Gary
Needham has recently published an article on the gimp as an image of SM in
popular culture very much in the spirit of Gayle Rubin’s work in seeking to
understand why sex is so terrifying for mainstream culture. The article appears
in Fashion Theory Vol.18 No.2.
The
article investigates the cultural power associated with the gimp and the gimp
mask. The gimp is a clothed or costumed SM body, frequently a submissive that
often wears a leather or rubber costume that covers and effectuates the entire
body including the face. The gimp is also a representation of SM that
circulates throughout fashion and film and other forms of popular culture.
Since the gimp’s first public outing and naming in the Quentin Tarantino film Pulp Fiction it has become the byword for the head-to-toe leather SM look that
has been appropriated by a number of designers as way of exploring and
exploiting the relationship between fashion, fetishism, and transgression. As a
counterpoint to the popular image of SM in fashion and popular film, the
article also explores how the artists Catherine Opie and Robert Mapplethorpe
have represented the gimp, not as an index of horror or transgressive style
rather as an affirmative image of their own SM communities that, while still
intended to shock and confront, is a defiant attempt to rescue or reclaim the
gimp from its negative associations.
Here’s
an extract from the article on Catherine Opie’s iconic work Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994):
[…]
In contradistinction to Pulp Fiction and
the gimp monsters of popular culture and the horror film, in the same year as Pulp Fiction photographer Catherine Opie
produced a self-portrait of herself in a gimp mask called Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994). In the self-portrait Opie is sitting
in front of chintzy brocade wallpaper, lettering freshly cut in to her bleeding
skin which reads ‘pervert’, and she is pierced along each arm with forty-six
evenly spaced temporary needles; at the time Opie belonged to the San Francisco
SM community. Why would Opie make an image that is so difficult to look at? Why
would anyone do that to their body? Why would a self-portrait deny access to
the artist’s face? These are important questions the work provokes. In Self-Portrait/Pervert
Opie recalls that she ‘wanted to push the whole realm of beauty and
elegance, but also to make people scared out of their wits’ (Ferguson 2008:
106). Unlike the scare tactics of Pulp
Fiction Opie’s intentions are altogether different. Self-Portrait/Pervert also challenges the conventions of
portraiture by having Opie’s head covered by a gimp mask so that the viewer has
no access to her face - she denies them a way to access her identity and
instead evokes a confrontation with SM and pain and the questions posed above.
Indirectly Self-Portrait/Pervert responds
to the politics of Pulp Fiction that
invokes a popular culture version of SM by making the gimp on/scene, while
concurrently the real queers and SM subculture remain obscene, off stage,
silenced, censored. Opie in Self-Portrait/Pervert
and related works from around this period challenged the ongoing
demonization of SM and the censoring of transgressive queer art which includes
hostility from ‘normalized’ gays and lesbians. Self-Portrait/Pervert symbolizes the silences and the obliteration
of identity that queers experience by heteronormative culture and other gays
and lesbians; it is a work born out of the AIDS epidemic, which turns the pain
associated with SM into a political statement to the point where the images
test the limits of legibility, both in the extremity of the image of cutting
and piercing and the gimp mask’s erasure of the face as a point of
identification. Opie explains the impetus behind the self-portrait:
‘Perverts’ [sic] is a very angry piece. I was
pissed off. I really wanted to make that piece because of what was happening
culturally in the US: the [NEA] censorship, the fuss around the Mapplethorpe
show and what was happening in mainstream gay culture. All of a sudden
mainstream gays and lesbians were calling themselves ‘normal’ and yet a lot of
communities were being pushed further and further out in a certain way.’
(Blessing 2008: 16)
Opie
also goes on to describe Self-Portrait/Pervert
as ‘a decorative image of pride; for people outside that subculture, it is
a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down’ (2008: 16) and she means those normalized
gays and lesbians as much as the assumed audiences for Pulp Fiction. Despite an obvious delineation of these two texts, Pulp Fiction and Self-Portrait/Pervert, nonetheless get yoked together in reference
to Mapplethorpe’s SM pictures as Stockton
remarks in her analysis of Pulp Fiction’s
black and queer debasement and shaming that ‘Tarantino's film puts into motion
images reminiscent of Mapplethorpe's photography' (2006: 104). Mapplethorpe and the discourses around his
photographs of gay leathermen and SM is a thread that links many of the ideas
raised in this article about representation, the reification and reception of
SM in culture as something risky and to be feared, horror being continually
evoked but also as a source of pride and defiance. […]
