Gender

About

Art about gender examines how being a woman, a man or neither is defined, performed and policed. Claude Cahun's shaved-head self-portraits of the late 1920s refused to settle on one identity. The feminist art of the 1970s questioned who got to make art and how bodies appeared in it: Nancy Spero printed goddesses and victims of torture along long paper friezes, and Ana Mendieta attached a friend's beard clippings to her own face in Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants) (1972).

Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990) described gender as something done repeatedly rather than something one has, and artists took up the idea. Catherine Opie photographed friends in false moustaches for Being and Having (1991), Sarah Lucas posed with two fried eggs on her chest in Self Portrait with Fried Eggs (1996), and Zanele Muholi's ongoing Faces and Phases, begun in 2006, portrays Black lesbian and transgender people in South Africa.