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a student reads her text out over a montage of scenes from contemporary films.

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Jill Soloway on the Female Gaze Video Essay

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Video essay in Media Theories and Methods at the University of Oklahoma. Keynote speech by Jill Soloway over the Female Gaze at the Toronto International Film Festival. All words and ideas are Jill Soloway's original work. Narrated and edited by me.

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Jennifer Lawrence Offended by Dress Controversy: ''This Is Sexist''

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Earlier this week, the 27-year-old Oscar winner was criticized for wearing a revealing Versace gown to a photo call in London amid near-freezing temperatures

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"Emma Watson Can Pose Topless and Still Be a Feminist"

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Last week, Emma Watson's feminist credentials were questioned after she appeared in a somewhat risqué fashion shoot for Vanity Fair's March cover story. The actress-a United Nations Goodwill ambassador and outspoken advocate for gender equality-was shot topless, save an open-weave Burberry bolero. The photo, taken by Tim Walker, ignited a flurry of criticism online, with many chiding the actress for what felt like a betrayal of the cause. British radio host Julia Hartley-Brewer summed up the controversy in one tweet: "Emma Watson: 'Feminism, feminism . . . gender wage gap . . . why oh why am I not taken seriously . . . feminism . . . oh, and here are my tits!' "

During an interview with the BBC over the weekend, Watson finally addressed her critics. "It just always reveals to me how many misconceptions and what a misunderstanding that there is about what feminism is," she said. "Feminism is about giving women choice. Feminism is not a stick with which to beat other women with. It's about freedom, it's about liberation, it's about equality. I really don't know what my tits have to do with it." Any other questions?

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Emma Watson Can Pose Topless and Still Be a Feminist

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Last week, Emma Watson's feminist credentials were questioned after she appeared in a somewhat risqué fashion shoot for Vanity Fair's March cover story. The actress-a United Nations Goodwill ambassador and outspoken advocate for gender equality-was shot topless, save an open-weave Burberry bolero.

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If Women's Roles In Movies Were Played By Men

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"I like watching you sleep." Post to Facebook: http://on.fb.me/1kIQOXV Like BuzzFeedVideo on Facebook: http://on.fb.me/1ilcE7k Post to Twitter: http://bit.ly/1kIR09N LINKS! www.buzzfeed.com www.buzzfeed.com/video www.youtube.com/buzzfeed www.youtube.com/buzzfeedvideo www.youtube.com/buzzfeedyellow www.youtube.com/buzzfeedpop www.youtube.com/cnnbuzzfeed BUZZFEED VIDEO BuzzFeed is the world's first true social news organization. Featuring tasty, short, fun, inspiring, funny, edgy, interesting videos from theBuzzFeed.

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Coca Cola - Diet Coke - Gardener (Advert Jury)

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After much anticipation by Diet Coke fans who swooned over Lucky Vanous in the 90's ad, the hunk is back! This time he's a lift engineer and the girls spend their Diet Coke break staging a lift breakdown to get a better look.

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David Beckham Sofia Vergara Diet Pepsi Beach Twitter

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Marc Jacobs Diet Coke Commercial (Official)

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Uploaded by MarcJacobsInterviews on 2013-02-11.

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a TV ad from 1995

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don't know what my tits have to do with it," said the actress Emma Watson last week - the "it" being feminism. She was responding to a mild public furore over a photograph published to accompany an interview in Vanity Fair magazine to support her role as Belle in Beauty and the Beast. In the photo, she's sporting a Burberry cape that exposes most of her breasts.

With feminism central to her personal "brand" as an adult actress, in particular, since her a ppointment in 2014 as UN women's goodwill ambassador, it's not surprising that the photo raised some questions about the nature of her feminism. It's also not surprising that Watson snapped back.

Born Emma Charlotte Duerre Watson in Paris in 1990, Watson's British parents were lawyers who divorced when she and her brother were young; the family returned to England, where Watson grew up between Oxfordshire and London.

Prior to her casting in Harry Potter, Watson's acting experience was sorely limited: she had played three small roles in childhood productions, including a turn as "an angry cook" in a production of Alice in Wonderland. But after the recommendation of a theatre teacher and eight auditions, Watson was cast as Hermione alongside Daniel Radcliffe's Harry Potter and Rupert Grint's Ron Weasley. From the debut of the first film, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone ( Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in the UK), in 2001, the three unknown child actors became some of the best-known performers in the world. By 2009, with the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Watson's earnings in the series made her the industry's most highly paid actress.

Emma Watson as Belle and Dan Stevens as the Beast in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Photograph: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock

With her education split between the independent Headington School in Oxford and time spent with on-set tutors, life seemed to imitate art when Watson proved to be a star pupil who could rival her top-of-the-wizard-class alter ego, Hermione. Watson's impeccable GCSE and A-level results were much reported in the press, concurrent with uncomfortable coverage of her body. She has recounted how photographers lay down on the pavement outside her 18th birthday party in order to take pictures up her skirt. "If they published the photographs 24 hours earlier they would have been illegal," she said in a speech given to mark International Women's Day in 2016, "but because I had just turned 18 they were legal." Watson has cited this kind of sexism and sexualisation, experienced growing up in the film industry, as lying at the heart of her interest in feminism.

