High Fem, High Masc: Performing Gender in Colors

Can gender be performed? This question has preoccupied theorists, spanning the gamut from psychoanalysis to postmodernism, yet it remains elusive. Sigmund Freud offered essentialist conceptions of gender identity rooted in psychic anatomy, whereas Michel Foucault conceived gender as a construct devised to maintain networks of power and knowledge. In her monumental work, Gender Trouble(1990), Judith Butler notably argued that gender comprises the sustained performance of socially ordained acts that produce the illusion of binary difference, subverting deterministic links between sex and gender. As conservative extremists increasingly weaponize discourse surrounding gender to undermine trans and non-binary communities, interrogating the performative nature of gender remains as relevant as it is urgent. Decades after Butler’s groundbreaking intervention, their theories continue to insist we critically challenge gender norms and examine how gender categories regulate identities and bodies, especially ones of color.

Can gender be performed? Let’s ask this question again. Butler and other scholars have collectively compelled us to conclude that it can, while pushing us to imagine possibilities that transcend the binary power structures that produce gender itself. This essay juxtaposes two performance artists on the identity spectrum’s opposite ends: Keioui Keijaun Thomas and Matthew Barney. Witnessing their work alongside one another, new revelations about performing gender emerge. Thomas’ work constitutes a radical reimagining of history in which the dolls (transwomen of color) are thriving, whereas Barney inherits and operates within a tradition that has amplified white male voices like his own. Yet Barney’s influence has also shaped an artworld where marginalized artists like Thomas can finally gain institutional platforms. This ambivalent dynamic inspires ongoing inquiry as to how certain voices are empowered over others. Ultimately, by contrasting Thomas and Barney’s works, this essay aims to uncover invigorating perspectives on enacted gender and its emancipatory possibilities. 

Keioui Keijaun Thomas is the self-proclaimed “doll” surviving mass extinction through resilience forged in adversity. Her work inhabits an Afrofuturism that envisions an empowered trans future, leveraging Surrealist imagery and blending satire, homoeroticism, and revisionary oral history telling. Contrastingly, Matthew Barney explores bodily transcendence and sexual differentiation, often incorporating homoerotic and masochistic motifs. Both artists work across media engaging themes of identity, performativity, and emancipation: Thomas directs an activist gaze toward speculative futures that empower marginalized communities, while Barney excavates physiology and the inner psyche to probe an individual body’s transformation. Collectivism versus individualism, a notable distinction between the work of these two artists, can be located in the framework of the cultural and historical context of the Queer Black body in America.

Barney, a cis heterosexual white male, never needs to place himself within a historical/cultural narrative where his identity would face scrutiny, potentially being questioned but never silenced. Critics like Terry Myers pointed out at the time of his initial emergence that “Barney is perfect for an art world that prefers that its gay artists be straight, its black artists be white, and its women artists be men.” (1) As New York Times writer Michael Kimmelman put it, “gay artists darkly joked about the fact that the most successful young gay artist had turned out not to be gay.” (2) 

Curator Amelia Jones summarized it perfectly, 

Barney and Abramović, while appropriating tropes and strategies, such as performance, from feminist and queer art and theory, freeze the performative into objects or spectacles that can be readily commodified. Again, a few “queer” tropes or “feminist” appropriations here and there are fine for the art world as long as the work is still by an artist who appears to be white and male (or, really, “masculine” and “phallic”). Call this the ‘Margaret Thatcher syndrome.’ (3) 

Indeed, the “Margaret Thatcher syndrome” continues to prevail in today’s art world, leading me to think about disidentification, José Esteban Muñoz’s theorization of a survival strategy leveraged by marginalized people, particularly queers of color, in navigating hostile cultural terrain — rendering (re)generative what might otherwise be deadening. Rather than completely rejecting or assimilating dominant ideologies, minorities disidentify, taking up cultural forms and repurposing them, insisting they reflect and refract one’s own experiences and needs. Disidentification allows marginalized groups to reshape cultural production, enveloping forms encoded with heteronormativity and whiteness, refilling, refueling, and ultimately transforming them. In an essay on Jean-Michel Basquiat, Muñoz posed: “How does this young African American identify with a muscular red, blue, and gold and yes, white, ‘Superman,’ not to mention the pastiest of art-world megastars?” (4) Muñoz’s query crystallizes the complexities of identification for minority subjects amidst icons of mainstream culture that fail to represent their identities. Pioneering Afrofuturist artist Renee Cox, confronting the absence of black superhero figures when her sons questioned this lack of representation, transformed herself into the figure of Raje to envision a liberatory black female superhero who shatters the status quo. Muñoz and Cox highlight the importance of disidentificatory practices, empowering possibilities to rework mainstream culture while rewriting history.  

