| Many feminist theorists have argued for a reexamination of "the feminine" as it impacts the gender constructions and representational practices surrounding the female body in the postmodern era. Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Elisabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, Mary Russo, Kathleen Rowe, Diana Fuss, Margrit Shildrick, Peggy Phelan, and Elin Diamond recognize femininity as a performance and offer varied feminist reading strategies to unmask such performances. This dissertation offers post-feminine as a post-modern feminist spectatorial position particularly attuned to the performances of portraiture. The prefix "post-," as in post-modernity, signifies a discursive move past and an incorporation of a particular perspective or way of knowing. Post-feminine/ post femininity is a feminist identification that considers multiple performances of sex/gender difference without absorbing or refusing them.; Photographic portraits create an inherently ambivalent framing of bodies; they both represent and perform their captured "reality." Historically, photographs have been employed in the service of "fixing" identity, particular normative femininity. Rather than accepting that "the feminine" is a self-evident or inherently repressive category of women's identification, this dissertation remaps the space of "the feminine" by examining portraits of a trio of post-feminine figures---the woman serial killer, the woman of extreme old age, and the woman who passes as a man---for how these performances reflect and refract appearances and identities most integrally linked to normative female (i.e. "feminine") gender identification.; Chapter two examines portraits of Aileen Carol Wuornos, often cited as America's "first" female serial killer, from her 1991 arrest, trials, incarceration, and 2002 execution. Chapter three examines portraits of extremely aged women, with particular focus on photographer Manabu Yamanaka's Gyahtei series (2000), as post-feminine spectral bodies. Chapter four examines portraits of Brandon Teena and Billy Tipton both whom have become iconic figures in the struggle for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender/transsexual rights in America as they were able to pass convincingly in their everyday lives as the "opposite sex." These three discursively entwined portraits provide a particularly rich terrain for examination not for the "evidence" they are presumed to display, rather for the "bodies" they are bound to perform. |