In 2010, Watson enrolled at Brown University in Rhode Island, a decision she took in part to help her avoid the British tabloid press. During her time at Brown, American media reported that "bullying" from her peers led to her decision to take a leave of absence from the university in 2011 - indeed, her attendance at at least one football game was live-tweeted by student journalists. But Watson explained that her decision to withdraw came from "a desire seek out normality... I kind of have to accept who I am, the position I'm in and what happened." She was, in other words, extremely famous.

Watson continued acting intermittently through her time at university - she did make an eventual return to Brown after a period as a visiting student at Oxford. Though she'd expressed a desire to pursue work other than acting on numerous occasions, it continued to be the focus of her career. Following the release of the final Potter film in 2011, Watson was seen in a number of new films, including The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring (2013) and Darren Aronofsky's 2014 epic, Noah.

Post-Potter, Watson has been widely regarded as a competent actress, somewhat safe in her choices, occasionally overrated or miscast because of the power of her fame. Publicity around The Bling Ring, for example, was heavily focused on Watson, giving short shrift to the rest of the cast. In theGuardian, Catherine Shoard described Watson's performance as "well-toned" but also "afforded excess airtime" in comparison to the other performers.

Emma Watson plays Ila in 2014 film Noah, directed by Darren Aronfsky. Photograph: Allstar/PARAMOUNT PICTURES

Since her UN appointment in 2014, the best way to describe Watson's relationship with feminism is to say that she has made it an intrinsic building block of her public identity; the interview in Vanity Fair is just one of many in which she's held forth on women's rights while demurring on questions about her personal life.

But perhaps her insistence on privacy is part of what has ruffled the feathers of those who find Watson an insincere feminist spokeswoman, provoking questions about the degree to which it is part of a calculated brand.

In addition, there is Watson's inescapable privilege - even setting aside the great wealth she has acquired in her acting career. Then there's the nature of the "He For She" campaign she spearheaded on behalf of the UN - appealing to men to support women's rights, arguably undermining the work of many feminists by implying that their efforts are inadequate without masculine endorsement.

It's hardly Watson's fault that she is who she is and she frequently notes her privilege. But it's hard not to consider that Watson's qualifications for her role as a bridge-builder between men and feminism included the fact that she's a young and beautiful, incredibly famous white woman with a cut-glass accent. A telegenic British girl next door - if you lived in a really good catchment area.

Watson has defended herself against accusations that she is a so-called "white feminist". When she received blowback for a 2014 interview with the writer and actress Tavi Gevinson, in which Watson described feeling "conflicted" about the sexuality portrayed in Beyoncé's work - she went on to conclude that the singer was "making her sexuality empowering because it was her choice" - Watson argued that she was working to use her platform to shine a light on the less privileged.

In many respects, playing Belle in Beauty and the Beast itself seems a choice that's incongruous with Watson's philosophies. It is, after all, a tale about a young woman who is entrapped by a wealthy but antisocial male creature with whom, in time, she falls in love. When questioned, Watson has insisted it's a feminist film - Belle is good at inventing things and in the early stages of the film she objects volubly to the Beast's cruel behaviour. But ultimately, it's a stretch to embrace a Stockholm Syndrome narrative as a romantic one.

One would have to conclude that Watson is no radical: her feminism is essentially a conservative one, compatible with the bureaucracy of the UN and the requirements of a Hollywood career. Her "tits" are then not irrelevant to conversations about feminism because she had gone to great lengths to represent herself as a feminist leader. She could have cited the photograph as a case of feminism in action, of a woman taking agency over her own sexuality, but her dismissal of it being part of the conversation doesn't sit that easily with her progressive credentials.

Most people have the good fortune not to have the thing they did when they were nine become so all-defining. Like her Harry Potter co-stars, Emma Watson's youthful fame locked her on a path that it has proved hard to deviate from. To so many filmgoers, her face will forever be that of Hermione Granger and perhaps for this reason and for the reason that she became the character when she was so young, Watson may be forgiven for so often embodying Hermione's attributes - a tremendous intellect that can sometimes be a bit know-all; a bravery that can sometimes move so quickly that it doesn't quite account for other people.

If you watch Watson closely in some scenes from the first Potter film, you can see that she is mouthing the lines of her co-stars: "I really wanted to do my job well," she explained in a recent interview with Jimmy Kimmel, "and I kind of overdid it." The public face of Emma Watson has always been one that aims to please, if not overachieve, and her surprise at the negative reaction to her Vanity Fair photo may suggest that she has not yet worked out how to deal with anything short of approval. But though she may have been in the public eye for nearly two decades - she is, after all, just 26 - she has some growing up to do. Then again, don't we all?

Comments willl be opened later

Born Emma Charlotte Duerre Watson, 15 April 1990, Paris. Raised in Oxfordshire. English degree from Brown University; UN women's goodwill ambassador.

Best of times Being cast, in 2001, as Hermione in the first Harry Potter film - and going on to star in the series - despite having no professional acting experience.

