Jennifer Miller - from “The 1998 Bearded Lady Calendar” by Zoe Leonard (1997).
(For shitz and gigglez, contrast this with Maryam Namazie’s “Nude Photo Revolutionaries” calendar.)
Hi! I noticed someone noticed my old posts, so I figured I’d make a new.. post. Here is my bachelor’s thesis. (Like, a year and a half old, now, but still a pretty rad read, I hope.) It was officially submitted to the art history department (long story), but I was completely over art history and deep into feminism & gender studies at that point, so I ignored that and wrote a feminist text (& got a rad grade from my rad feminist modern art scholar Marga). Check this out, if only for the TON of rad images in the back. This includes amazing photos by Catherine Opie, Zoe Leonard and Trish Morrissey, as well as the Ana Mendieta stuff I posted long ago. Rad rad rad.
(If you’re reading this, hi Chelsea! Sorry for vanishing!)
OH! And following Chelsea’s lead over at the “unacceptablebeards” Tumblr that got me into Tumblin’ in the first place, I will now scratch “bearded ladies” from my vocab and retroactively ask y’all’s to take that title with a grain of salt :). (I’m not a lady and I have a fairly unacceptable beard too, or so I’m often told. (Mmm. Gotta perpetuate those hegemonic visual norms.) Not as unacceptable as beards on female-designated faces, BY FAR FAR FAAAAAAR, but there’s always someone willing and able to remind me of the stigma whenever I’m off guard.)
Another ridiculously cool Ana Mendieta piece I found. It’s a variation on the performance I posted earlier, done in the same period. Unfortunately I couldn’t locate any photos of the performance itself (it was her and Morty Sklar again, I’m assuming this time he only cut his mustache), but this is badass enough to stand on its own, I think. It’s a shame she died so young. -J
Ana Mendieta
Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants), 1972
In these performative self-portraits taken in the final stages of her master’s degree (in painting, but that’s a different story) at the University of Iowa, Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta carefully transfers the facial hair of her bearded, male friend Morty Sklar to her own face, gluing it to her chin/jaws as Sklar cuts it from his. She starts off with a soft, hairless face next to Sklar’s full beard, and ends up with a full beard herself (but sadly no mustache). She would later use the second-to-last photo (the frontal solo portrait) as the basis for a series of silk screens which ended up being her final thesis submission (well, hence painting), but the performance and resulting photos themselves are much more interesting than that. In the performance, Mendieta actively reverses the act of depilation that is a frequent ritual for so many (invisible) women with facial hair, and instead deliberately grows a beard in a matter of minutes. By doing so, she shows the strong gender-specificity (or exclusivity) of this symbol of identification called facial hair. While Sklar with-beard might be seen as somewhat unkempt by the average viewer (something easily fixed with a little trimming), his beardedness would raise no other questions; most would glance over him or be more inclined to notice some other aspect of his appearance, if any. Mendieta with-beard, however, is virtually incomprehensible to the conventional gaze. Magically, the exact same stuff, on a different face, suddenly has a wildly different meaning. -J
