Dressing up the Self: Feminism and the Anomalous Art of Zanele Muholi and Cindy Sherman

Abstract

For Lauren Berlant (1998), intimacy begins with shared narratives or narratives about something shared. In other words, we desire our story as humans to be set within ‘zones of familiarity and comfort’ (Berlant, 1998: 281). How do we know we have achieved familiarity and comfort? Berlant says, that we know it is enough to intimate or gesture, to communicate with brevity because of a communal language (like the intimacy of a shared joke). But, says Berlant (1998: 281), ‘the inwardness of the intimate is met by a corresponding publicness’. This ‘public’ side is related to what she terms the ‘institutions of intimacy’ that we create in the hope that these will give us ‘a life’ (by which she presumably means a life of intimacy). Might Berlant consider Art as an institution of intimacy, a means of creating a shared language by which we can enter into zones of familiarity and comfort but also by which we can point out the flaws in each other’s thinking and laugh together at the ways in which we have failed at intimacy? Berlant describes a tension between desire and ‘therapy’ (or what one might think of as a response to immorality) and says this tension governs our ‘modern, mass-mediated sense of intimacy’. The article explores whether one might think of feminism in the photographic self-portraits of Cindy Sherman and Zanele Muholi as a form of ‘therapy’, a means of correcting the violence we commit both knowingly and, as is often the case, out of a kind of willing ignorance.