'3 Questioning Cartoons'

'Phiz/phys': Playing in the stadium of incongruous physiognomies and physicalities, or, ‘Why doesn’t the head match the body..?’

A recurring consideration in my recent research work is that of reactions – reactions to me, to my work, and of course my own reactions to those initial reactions, a network of feedback which accounts for me sitting writing these very words now. Revisiting this drawing style in October 2021 cannot help but remind me of the reactions I received to the comic-book characters I regularly posted on art-sharing site Deviantart.com between 2007 and 2016, many of which boiled down to the essence of “All your women look like trannies”. Whereas then I was still developing my aesthetic sense and was unsure of the whys and wherefores surrounding it, now, years later, I am fully grounded in my purpose for creating this kind of physicality and physiognomy, and have deliberately set out to push the boundaries of orthodox representation – to make distinctly queer art in the idiom of mainstream comic-book art, which, with few exceptions, is still hopelessly inseparable from its traditional cis/het/white male mindset, and its associated gaze. How might the orthodox majority react to such a provocative colonization of their aggressively-guarded territory? The three deliberately provocative pieces which follow were all created and submitted to a new Deviantart account in the past few weeks – but so far without any reaction. What remains so far, then, is the theory informing them, the personal experiences and narratives they reflect, and the first visualizations of this research journey into aesthetics, gender, and subversion.

‘HELLO BOYS’  

In this I chose to play with the reactions of not only the viewer of the work, but of the unseen, assumed ‘boys’ of the title, whose position the viewer occupies. To untangle this seemingly rather lowbrow work:

- the title is written in the same font, colour scheme and style as the 1981 American sex comedy film Porky’s, the quintessential cis/het male fantasy of college-age guys pursuing the quest to get laid (and see women naked) at any cost. The background design also echoes the original poster, which depicts a blue tiled shower room and theteasing side view of a naked female reaching for the shower control, while a (male) eye stares up at her through a hole in the wall. There is no tease herein: instead a full-frontal revelation, though not quite of the sort that would have been expected.

- the film was a recurring theme in playground conversations when I was at school, mainly involving classmates showing off how explicitly they could describe certain scenes. I came late to this party, finally seeing the film on TV when I was about 18, and therefore able to understand what all the fuss was about at a time when it seemed rather tame, compared to the late-night Sky TV adult channel offerings.

- we may imagine the terror that would inflict the sex-mad teenagers upon being confronted by this ‘girl’, who now turns ‘her’ gaze upon them, and the reactions they – macho, swaggering types that they are – would have to suffer. Referring to the iconic ‘Wonderbra’ poster which was allegedly responsible for traffic accidents, the roles are reversed: the gaze is met in this case, demanding a reaction from the viewer as ‘she’ welcomes them, either blocking off the ‘escape route’ or presenting ‘herself’ blatantly in the doorway in a somewhat predatory manner. Whatever the case she clearly likes what she sees, which forces the viewer to consider how they might feel about that.

- on a more insidious level, the scene is capable of being read as a reference to the transphobic myth of transwomen using their status as an excuse to seek illicit access to women-only spaces in order to pursue some undefined, but definitely illegal, perverted sexual agenda. Here, it’s the turn of the men to be scared: ‘she’ does not truly belong in this macho, male-only shower room, so the cowering inhabitants tell themselves. Yet where else can she go? The ambiguous protagonist literally stands on the threshold, the nexus of a complex web of socio-cultural threads: gendered biology, the navigation of gendered spaces, responses to ‘Othered’ bodies and persons, and the assumed motivations of individuals based upon their biological essentials, and prejudices that arise therefrom.

My own personal reasoning behind this work is that a ‘hot babe’ the boys had previously pursued outdoors has recognised their advances, and now, to their probable dismay, has returned to divulge her true nature, turning their fantasy on its head – but perhaps the boys are not as heterosexual as we may assume...

 Alternative consideration: an earlier version of this drew the character with a blatant erection – which, while perhaps amusing in its sense of role-reversal, perhaps also reinforced the “sexual predator” figure in transphobic discourse, and is still a signifier of male-pattern sexual behaviours. However, the physicality of the penis is itself another binary problem: flaccid, it suggests submissiveness, weakness; and erect, it suggests aggression, dominance and even potential rape culture (issues, if not informed directly by, then at least heavily illustrated by, ancient Greek art, wherein the erection was mocked as a symbol of bestial, uncivilised mentality, in which savage men allowed their emotions and desires to control their bodies – which is the ancient Greek definition of the ‘effeminate man’, contrary to the later European conception of the flaccid, mincing aesthete. Foucault, in his ‘History of Sexuality’1, reminds us of the Greeks’ ideas of virtue surrounding sexual abstinence and the control of desire). What to do with the penis in nude art is a prickly problem discussed by Nancy and Ferrari in ‘Being Nude: the Skin of Images’: “...the erect penis can’t be painted (or photographed) without being pornographic...without revealing a methexis without mimesis...[t]he penis is the joker of the naked...forever too improper really to be put into play.” 2 This area relates to one of my original research questions, “What constitutes an ‘acceptable’ depiction of a non-standard body – is there such a thing? In what contexts?” Hereafter I’ll consider the depiction of non-binary bodies in terms of how the revelation (or concealment) of genitalia – themselves of course the source of biological determinism – affects not only the reading of the body and the character, but the deeper discourse surrounding exploitation, pornographic intent and the pornographic gaze, the reaction being the defining element in the piece’s success (or otherwise)3.