Worst of times Accused of hypocrisy for criticising Beyoncé's sexualised music videos, only later to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair in a photoshoot that partly exposes her breasts.

What she says "Feminism is about giving women choice. Feminism is not a stick with which to beat other women with. It's about freedom, it's about liberation, it's about equality."

What others say "It's refreshing to see her vigorous embrace of feminism, which Watson defines as 'the theory of political, economic and social equality of the sexes'. And apparently she lives by it." Jill Abramson, former New York Times editor

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Emma Watson: feminist to the core or carefully polished brand? | the Observer profile

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don't know what my tits have to do with it," said the actress Emma Watson last week - the "it" being feminism. She was responding to a mild public furore over a photograph published to accompany an interview in Vanity Fair magazine to support her role as Belle in Beauty and the Beast .

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Jeanne Dielman (1975)

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Cinema of Chantal Akerman Official Trailer

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Female Gaze (excerpt from Jeanne Dielman. Dir. Chantal Akerman, 1975)

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Laura Mulvey "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975)

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Laura Mulvey "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975)

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'Teen movies'

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Uploaded by StarStruck Film Productions on 2016-01-20.

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Laura Mulvey discussing  - Visual Pleasure and Narrative (1975)

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Laura Mulvey discussing  - Visual Pleasure and Narrative (1975)

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40th Year Anniversary Presentation

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Visual Pleasure at 40: Laura Mulvey in discussion (Extract) | BFI

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the classic references made in the text Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 1975)

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Laura Mulvey-Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema examples

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n.paradoxa’s 12 Step Guide to Feminist Art, Art History and Criticism 

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n.paradoxa’s 12 Step Guide to Feminist Art, Art History and Criticism 

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A primer for questions and references for the literature on feminist art criticism

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Miss Representation exposes the bold reality of western culture and our continuing idea that a woman's value is based on beauty over her ability as a leader

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A significant contribution to the debate coming out of 2nd Wave Feminism around the image and women's images...

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Claude Cahun, with kiss-curls, Clara Bow lips, love hearts on her cheeks and stockings, is posing with dumbbells. The words "I AM IN TRAINING DON'T KISS ME" are written on her white leotard. Pasted-on black nipples complete the ensemble. It is 1927 and the French artist stares back at us with a steady, insolent gaze. If that gaze asks for anything at all, it's complicity.

In 2012, Gillian Wearing realised her own version of Cahun's photograph, adopting the same pose, but without the writing or the stuck-on nipples. Instead of comedy dumbbells, she holds a mask of her own face dangling from a stick, while her own face is covered by a silicone mask (including ears) that bears an uncannily close resemblance to Cahun. The large scale of the work, called Me As Cahun, Holding a Mask of My Face, as well as other discrepancies, make it more homage than copy.

As with other portraits in which Wearing emulates famous photographers, there is an almost frightening verisimilitude. Andy Warhol in drag, bearing the scars of his shooting; the young Diane Arbus, alert behind her camera; Robert Mapplethorpe, facing death, with his skull-topped walking cane - Wearing has been them all, re-appropriating their self-images and making them her own.

She has also re-enacted family photographs, shooting herself as a small child, as a teenager, as her parents and grandparents. Each time, there are various clues to let us know she is performing a part. Her own eyes peer back at us through the undisguised edges of the silicone eyeholes. Somehow, her photographs shear away from the real the more they try to cling to it.

Since her rediscovery in the 1980s, Cahun has been subject of many exhibitions. The Arts Council has one touring now. Yet her art remains mysterious, her life full of unanswered questions - as I suppose all lives are. Born Lucy Schwob in Nantes in 1894, she adopted her pseudonym during the first world war while writing for her father's newspaper. Cahun met Suzanne Malherbe, her life partner and later artistic collaborator, while still at school. The two became stepsisters when Cahun's father married Malherbe's widowed mother.

Malherbe adopted the name Marcel Moore. Moving together to Paris, Cahun and Moore began collaborating on photocollages. They had ties to the theatre but focused on photography, most of which depicts Cahun in various masquerades. This was more than merely dressing up: Cahun with gold-dyed hair and checkered shirt, looking away from herself in a mirror; Cahun as a besuited dandy; Cahun as Buddha and duplicating a portrait of her own father; Cahun the skinhead avant la lettre; Cahun as a man, as a matelot, as a peasant; turbaned, masked, male, female, somewhere in between.

It is attractive to regard Cahun as an artist more of our time. Her reputation rests on her astonishing yet modest black and white photographs that display her sexual and gender politics, her refusal of the binary norms of male and female, her feminism and lesbianism, both coquette and butch. "Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation," Cahun wrote. " Neuter is the only gender that always suits me."

In a 1994 video, Wearing dances alone to the music in her head in a shopping mall in Peckham, London. In 1947, Cahun stands on the sea wall at the bottom of her garden in Jersey. In a diaphanous white outfit, and carrying what looks like a shepherd's crook, she too seems to dance in the succession of blown-up contact sheet shots that paper an entire wall at the National Portrait Gallery.

