Diane Torr

 

Diane Torr

Recommended to me by Maria Fusco last year, Diane Torr presented a rare but interesting embodiment of transgender selfhood by adopting masculine personae, and inviting other women to do so too through her ‘Man for a Day’ workshops. In these, women are invited to live Judith Butler’s notion of gender as a performative act, dressing and behaving like their gendered opposites and in the process, it is hoped, learn something about the unwritten codes, rules and limitations of what defines a specific gender and differentiates it from their own. As transmasculinity is still somewhat ‘underground’ and much less obvious than the male-to-female variety, Torr and her work filled a very important gap in society and culture. The idea of the ‘drag king’ is one that has evolved only in recent decades and I myself had never heard of the term until my first visit to Manchester’s Canal Street in 2014 (for a cabaret act appearing at the Via bar) – Torr herself has done much to raise the profile of this artform, and bring male impersonation somewhat into the public consciousness.

            Torr’s gender-swapping workshops have their analogue in Annie Sprinkle’s 1991 ‘Sluts and Goddesses’ sessions, wherein both male and female participants dressed in sexually provocative attire and took on the personae of ‘sex-goddesses’, embodying the erotic power of sexualised femininity championed by Camille Paglia. Unlike Sprinkle’s group work, Torr’s gender-swapping embodied the everyday, the conventional, even the stereotypical (photos of women participants in some of her workshops depict the cross-dressed results invariably sporting almost comical, Village People-style moustaches), and invited women to consider what is and isn’t considered masculine? Only by ‘living’ in the skin of another can we hope to even begin to understand how those others are perceived and treated in the wide world, as Torr herself describes in one anecdote – in increasingly embarrassing detail – during her visit to a public art gallery in full moustachioed male mode, where she found herself unexpectedly stalked by a very persistent female admirer. I discovered this myself through gradual experience after first coming ‘out’ in 2014, where I found myself variously read as a woman, a transperson, and an “effeminate guy” according to one earnest encounter.

            Torr’s work steps out of theoretical and academic ‘gender studies’ and brings it into the street, where unconventional gender representations can still provoke problematic reactions, but by encouraging persons of one gender to ‘impersonate’ another, such efforts educate us in how gender itself is constructed, by a network of visual and behavioural cues – thereby going beyond performance art and touching on such areas as anthropology, social science, psychology and evolutionary behaviour: why are men and women seemingly conditioned to ‘act’ in certain ways, and what are the consequences of not buying into those behaviours? Only by close study of a subject can we hope to successfully ‘mimic’ it, but where gender is concerned – and I believe that we are all capable of existing on a spectrum of gender, no matter how restrictive (or restricted, in some cases) – we may already have some of the ‘other’ within is, thoughts and developing notions which I have recently gained directly from Torr’s writing.

 

Reference: D. Torr, ‘Sex, Drag & Male Roles’, Ann Arbor, Uni. Of Michigan Press, 2010.