Beyond the Feminine

How can contemporary artists and image makers challenge representations of race and gender in visual culture and produce alternate visions? Exploring a range of lens-based British art that engages with questions of race and gender, this book critiques power structures that embed racial dichotomies to arrive at a nuanced understanding of the position of race in contemporary visual culture. It examines how white and light-skinned Black women are privileged over Black and dark-skinned women in music videos, advertising, and even in classic paintings. Focusing on skin colour as implicit in constructions of femininity, the works discussed deconstruct the links between race and gender to expose hidden power relations. Presenting intimate interviews with four British artists – NT, Marcia Michael, Sadie Lee and Ajamu X – along with the author’s own artistic practice, this book provides a much-needed toolkit for image-makers and critics alike. Using the analogy of the ‘set up’, this boundary-breaking book encourages us to not only question what we see, but to see differently, beyond the conventions of the male gaze. Reversing normative categories and social hierarchies, Beyond the Feminine puts forth a new gaze; an up-set to the system. In this compelling journey through visual culture, moving images and photography, artist and educator Ope Lori questions how intersections of race and gender in visual representations play out for women of different racial and skin colour complexions. In particular, she daringly engages with how these hierarchies of difference are mapped out, in and through the encounter of the Black female body and the white female body, when both occupy the same frames of reference. How and why is it that whiteness is linked to femininity and Blackness to masculinity or, as she argues in the book, to the non-feminine? What then is the feminine, as we navigate a much-needed discussion in what it means to be a woman and, indeed, what constitutes the ideal female body. Using the analogy of the set-up she encourages us to not only question what we see, but to see differently, beyond the conventions of the male gaze and the limitations of the oppositional gaze, towards a new gaze that causes an up-set to the system. Using intimate in-conversations with four British artists – NT, Marcia Michael, Sadie Lee and Ajamu X – along with Lori’s own image-making practice, this book provides a much-needed toolkit for anyone engaging with making or receiving images. It is Lori’s contribution to addressing the inequalities experienced by women, not just in visual culture but in real life, and to the current engagement with challenging acts of violence, however they manifest, against women and girls across all borders.