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Claude Cahun's Self-portrait (with Nazi badge between her teeth), 1945. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist

What distances lie between the two artists, what proximities? Cahun, 53, has been aged by the German occupation of Jersey, where she had moved with Moore in 1939. Both spent a year in prison for their hapless resistance activities, much of it in solitary confinement and under a death sentence. The wall she stands on was built by the Germans. Wearing, 31 at the time she shot Dancing in Peckham, was a Goldsmiths graduate, a young British artist riding, or dancing, the wave.

This is just one of the strange and awkward meetings that attempt to show the affinities between the two artists, in a fraught, unbalanced exhibition called Behind the Mask, Another Mask. Cahun's photographs are small, fragile and demand a different register of looking to Wearing's mostly large-scale work. Both parts amount to incomplete retrospectives, and neither quite manages to illuminate the other.

At the end of the show, Wearing has papered a wall with images of herself as an older woman, digitally aged. In these different versions of her possible self at 70, she looks pinched, perky, comfortable, fighting the years, conventional, louche, an old rocker. Somehow, there's no real risk here. Cahun was all risk, though she had no reputation to lose.

Wearing belongs to a different generation to Cahun. Her expectations as a successful artist are entirely different to the experiences of the Frenchwoman who, after the liberation in 1945, stood in her doorway in a trenchcoat with a Nazi eagle badge clenched in her teeth, like a cat with a sparrow. There is a homemade, extemporised quality to Cahun's art, while Wearing's work looks like it was intended for public display.

In 1949, Cahun posed with an oval, blank mask over her face at the edge of a graveyard. She looks like an apparition. It is a haunting image, made more so by its delicacy. Small details snag you - her one black glove, her bare legs, what appear to be manacled hands. In 2015, Wearing stood by the grave of Cahun and Moore in that same cemetery. Like Cahun, she raises her hands to her head. Instead of a blank mask she covers her face with her hair. It seems an almost spontaneous, semi-private gesture, very much in the spirit of Cahun, and all the better for it.

Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, Another Mask is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 9 March-29 May
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Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask review - jail, gender and Jersey

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Claude Cahun, with kiss-curls, Clara Bow lips, love hearts on her cheeks and stockings, is posing with dumbbells. The words "I AM IN TRAINING DON'T KISS ME" are written on her white leotard. Pasted-on black nipples complete the ensemble. It is 1927 and the French artist stares back at us with a steady, insolent gaze.

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Until recently, Claude Cahun was little-known: an androgynous figure on the margins of surrealism, who considered herself "third gender" - neither male nor female - and whose small oeuvre consists entirely of carefully dramatised photographic self-portraits.

Now, however, Cahun is considered one of the key artists of our age - despite the fact that she died in 1954 - a sort of patron saint of the Instagram era, when "everybody" is exploring their identity, gender and body image through uploaded self-portraits.

Cahun paved the way for Cindy Sherman, Tracey Emin and all artists who make themselves the focus of their art - and these days, that is a lot people.

Here Cahun is paired with Turner Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing, for a show that plays with the idea of a self-portraiture as a kind of mask that conceals as much as it reveals. "Under this mask, another mask," declared Cahun. "I will never finish removing all these faces." Confusing? Of course. But then a degree of rather delicious obfuscation is what this exhibition is all about.

Born in 1963, Wearing, who emerged as part of the YBA generation alongside Emin and Damien Hirst, is no slouch herself when it comes to posing for the camera. Her recent work involves the use of technically sophisticated masks, and at first sight this appears very much her show, with Cahun's images dropped in to provide context.

In the opening, large-format image, Wearing appears in the role of Cahun, a doll-like figure with bee-stung lips and kiss-curls, only the cut-away sections around the eyes revealing that the face is in fact a mask. In her right hand she holds an empty-eyed mask of herself. Is it a life-mask or a death-mask, or are all masks, like all photographs, in some respects memento mori?

Seen opposite this wacking high-gloss image, the Cahun's tiny sepia photographs, from which it was derived, struggle to hold our attention. But as we dig deeper, this balance of interest starts to reverse itself.

Born Lucy Schwob in 1894, into an affluent Jewish family in Nantes, Cahun never felt comfortable in her female skin, and, adopting a more androgynous name, began to record her changing appearance in a series of quasi-fictional portraits, the majority taken by her partner Suzanne Malherbe, who changed her name to Marcel Moore. From curly-haired, dutiful Jewish daughter, Cahun becomes a boy sitting on a beach, then a young working class-man (who could pass at a glance for a skinhead), a sexually indeterminate Nosferatu lookalike, with shaven head and beaky nose. And, at the age of 25, she becomes the deliberately posed image of her father, a respectable businessman.

If each of these tiny (often no more than 3x4in) but powerfully composed images feels like it has a whole novel's worth of emotional content behind it, Wearing's polaroid self-portraits are remarkable in their determination to give nothing away. Wearing, indeed, hardly needs to wear a mask. Her appearance - familiar long dark hair and ever-so-slightly-surly expression - barely change through the hundreds of images in her series My Polaroid Year 1988-2005. It's as though she's daring us to read significance into these calculatedly mundane images, with their banal domestic backgrounds.

