Clones in blackface and drag: The promise and privilege of the feminist biotechnological imaginary

Hines, Megan

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/117142 Copy

Description

Title

Clones in blackface and drag: The promise and privilege of the feminist biotechnological imaginary

Author(s)

Hines, Megan

Issue Date

2022-02

Keyword(s)

• feminist biotechnological imaginary
• gender
• race
• art
• feminism

Abstract

This article discusses the visual culture of the feminist biotechnological imaginary, a technofeminist belief that a feminist society could be technologically engineered at the biological level. In the United States, many second-wave feminists embraced the possibility that reproductive technologies might facilitate women’s liberation from biological determinism. The idea that biology could become a tool for self-fashioning and diverse community building rather than a fixed determining force resulted in gender and race becoming mutable categories. Both race and gender became subject to technological intervention as well as technologies in themselves. Within the visual culture of the feminist biotechnological imaginary, images of clones served to examine the tension between unity and diversity in the feminist movement. Working in this context, the white women-identified artists Lynn Hershman Leeson, Cindy Sherman, and Eleanor Antin constructed representations of themselves in drag and blackface. I argue that these representations related to the visual culture of feminist clones and undermined gendered power structures while ultimately reinforcing existing racial ones.

Series/Report Name or Number

Media-N, vol. 18, issue 1

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21900/j.median.v18i1.849

Copyright and License Information

• Copyright 2022 Megan Hines
• This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).

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