"The body becomes it's gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time."
~ Butler, 1988: 523
Body Museum tackles ‘the relationships between the public display of the bodily motion and the articulation of social categories of identity, of their transmission, transformation, perception, and enactment’ (Desmond, 1997: 3). Currently, the project focuses on bodies shaped while sitting, particularly, the emphasis is on the positioning of the legs and feet. Future work will explore more poses involving folded hands or a standing body.
The project’s title was inspired by the reading of Janet Goodridge’s (2011: 120) article where she presents her vision of her body as ‘a living dance museum – an inner archive or repository of dance/movement-arts practice’. Seeing the body as an archive of past events triggered the idea of curating a bodies’ archive by way of ethnographic photography. Participants are asked to find their personal seating position for a particular scenario or setting. The results are visually documented and presented on this website and Instagram.
This work puts a spotlight on a cultural body (i.e. its assimilation of cultures) which is exposed in ways of sitting. Anthropologist Ted Polhemus (1993: 7) explains: ‘Where one personally stood in relationship to this clash of cultures was precisely encapsulated in how one walked down the street, sat in a chair, leaned against a wall or moved on a dance floor’. In other words, the way we sit or move is determined by the cultures in which we grew up.
Furthermore, Susie Orbach (2009: 8) writes: ‘As we perform our exercises, do our hair, put on our clothes, we are underpinning how we wish to be seen and how we see ourselves’. This presence of unconscious or conscious ‘awareness of being watched’ (Howson, 2004) while sitting influences the choice of the position. This is especially true among women - ‘seeing oneself as an object shapes how women move through the physical environment’ (ibid: 59) - and how much space they occupy while sitting.
The gender differences in the photographs are striking and prove one more time that, ‘in any society and at any point in human history there have always been two significant categories of experience which inevitably and profoundly distort any individual’s subjective perception of cultural reality: age and gender’ (Polhemus, 1993: 10). What participants have to say about their poses also reminds us that ‘women are not born but are taught to become feminine in ways that emphasize containment and control’ (Howson, 2004: 58).
In 1979, Marianne Wex, a German feminist photographer, undertook the project “Let’s Take Back our Space”. She collected images, among which were seated people with a sharp gender contrast being presented. Body Museum shows how little has changed in the last 40 years. Let the photograph speak for themselves… Proceed to our galleries or peruse our Instagram page.
Reference List
Butler, J. (1988) Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal. 40(4) pp. 519-531.
Desmond, J.C. (1997) Introduction. In: Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance. Durham: Duke University Press. pp. 1-28.
Goodridge, J. (2011) The Body as a Living Archive of Dance/Movement: Autobiographical Reflections. In: Davida, D. (ed.) Fields in Motion: Ethnography in the Worlds of Dance. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. pp. 119-144.
Howson, A. (2004) The Body in Society: An Introduction. Oxford: Polity.
Hutera, D. (2011) Regenerating Identities. Animated: The Community Dance Magazine. Spring.
Orbach, S. (2009) Bodies. London: Profile.
Polhemus, T. (1993) Dance, Gender and Culture. In: Thomas, H. (ed.) Dance, Gender and Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 3-15.
Wex, M. (1979) Let’s Take Back Our Space: “Female” and “Male” Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structure. Berlin: Movimento Druck.