The exhibition proceeds as a kind of dialogue, in which Wearing responds to Cahun's images - and, in the way of these things, it inevitably becomes something of a competition. Wearing wins the film round. Against her funny Dancing in Peckham, in which she disco dances in a south London shopping mall - without music - Cahun can offer only enlarged contact prints of an expressionistic sun-dance performed in her garden in Jersey in 1949.

Wearing's use of masks to recreate her appearance at different stages in her life becomes increasingly complex, from the stiff and robotic Self-Portrait, 2000, to Me as an Artist in 1984, 2014, where you blink before you realise a mask is involved, before then pausing to work out what the face behind it must actually look like.

While Cahun donned masks during her late-Twenties surrealist period, these feel a red herring beside the mask-like personae created with her actual features. These reach their apotheosis in the superb Self-portrait (reflected image in mirror with chequered jacket) in which her eyes betray the satisfaction of the person who has completely transcended their given identity - and in which she appears to predict the New Romantic style adopted by Boy George, Steve Strange et al over half a century later. If you didn't know, you'd never imagine this immaculately stylish photograph was taken in 1927.

This exhibition makes fascinating play with concealing and revealing, identity and deception. Who is the real enigma here: the long-dead surrealist or the inscrutable and very-much-alive YBA?

We tend to assume that Cahun's images must reflect her real life at the farthest frontiers of gender dislocation, while Wearing, the consummate professional, we imagine assuming and discarding roles before going home to "normal life". In fact, there's no evidence that Cahun's self-portraits are any less "faked" than Wearing's.

Wearing's contribution climaxes with a kind of large-scale prosthetic family album, in which she uses latex masks and body extensions to become members of her family, from her brother, half-naked with sweat pants and tattoos, to her grand-parents got up as though for a wedding. In the brilliantly unsettling central image, Self- Portrait at seventeen years old, she appears as a kind of creepily alluring ventriloquist's dummy of herself. But in many of the others the illusion is so complete, and there's so little of Wearing apparent in the image, you're left wondering at the point of the exercise.

Cahun's story hardly ended happily: she died in her final home in Jersey in 1954, having been incarcerated by the Nazis and her health damaged by attempting suicide in prison; her companion and collaborator Moore committed suicide. Yet the pair appear to have achieved a degree of contentment on Jersey: in her final images, the edgy, shaven-headed figure has become an only-very-slightly outré English country lady. That is, in all probability, the most brilliantly realised "mask" in the entire exhibition.
March 9 until May 29; 020 7321 6600; npg.org.uk

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Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, Another Mask, National Portrait Gallery, review

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Until recently, Claude Cahun was little-known: an androgynous figure on the margins of surrealism, who considered herself "third gender" - neither male nor female - and whose small oeuvre consists entirely of carefully dramatised photographic self-portraits.

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The subject of this exhibition could scarcely be more fashionable if it tried. It's all about gender-slipperiness, the mass appeal of androgyny, that wish we all have to slip off a mask - or put one on. Or having slipped one off with such seductive adroitness, to surprise our friends by revealing that there is yet another mask behind the first one. What fun! If only Bowie had not absented himself so shockingly abruptly.

The exhibition brings together two artists, one dead, another living. You could call it a collaboration if you like, but collaborations are never really quite what they seem. Just beneath the surface of the uneasy amity, there always tend to be fights to the slow - or quick - death of one reputation or another. And so it is here. Who wins then? Who are the contestants for supremacy?

Gillian Wearing once won the Turner Prize. She is from the West Midlands, and she is very much alive. Claude Cahun is the dead one. French, and born with the fairly dull name of Lucy Schwob in 1894, she died in 1954 on the island of Jersey. Her work is very little known - many of the prints on these walls will never have been seen in public before. Her works, generally speaking, are very small.

Wearing's work is large and takes up a good deal of wall space - photographs, masks, sculptures of dismembered limbs, etc. Wearing has the advantage, you could say, because she can respond and interpret Cahun's work as much or as little as she likes. She can climb up on another woman's shoulders so that we all get a better view of her. By her I mean Wearing. And she does - or, at the very least, she tries to. Cahun, being a dead surrealist, cannot answer back. (Unless, of course, something unusual happens in the coming days, and, given that she was very much influenced by André Breton, that is perfectly possible.) In fact, the skilful curation of the show has turned it into a homage of sorts by Wearing to her predecessor.

The difference between them is one of quality. In spite of the fact that we experience Cahun through nothing but small and grainy images, her vitality, her versatility, as an artist win through at every turn. By comparison, Wearing's efforts seems slow and over-calculated, programatic and slightly lumpish. Cahun's entire body is consumed by her art - the way she holds it in suspense or bends it or floats it on water - and by her obsessive wish to be ceaselessly reinventing herself as a being who is hauntingly gender neutral. It is a genuine exercise, we feel, in painful self-hazarding. There is no such pressure behind Wearing's work - in spite of its commanding physical presence on these walls and its technical slickness.

