Female Desire and Transformed Masculinity: Imogen Cunningham's Photographs of the Male Nude

Abstract

This paper explores how Imogen Cunningham boldly envisioned woman-made, white masculinity and parodic subversions of the normative gender roles in her pioneering photographs of male nudes, which have received little attention in gender studies. Of special interest to me will be investigating the collusion and collision of Cunningham's gaze with the New Woman's gaze toward the woman-made men in the early-twentieth-century dance culture in theater and dance hall. My argument is that the New Woman's emergence as the primary figure in the consumption of the ethnically-other type of androgynous masculinity, gradually established in dance culture, inspired Cunningham to articulate her own fascinations and desire for the male nude through herphotographs. However, her most innovative performative intervention, I believe, lies in directly offering a startling transformation of gender norms through shooting the sexually desirable white, male body without dissimulating her fantasy around the liminal Oriental scenarios. I would also like to apply Judith Butler's gender theory to further interpret how Cunningham created a radical New Woman's alternative visual practices for female desire and pleasure, which enacted a feminist deconstruction of the normative gender roles of the white man and woman in her day.