as Post-Structuralist Feminist Critique
It can be argued that the work of Cindy Sherman isùat least in partùfeminist critique. Certainly, in reading the feminist theory of critics such as Judith Butler, one can easily see that ShermanÆs ôsex picturesö series argues on the same side of post-structuralist feminism that Butler champions. Furthermore, in juxtaposition to the work of a similar yet categorically male artist such as Hans Bellmer, it is easily seen that while Bellmer seems to operate on a more essential phallogocentric level in his art, Sherman most certainly operates on a level that is more conducive to the notions of femininity, as we will see in Butler.
This argument is rooted in the ideas of binary opposition that are derived in the structuralist theories of Levi-Strauss, which we will not examine in any depth here. The essential idea of binary opposition claims that everything is A or B, and thus, what is not A, is B. These are two mutually exclusive categories, i.e. white/black, day/night, mind/body, and most important for our purposes, male/female. The consequences of this structural theory were such that the first category was held as ôbetterö or more important than the second; this effectively held the construct of ômaleö over that of ôfemaleö, and associated all other binaries in the same manner respectively. This later resulted in a post-structuralist movement bent at reversing these binaries, thus holding ôfemaleö above ômaleöùin order to destroy the notion of the binary entirely. From this idea, the work of Cindy Sherman and Judith Butler emerge,
In looking at the representative work of the ôsex picturesö series, we see the incomplete forms of women, created from the manipulation of mannequins into poses usually reserved for the world of pornography. What Sherman does with the mannequins however, is certainly not pornographic at all, but a statement of the rights of woman to assert he...