One of Wearing's works is called My Exquisite Corpse, after a famous game invented by the surrealists. The first participant person begins a drawing, and then folds the paper over so that the second, continuing it, is launching herself out, in the most fragile of skiffs, on to unknown waters. And so it goes on. Wearing's effort has been made in collaboration with her partner Michael Landy and the painter Gary Hume. It has no lift, no energy and no unpredictability. It's rubbish.

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Surrealistic gender exploration at the National Portrait Gallery

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The subject of this exhibition could scarcely be more fashionable if it tried. It's all about gender-slipperiness, the mass appeal of androgyny, that wish we all have to slip off a mask - or put one on. Or having slipped one off with such seductive adroitness, to surprise our friends by revealing that there is yet another mask behind the first one.

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Written by Izabela Radwanska Zhang

The National Portrait Gallery's new exhibition shows the "extraordinary links" between Claude Cahun and Gillian Wearing, finds BJP in an article first published in our March 2017 issue

Early 20th-century surrealist photographer Claude Cahun (1894-1954) and contemporary artist Gillian Wearing come together in The National Portrait Gallery's ambitious new exhibition, Behind the mask, another mask.

The exhibition includes 100 works by the two artists who, despite being separated by 70 years, have "extraordinary links" according to curator Sarah Howgate, in an interview for the March 2017 issue of BJP. "Although their trajectories as artists are markedly different, many parallels can be drawn between their work," she says.

The exhibition - the result of a "light-bulb moment" at a round-table meeting of NPG directors - addresses themes of gender, masquerade and performance through images that often involve the artists dressing up and wearing masks to portray a character or communicate a message.

In an early Cahun self-portrait the photographer is dressed as a 'dandy', for example - a young man with a shaved head and a neatly pressed black suit, complete with a handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket. The show explores "Cahun's transformation from young girl to gender-neutral figure", explains Howgate.

Cahun, a contemporary of Man Ray who was born Lucy Schwob, devoted her life to dismantling stereotypes of gender identity via her images and politically-charged essays. "Masculine? Feminine?" she wrote. "It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me." Elsewhere, she simply stated: "I will never finish removing all these masks."

Cahun was also an active member of the resistance movement in Jersey during the Second World War with her partner, the artist Marcel Moore [who was born Suzanne Malherbe]. They distributed leaflets encouraging Nazis to desert and dropped subversive notes - written in German, as if from an officer - into their pockets to chip away at morale. They were arrested and imprisoned for almost a year, an experience which is said to have deeply affected Cahun, and which may have led to her early death aged 60.

Born almost 10 years after Cahun's death, Wearing has often sought inspiration from her predecessor's work. Her portrait Me as Cahun holding a mask of my face is a homage to Cahun's I am in training don't kiss me - holding a Venetian-style mask of her own face on a string, Wearing sports a mask of Cahun's visage but peers out at the viewer through the eye-holes.

Wearing, who won the Turner Prize in 1997 and is associated with the Young British Artist movement, has also made a series inspired by the French surrealist, some of it produced after a recent trip to Jersey (where much of Cahun's photographic archive is still held) and previously unseen by the public.

A collection of playful Polaroids that show how Wearing's appearance has changed over time has also been unearthed for the exhibition. "They are fascinating and interesting in their casualness, which is unlike the way that Gillian works now," says Howgate. "They are very homemade."

The show concludes with a series by Wearing in which she creates "her spiritual family", says Howgate, "with homages to Claude Cahun as well as Diane Arbus and Andy Warhol."
Behind the mask, another mask - Gillian Wearing & Claude Cahun is on show from 09 March - 29 May at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Entry costs £10, concessions £8.50. This article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of BJP, which is available via www.thebjpshop.com

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Early 20th-century surrealist photographer Claude Cahun (1894-1954) and contemporary artist Gillian Wearing come together in The National Portrait Gallery's ambitious new exhibition, Behind the mask, another mask. The exhibition includes 100 works by the two artists who, despite being separated b

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Emma Watson Photo shoot controversy March 2017

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Emma Watson Photo shoot controversy March 2017

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Example 1

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Emma Watson addresses Vanity Fair photo controversy

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Serena Williams Photo Shoot controversy February 2017 

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Serena Williams Photo Shoot controversy February 2017 

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Example 2

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'By baring (practically) all in this Swimsuit issue, Serena has loaded importance on her body parts rather than what her body enables her to do as a tennis player.'

'I've never actually worn a thong bikini . . . the thong is perfect, it really made me feel comfortable. I'm officially a thong girl now".

This quote isn't from a member of the Kardashian mob on their latest attempt to break the internet - it is a line from one of the best tennis players ever.

This week photos and a behind-the-scenes video of Serena Williams' shoot for the Sports Illustrated 'swimsuit issue' were published.

In one picture Serena is wearing a blue swimsuit lying on a beach with her arm behind her head, looking as uncomfortable and awkward as someone trying to scratch an itch on their back that they can't quite reach.

There is the highly original 'shower scene' photo of Serena in an itsy, bitsy, teeny, weeny bikini posing under a shower with her arms provocatively resting against a wooden stand (because, obvs, that's the way women stand under a shower after a day's work).

And there's the money shot of Serena pictured topless with her arms covering her breasts and wearing a thong. You see, she's officially a thong girl now.

