(Today’s posting showing that I’m Not Dead Yet. Tough day, the eve of my man Jacques’s death day, 17 years ago. Watching the funeral service for George Floyd. In a California heat wave.)
Recently in the (physical) mail, a pair of cards from Ann Burlingham from her last Australian visit. She saw them as a diptych, to be viewed in sequence. The cards are about, though she didn’t say this, the presentation of gender.
On the left:
(#1) A greeting card by Lilly Perrott, illustrator and designer for La La Land (cards and gifts)
And on the right:
(#2) Patience Hodgson of The Grates, with Straight Arrows + Pleasure Symbols, performing at the Corner Hotel, Melbourne, August 15, 2015 (photo by Kristen Ashton) – from the Life Music Media site
In #2, Hodgson performing extravagant but aggressive Feminine. In #1, the cartoon figure of a merman (NOAD on the noun merman “the male equivalent of a mermaid”) performing sexually compliant Feminine, in the form of an odalisque (NOAD on the noun odalisque: “historical a female slave or concubine in a harem, especially one in the seraglio of the Sultan of Turkey”). With, as a lexical extra, the portmanteau mermazing, merman + amazing.
Yes, he’s amazing, for the gender cross, but there’s a lot more than that. #1 is a take-off on an extraordinary painting:
(#3) The Ingres odalisque
From Wikipedia:
Grande Odalisque, also known as Une Odalisque or La Grande Odalisque, is an oil painting of 1814 by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres depicting an odalisque, or concubine. Ingres’ contemporaries considered the work to signify Ingres’ break from Neoclassicism, indicating a shift toward exotic Romanticism.
Complete with a turban in #1. But displaying his big belly rather than his buttocks.