1 Specifically volume 2, 'The Use of Pleasure' (trnsl. Robert Hurley, Penguin, London, 1994).

2J-L. Nancy and F. Ferrari (Transl. Anne O'Byrne & Carlie Anglemire), ‘Being Nude: The Skin of Images’, Fordham Uni Press, New York, 2014.

3 I've long since considered the prejudices held against certain stylistic genres of what tend to be lumped together as 'lowbrow' or 'popular' art: Western-style comics (and “comix”, the underground/subversive flipside), cartoons, and Japanese (or Japanese-influenced) manga or anime. Roy Lichtenstein notwithstanding, actual comic art rarely appears in the context of fine art galleries and when it does, it ought not to be too polished, too precise, too indistinguishable from its mass-produced counterpart – or else, like Murakami's sculptural icons, so big and so 'pop' that they seem to transcend their origins. This makes the depiction of deliberately subversive content difficult for some, as the assumption that these media tend to glorify and enforce the most base of content: sex, violence, good/evil and other orthodox binaries, will sometimes obscure the attempts to challenge or interrogate these very tendencies. (Such prejudices tend to be confined to the Anglo-American world: in Asia and Europe, especially the Franco-Belgian regions, graphic narrative and its stylistic forms are regarded on a far higher cultural level.)

 

‘NIP ‘N TUCK’

This also plays with the American college cliché of the nubile cheerleader, though with a deeper personal meaning. My earliest memory of actively exploring the feminine side of myself is from about age 7 or 8, which I accomplished via my grandmother’s dressing table mirror, and a selection of her costume jewellery. This sense of growing sense of self-awareness at an early age meant I had no 'girl' clothes to cross-dress into, so I had to rely on imagination, inner dialogue, fantasy and to a large extent, the use of mirrors in order to construct my Other, inner self at that time. While I increasingly felt more female as years went by, it was still only through visualising and creating a dialogue with the mirror (and much later, the camera) that I was able to see myself as Other and judge, appreciate, modify, that construction. Thinking, or 'acting female' whilst embedded in day-to-day 'male mode' felt completely incongruous (triggering what I now understand to be low-level dysphoria), and the need for accessories – clothing, make-up, etc. (all examined, again, through the agency of the mirror) – to refine that ‘other self’ increased.

In Lacan's 'mirror stage', an infant’s nascent sense of Self is encountered, though as this involves identification with an image outside itself, the process invests the Self in the form of the Other. As the 'stage' in Lacan's usage is ambiguous – functioning also as a 'stadium' for an act of performance, that can last a lifetime – I aim to focus on the growing sense of 'Otherly' gender being formulated through the same process, in the sense that gender can be viewed as a performative, embodying act. For me, it was also empowering, and liberating.

“I want what she’s having...”

The down-side of investment in the form of the Other is that we cannot have what the Other has – the experiences, the emotions, the successes – thus providing us with frustration, and in my case, another level of dysgraphia as I was forced to vicariously live that side of my life through models, music videos and films – until I finally found the confidence to get ‘out’ in early 2014, and never looked back.

 

TRANS/MUTED ATHENA

An attempt at embodying my working method (which I tentatively refer to as ‘post-postmodernist’) of using ‘low’ cultural forms (comic book art, cartoons, T-shirt designs) to critique and challenge ‘higher’ attitudes which enforce any fixed position or socio-political status quo of binary opposition – or indeed embodying ‘higher’ thought and critique in a lowbrow cultural artefact (again with reference to distinct postmodern practice and method, such as Murakami). Working between the hypermasculine physicality of transmale performance artists Loren Cameron and Cassils, and iconic gay cartoonist Tom of Finland, I made a deliberate return to the same form of androgynous representations which triggered often unfavourable responses on certain online art-sharing forums, and which in many ways now contribute to the work I do in terms of formulating a reasoned response and justification for my own representational practice. Graeco-Roman and classical idealism are in evidence as both Cameron and Cassils seek to re-codify their forms according to their own inner visions of self. Also my long-standing interest in bodybuilding per se as a transformative process, parallel in some ways to transgenderism in terms of realising in actuality an inner, idealised sense or image of self – to refine, fine-tune, until the goal is met in which the form of inner self matches what is seen by others – to map upon the outward body the form which the mind believes it ought to occupy. (Of course one is not born a bodybuilder, as intersex and gender-incongruent people are, but the inner driving mechanisms have certain similarities. Both processes involve much effort, both physical and psychological, drugs and hormones, and professional medical advice).