The pictures broke a recent trend for Serena. She has done her bit in the past to raise the issue of equality in sport.

Last year she said she wants to "see people, the public, the press, other athletes in general, just realise and respect women for who they are and what we are and what we do".

In November she wrote an open letter about equality and equal pay: "Women have to break down many barriers on the road to success. One of those barriers is the way we are constantly reminded we are not men as if it is a flaw. We should always be judged by our achievements, not by our gender."

The exception to the last line, it seems, is when you want to get your kit off.

When an athlete like Serena goes from acing another Grand Slam to taking her clothes off for a magazine (just because the words 'Sports' and 'Swimsuit' are in the title, Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue doesn't make it anything other than soft porn) it shows success doesn't change some women's desire to be validated for how they look.

In the behind-the-scenes video, Serena says: "I want people to come away with the fact that its okay to be comfortable in your body. I feel like its okay to look strong, to be sexy and to be a woman."

Hold on Serena. So to look strong, sexy and to be a woman involves baring your butt and boobs? What happened to being "judged by our achievements and not by our gender" or was that way of thinking inconvenient for this kind of glamour photo-shoot?

Why does Serena feel the need to wear barely-there bikinis to "be a woman" when the best advertisement she gives of being a woman is the way she plays?

Maybe, she doesn't want tennis to define her. It's hard to forget her sassy Sports Illustrated front page cover a few years ago when she had one high-heeled foot draped over the arm-rest of a golden throne. I even liked (not really) the way she danced (terribly) in Beyoncé's video Sorry.

But by baring (practically) all in this Swimsuit issue, Serena has loaded importance on her body parts rather than what her body enables her to do as a tennis player.

These kinds of photos are reductive, they're about how women look rather than about what women like Serena have to say (cos there ain't all that much going on in America these days).

These photos switch Serena into the traditional passive role for women who are objectified as things to be ogled.

The most laughable notion is that these photo-shoots are 'empowering' women as if they're something to celebrate.

To some, women like Serena who are not short of money, have fit athletic bodies and decide themselves to take their kit off is proof of how far women have come.

Oh please, it does nothing of the sort. It instead underlines the historical and societal value which continues to be placed on the way girls and women look, and girls and women's part in playing out that role.

Serena isn't the only tennis player in this Sports Illustrated issue. Eugenie Bouchard (hugging a big inflatable swan in one picture, for goodness sake) and Caroline Wozniacki (in the issue for the third year in a row, is there someone she's trying to impress?) are also giving readers a license to lust after them with their topless shots. I guess if you can't be the best, then at least try to be the most famous.

It is almost too easy to blame the folk at Sports Illustrated for enabling all this. A look through their Twitter timeline over the past few days and the rare times female sports stars got mentioned was when they were promoting this Swimsuit issue.

If sportswomen want to scratch an itch and take their kit off they become willing pawns for others to objectify and degrade. And instead of solely trading off their performances on the courts, they allow themselves become a commercialised version of 'sexy'. And we all know how that sells.

Indo Sport

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Sinead Kissane: Serena Williams sabotages own equality battle with soft-porn photo shoot - Independent.ie

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'I've never actually worn a thong bikini . . . the thong is perfect, it really made me feel comfortable. I'm officially a thong girl now". This quote isn't from a member of the Kardashian mob on their latest attempt to break the internet - it is a line from one of the best tennis players ever.

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Claude Cahun's art questioned gender norms

For Claude Cahun, resisting normalcy was a lifelong pursuit. Born in 1894, she was a genderqueer pioneer, Jewish Nazi fighter, and radical collage artist. The French photographer's self portraits are a focused interrogation of identity and gender fluidity. Rediscovered in the 1990s, her work reminds us that the impact of one person's refusal can ripple for centuries.

The daughter of prominent Jewish publishers, Cahun was born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob in Nantes, France. But by the age of 18 she was already making self-portraits and identifying as androgynous under a series of pseudonyms, eventually settling on "Claude" for its gender ambiguity in French. She identified as agender in a time before neutral pronouns, and used photography to channel her complex relationship to the binary of public and personal identity. These are familiar concepts in a world after Cindy Sherman and Leigh Bowery, but for prewar France they were progressive to the point of incomprehension.

Cahun's development as an artist parallels the thick intellectual fervor of interwar Paris, but her interests and output remained peripheral to the male-dominated circle of surrealists who held sway. In 1937 Cahun and her longtime artistic and romantic partner Marcel Moore (Cahun's " l'autre moi") decamped to the Channel Islands to escape the anti-semitism of wartime Paris. Moore and Cahun were technically stepsisters-Moore's widowed mother had married Schwob's divorced father-and their sister act allowed them to cohabitate without drawing attention. In Jersey the two became active in the French resistance as members of the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, using their design skills to undermine German authority by targeting occupying soldiers with anti-Nazi propaganda. Wearing disguises, the pair would mill around German social gatherings and surreptitiously leave flyers in attendees' coat pockets or on empty tables and chairs.

In 1944 Cahun and Moore were arrested, jailed, and sentenced to death for subverting the Nazi authority. Much of Cahun's work was confiscated and destroyed, but the artists' lives were saved when the war ended and Jersey was liberated in 1945. Cahun continued to make pictures until her death in 1954.

