The Female identity being performed -- Gender rebellion in Cindy Sherman’s photography

Department of Chinese language and literature, East China Normal University, Minhang district, Shanghai, 200241 China

^* Corresponding author: clfdeyx@fjmu.edu.cn

Abstract

Cindy Sherman is a post-modernist artist who uses photography to question and deconstruct traditional images of women. Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills is a female self-portrait “parody”, showing the performative characteristics of “female behavior” in many places. Judith Butler pointed out that the construction of female gender identity comes from “performativity”, which has a connection to Sherman’s work. Based on Judith Butler’s gender theory, this paper analyzes Sherman’s artistic techniques and the content of her works, pointing out how women’s identities and bodies are subtly constructed and disciplined by behavioral language and symbolic chains in the media. In addition, this paper tries to prove that Sherman’s critique of female identity is not radical but derived from a revision of the problem. Starting from the source, she distorts the details of traditional works to make the audience feel dissonance and realize the problem independently, finally achieving the purpose of deconstruction. Cindy Sherman attempts to use the method of parody and distortion (by creating dissonance) to illustrate that the discourse construction process of “gender” features is dominated by lots of symbolic features that people are used to performing, and what Sherman wants to deconstruct is not only the concept and characteristics of female identity, but also the limitations of female identity under the background of “performance”, and more the process of how “performance” culture establishes this concept.