Thomas’s gender-performing work traffics in disidentification as she continues to battle with the concept of “lack” within the Black diaspora.  “It is so black, it is blue… It is detached and left for the faggot who can never be a Black man.” In Come Hell or High Femmes: The Era of the Dolls, Thomas reinforces this interrogation of absence. Thomas parses and unsettles Black masculinity, revealing the alleged deficiencies that obstruct identification as and with true Black manhood. Echoing Muñoz’s assertion that “the social construct of masculinity is experienced by far too many men as a regime of power that labors to invalidate, exclude, and extinguish faggotry, effeminacy, and queerly coated butchness,” (5) Thomas critically confronts her deviation from masculinist Black norms to examine further Black womanhood, especially for trans individuals.  

In her one-night-only performance, Come Hell or High Femmes: The Era of the Dolls, at Abrons Art Center on April 4th, 2023, viewers were immersed in a dimly-lit interior bifurcated by a fringe curtain of camouflage fabrics. The area was replete with recycled materials — coffee beans, balloons, string, confetti, tape, cardboard boxes, plastic bags, pedestals, and bricks. This use of material carried metaphysical significance, aligning with Muñoz's argument that disidentification within the framework of the Black diasporic experience involves “the (re)telling of elided histories that need to be both excavated and (re)imagined.” (6) Staging a no-waste zone, Thomas tangibly manifested her project of challenging ossified historical narratives and boldly envisioning a future where the dolls survive and thrive. Expanding on the concept of revisioning history in an interview with the New York Times, Thomas foregrounds thingliness, invoking the long history of “how Black bodies are used as disposable labor and domestic service.” (7) The objectification of Black bodies propels Thomas to shape-shift; therefore, a new language of survival is born.  

However, this doll is confined by duct tape encircling her joints, waist, and ankles. The indentation and redness caused by the painfully tight binding viscerally convey the constraints faced by Thomas as a Black trans woman. The ceremonial freeing of these invisible shackles proves intimately and collectively moving: Thomas approaches the racially diverse audience, asking individuals to gently remove her tape bonds. This ritualistic unbinding signifies Thomas’ revisionary reworking of the enslaved Black diasporic narrative through a lens of solidarity. A twist comes at the end when Thomas selectively thanks and embraces only the Black attendees, pointedly excluding non-Black observers from this intimate communion. Her deliberate centering of Black solidarity cultivates a safe space and enacts a paradigm shift: rather than fixating on the white gaze, Thomas' speculative world privileges communal care and appreciation within the Black community. In the era of the dolls, Black folks are finally centered, appreciated, and loved. Thomas' art gracefully re-authors narratives of oppression into visions of empowerment and collective liberation. 

In tandem with her video work, Thomas engages in a dialogical exchange with herself. Literary critic Geneva Smitherman describes the Black oral tradition of call-and-response as signifying "spontaneity, emotional involvement, rhythm, teaching, conversation, verbal dexterity, and humor." (8)  Speaking in poetic fragments, Thomas conjures a temporal and spatial oscillation, responsive to and in the ancestral as well as the present. By vocalizing in a delayed temporality, this dialectical juxtaposition signifies the nonlinear entanglement of then and now, while foregrounding disruptions of history that (can) shape the present. Through self-reflexive discourse delightfully untethered from chronology, Thomas inhabits the liminal state between reverence for origins already lost and active resistance against current constraints as she chants, “Black femmes are the original teachers.” The artist’s anachronistic conversation with herself underscores both the ruptures and recuperations between diasporic history and contemporary identity. 

Similar to the call-and-response elements in Thomas's work, Barney's most recent project, Secondary, also incorporates this style of verbal performance. Though signifying the funeral ritual, the chanting in Barney’s video work leans closely toward its musicality and sound aesthetics rather than substantive meaning. Inspired by the infamous Tatum-Stingley collision (9), Secondary continues Barney's interests in the concept of the body and gender performance through a five-channel video installation. As critic Alex Greenberger describes, “Set across several screens, the installation would be easy to write off as another macho, pretentious moving-image work from an artist who dabbles in them. Yet it is so hypnotic that even those repelled by Barney’s machismo will fall under its spell.” (10) Premiering in Barney’s Long Island City studio on May 12th, 2023, the exhibition immerses visitors in disquieting tension, evoking the uneasy anticipation of violence within American football and American pageantry culture as a whole. Though based on a tragedy involving the paralysis of a Black athlete, Barney was still able to interject himself into the lead role as Kent Stabler, a quarterback on Tatum’s team. Dancers Raphael Xavier and David Thomson embody the roles of Tatum and Stingley respectively, and navigate within Barney’s studio with a deliberate slowness that is also rhythmic and athletic. Thomson, in his own testimony, taps into the vulnerability and innocence of the tragic figure, Stingley, which further amplifies the cruelty within American football culture.