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This queer Jewish photographer resisted the Nazis and escaped death-and made great art

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Claude Cahun's art questioned gender norms For Claude Cahun, resisting normalcy was a lifelong pursuit. Born in 1894, she was a genderqueer pioneer, Jewish Nazi fighter, and radical collage artist. The French photographer's self portraits are a focused interrogation of identity and gender fluidity.

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Whilst focusing on Gaming Culture, its useful to test the Male gaze theory against these forms.

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Male Gaze Theory and Gender Performance (Gamer's Guide to Feminism)

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A summary of Mulvey and some contemporary examples asking if it still applies today ...

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Are women still objectified? | Laura Mulvey Male Gaze theory explained!

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Guerrilla Strategies - The Guerrilla Girls

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Guerrilla Strategies - The Guerrilla Girls

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0:00 / 4:58•Watch full video

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Guerrilla Girls: Art and Feminism / Guerrilla Girls: Arte y Feminismo

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hould you be struggling with a gift idea for that special person in your life, here's a suggestion: how about a home DNA kit? These are all the rage in America, I recently read in the New York Times, with 3m sold by ancestry.com alone in the past five years. At last, Americans can find out how Irish they actually are.

On the one hand, this makes sense: identity is the hot issue of our age. On the other, it makes no sense at all, because your identity is, we keep being told, whatever you want it to be. And, indeed, the New York Times writer stoutly concluded, "Whatever the results, I'll still come from a large Irish family." Top o' the morning to you, sir: why let a blood test ruin your St Patrick's Day?

Nowhere is the discussion about identity more passionately felt than within the transgender movement. If you feel you are a woman, you are a woman is the rule, although some women are querying this. Last week, the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was asked by Channel 4's Cathy Newman whether trans women are "real women". "My feeling is trans women are trans women," Adichie replied, a response not so much tautological as almost palindromic. "I don't think it's a good thing to conflate everything into one."

This was a clearer way of saying what Jenni Murray had written in an article that clumsily argued trans women are not "real women". And as with Murray, the online opprobrium quickly rained down on Adichie's head. The next day she posted a clarification on Facebook, but stood her ground: "Acknowledging differences and being supportive are not mutually exclusive," she wrote.

The fear of being on the wrong side of history is a strong persuader, and it was clearly behind much of the reaction to the news that the BBC had slapped down Murray. Instead of crying foul at the broadcaster's palpably nervy excuse that their presenters must remain "impartial on controversial topics" (while having no problem with Gary Lineker sharing his political views), female commentators gave Murray a kicking. Let all women be women, was the verdict.

This kumbaya approach is an increasingly popular one. Why can't we ladies all just get along? Hakuna matata! Yet no one is asking why more women than men are raising objections here. Perhaps people think this is just what women are like: uniquely catty. Lifelong feminists, especially older ones, who express any reservations about eliding the experiences of trans and cis women are dismissed as bigoted ol' bitches - and maybe some are. But there are real ethical issues here, and they overwhelmingly affect women.

Sport is one obvious example. Male-born bodies have had different testosterone levels and muscle distribution from female ones. No one knows what the solution is but pretending there isn't a difference is ridiculous. Then there are prisons. It's easy to cheer on Chelsea Manning, but Ian Huntley - who now reportedly wishes to be known as Lian Huntley and be transferred to a women's prison - is a tougher sell. Should a man with a history of crimes against women and girls really be in a female prison?

Related: I'm American and British. Can I save the special relationship?

In January, it was reported that the British Medical Association advised that instead of referring to "expectant mothers", health providers should talk about the less exclusionary "pregnant people". Some young feminists are even asking if it's OK to use the words "female" and "woman" - yet men are not being urged to avoid mentioning their gender. Is it any wonder some women are calling bullshit?

Just as the fringe elements of the political world have taken centre stage, so the more extreme end of the trans movement - which insists there are no differences between trans and cis women - has moved to the frontline. Some will call this progress; to me, it seems more a case of throwing out the commonsensical baby with the transphobic bath water. Trans activists say the idea that biology should determine who is and isn't a woman is misogynistic. Yet far more simplistic gender arguments are advanced by the trans movement. On Radio 4's PM last autumn - from the impartial BBC - a mother went unchallenged when she claimed she realised her three-year-old daughter was a trans boy when she asked for books about pirates instead of princesses. In another BBC interview last year, Eddie Izzard said he loves manicures because he's trans.

That trans people have long suffered from hideous prejudice and violence, and continue to do so, is without question. But as Adichie said, acknowledging differences and being supportive are not mutually exclusive. If anything, they go hand in hand, because they allow women, trans and non-trans, to talk honestly and see each other as people, instead of reducing themselves to manicures and menstruation.

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Identity is the issue of our age: so why can't we talk more honestly about trans women?

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hould you be struggling with a gift idea for that special person in your life, here's a suggestion: how about a home DNA kit? These are all the rage in America, I recently read in the New York Times, with 3m sold by ancestry.com alone in the past five years.