 

As a side note, the general form of masculinized female presented here is not without its subterranean fetishistic connotations – enshrined in the West via an almost exclusively pornographic appropriation of the historical Japanese futanari form, which refers to figures of ambiguous gender – but which in Western adult ‘pop’ culture is usually downgraded to what might be referred to as ‘shemale’ imagery. This literal phallusization of the female form, for all its apparent inclusivity (in terms of tolerating a ‘non-standard’/hermaphroditic body), still seems rooted in what (Freudians at least) would define as an exercise in reuniting the troublesomely ‘castrated’ female with her ‘missing’ body part, producing a satisfying resolution to the infantile male viewer’s problem of reconciling cisgendered female anatomy(1).

The notion of shemale versus transitioned MtF may be summarised as – one still has their phallus, and is therefore deemed, I would reckon, ‘safer’ while the latter, in disposing of it (if not physically then likely biologically through hormones), angrily reminds the cis male of the possibility that it can be ‘lost’ – and even voluntarily surrendered at that, a notion no doubt reprehensible to the macho male’s fragile sense of being and his whole raison d’etre (cf. Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling on the accounts of prevailing attitudes to genital surgery, such as the mutilations practised upon intersex babies, which privilege a working penis, with erectile and sensory functionality – at the expense of the female counterpart, in which the clitoris is given scant if any consideration for its use in later adult life – the focus in the latter case being only on the vagina being able to receive a penis – too bad if the recipient of this phallocentric prejudice grows up queer).

 

The enthusiastically-embraced conception of Athene as somehow empowering (as a warlike female) should be tempered with the fact that she is in essence a surrogate man bereft of femininity (as an untouchable virgin, clad in full armour and bearing the aegis of the apotropaic head of Medusa – identified famously by Freud as an emblem of castration anxiety and here symbolised by the Freudian reference to the pubic hair), and her status as upholder of patrilineal succession. Her origins, as birthed directly from the mind of Zeus with no motherly contribution, refute any hope of a matrilinearity from her direction (a situation clearly regarded with neurotic terror in the ancient Greek mind, as indicated by their numerous depictions of Amazonomachy2 themes). In this sense she has similarities with the BVM of Christianity, who likewise has had little direct influence upon empowering or furthering the equal rights of living, worldly women, or making any flesh-and-blood woman feel good about her own flesh, or blood. That Athena was the one goddess in classical times who was always depicted fully-clothed, and furthermore armoured, by stripping her here we expose the darker, insidious sense of femininity which got the ancient Greek males so neurotic, seemingly. In graphic design terms, the red triangle is a direct reference to the badge for political prisoners used in Nazi Germany, wherein the bi-gendered or ambiguous body is in today’s world still a political battlefield. Personal note: While I vividly recall once believing that both girls and boys had penises3 - I never recall any fears or troubles arising from castration anxiety when I discovered that they didn’t (at about age 6, if memory serves). Perhaps because I always knew that I did not feel l00% masculine internally anyway, with what Foucault might have termed “hermaphroditisim of the soul”, and always identified with the Other in films and TV, especially cartoons (the female characters, the non-human/alien characters, the monsters – especially Godzilla – and animal/human hybrids of any form, such as werewolves and ancient Egyptian deities). For this reason I grew up with little interest in traditional comics, most of which focused on macho male humans such as superheroes, a dislike which persists to this day, and may be one reason why I was never embraced by the mainstream comics fandom – since I never made any effort to embrace their boring power-fantasies.


1 This analysis is based on composite readings – and interpretations – of various writers and theorists. While I disagree wholly with Freud’s apparent and reported patriarchal bias and the theory of ‘lacking’ – I’m still assimilating Juliet Mitchell’s study - his general theories of fetishization of the feminine, whether the body itself or of objects associated with it – and the male propensity to seek to ‘complete’ her anatomy with phallicized accessories (cf. all those sword, gun, whip, etc.-wielding comic-book, video game and movie heroines) does, for me at present anyway, seem to be well-explained by that line of reasoning, and is highly relevant to me at this point in exploring non-binary physicality, and the very mixed responses to it. The fans of ‘shemale’ imagery, in my experience, find themselves troubled when the site of ambiguity is moved from the crotch to the face – therein, creating the (arbitrary) perception of an underlying masculinity – my interpretation being the viewer ‘reads’ the figure as transgender, once male but though now feminised, still requiring the ‘feminisation’ of physiognomy in order to happily accept the representation – literally as a ‘girl with a dick’, i.e. a non-castrated female, some form of phantasy (as opposed to fantasy) reformation of the primal mother – as opposed to, and distinct from, anything that may, on some level, threaten their own fragile sense of heterosexuality.

2 Battles between the Amazon female tribes and vicotrious Greek males. The iconography and themes in the legendary figures of the Amazon have informed my visual, and theoretical, work for some years now, a long-term (still unrealised) project being a reworking of Heinrich von Kleist’s epic tragedy Penthesilea in some form or other – from whence my interest in the Mulvey/Woollen film of the same title.

3 I have memories of a drawing of a ‘girl’ I made at about age 4 or 5 which upset me when my parents read it as a boy, seeing only the penis and not the breasts, while the figure’s long hair could have been interpreted as part of late l970s male culture, and which I sported myself up until about age l3. This early attempt at representing my own inner hybridity was probably more of a defining moment than I’ve hitherto realised…