Barney’s use of Black bodies recalls Kimmelman’s comparison of Barney as “a video version of Mapplethorpe; if he wasn't naked, he was, as in one video, pushing around a football player's blocking sled while dressed in a cocktail dress.” (11) This invokes their shared appropriation of Black forms as cultural motifs. Mapplethorpe notoriously fetishized Black subjects, even admitting in a 1989 interview that many Black men in his infamous Black Book died from poverty or AIDS. (12)  While Mapplethorpe’s white privilege aligned with the socio-political climate then, it is crucial to critique similar dynamics today. The second half of Kimmelman’s analogy describes Barney wearing a cocktail dress while pushing a football sled, channeling drag and feminine personas despite embodying masculine physicality. This form of drag experimentation has historical precedent among cis white male artists like Marcel Duchamp’s alter ego Rrose Sélavy but is rare among Black cis male artists. The dissonance suggests gender performances intersecting with racial hierarchies – white masculinity accommodates temporary feminization while Black masculinity faces greater constraints, policed by social expectations and power relations. Scholar Kobena Mercer critically assesses Robert Mapplethorpe's fixation on Black bodies, characterizing it as a colonial fantasy that generates ambivalence, in which racist stereotypes are undermined not by Mapplethorpe but by the spectator. Building on this viewpoint, Muñoz argues that gay men of color, including Mercer and Isaac Julien, experience a disidentificatory pleasure when engaging with Mapplethorpe's images, acknowledging the unsettling aspects of the black male objectification in which Mapplethorpe participated while recognizing the persistent allure of this pleasure, despite its political risks. (13) Similar to this notion, Barney's work evokes ambivalence, drawing cis white artists like himself into the embrace of the art world. Ultimately, a legacy of appropriating and commodifying Blackness underlies the work of both Mapplethorpe and Barney, demanding continued analysis through an anti-racist lens. 

Barney's Secondary, when analyzed in light of our recent societal awakening of race and sexuality, raises a pertinent inquiry: What are the consequences of performing masculinity, particularly for individuals of color? Bearing this question in mind, it is noteworthy that both Thomas and Barney share a common background as former college athletes. Thomas played football from a young age and nearly pursued a collegiate track, while Barney was recruited to play football at Yale University in 1985. However, it is crucial to examine the realities of sports participation for people of color and transgender individuals. Trans people's involvement in sports has become highly politicized, with conservative politicians imposing restrictive measures that not only target trans individuals but also impact cisgender athletes. A striking example is the case of Caster Semenya, a cisgender Black woman Olympic runner, who has been subjected to court rulings mandating the use of hormone-suppressing drugs to compete. These instances illustrate the intersecting and contentious dynamics surrounding race, gender identity, and sports participation. Barney's artistic prowess and institutional recognition are undeniable. However, there is an opportunity for him to further enhance his work by consciously empowering and amplifying the voices of those who would not traditionally receive acclaim for engaging in gender-bending performances. By actively sharing the spotlight with individuals who challenge societal norms but often go unnoticed, Barney's work could transcend conventional boundaries and attain an elevated artistic significance.  

Thomas’ work constitutes a radical reimagining of history, one in which dolls like her can endure and thrive rather than perish. Barney, conversely, inherits and operates within a linear historical tradition that has always incorporated cis-white male artists like himself into dominant narratives. Yet, the potency and influence of Barney’s oeuvre have, in a way, contributed to shaping an art world where marginalized voices, like that of Thomas as a Black woman artist, can finally access institutional platforms and visibility. This ambivalent dynamic proves intellectually energizing for cultural critics like myself. However, it simultaneously issues a call for sustained ethical vigilance: an urgent need to continually hold benefactors of white supremacist systems accountable, while illuminating the oppressed and the invisible.  

Recent research conducted on 329 contemporary foraging societies reveals the pervasive and significant participation of women in hunting, challenging the conventional "man the hunter" stereotype. Women collaborate in hunting large game in 50% of societies and procure small game in 85%, contributing 10-35% of calories from hunted food. The findings indicate a fluidity in hunting roles that is context-dependent, rather than indicating fixed divisions. This comprehensive analysis provides compelling evidence of women's substantial contributions to hunting in prehistoric human societies, critiquing the persistent influence of the "man the hunter" myth on gender stereotypes and policy through empirical data. (14) Combining these findings with Jack Halberstam's concept of "Female Masculinity," which explores how individuals assigned female at birth can embody and perform masculinity, suggests a future where gender roles and their constructions gradually collapse, leading to a broader understanding of gender diversity and queerness. While gender can be performed, it is hopeful that one day, society will move toward a state where the performance of high fem or high masc is no longer necessary, and individuals can simply be HUMAN.