COVER GIRL

by Iké Udé

Cover Girl is an interrogation of the aesthetic politics of gender, race and class apropos of the currency of the "mainstream" magazine. What is mainstream within the media context? Is mainstream a measure of fact or ideal representation? By who, and for whom? How, when and where? These questions may appear as a kind of "who's on first," but the context for my contention is real. One need only read any "mainstream" magazine to see its hypocrisy of inclusion and practice of exclusion.

For this project, the Igbo Adamma served both as an historical resource and contemporaneous inspiration. Adamma is both a presentation/manifestation of the malleable nature of gender identity. Thus, the gender sphere is ever the zone of alert, the boundary of indistinguishable shades of difference, and the ultimate site of male/female patriarchal contention.

The magazine cover is by design representational. The complexity of factors exerted by its ubiquitous representation expresses and impresses on the entire society a kind of prosaic seduction of excesses. This mode of transgressive omnipotence originating from covers decisively weighs on our individual and collective unconscious.

Cover Girl is certainly a project that attempts to shed light on many of the issues surrounding representations of race, gender and class, in that I clearly delineated all these issues as a requisite reference.

The quantitative and qualitative measures of a cover within a calendar year exemplify the ratio of the marginalized to the mainstream. Thus the rare appearances of a Naomi Campbell or Veronica Webb on a "mainstream" cover tragically illustrates the extreme lopsidedness in mass representations and the tokenistic attention paid to the "other."

The relevancy and critical urgency of this project is continually being validated by the media. Some of the same issues (the exoticized, marginalized or stereotyped other I dealt with in Cover Girl), became a detailed cover story on "Racism On The Runway" in the Village Voice of May 9, 1995. The work has also been covered in "Iké Udé mans a race and gender magazine kiosk," "Voice Choices," Village Voice, October 4, 1994.

Cover Girl is neither a metonymy nor an apologue, but an earnest interrogation of institutionalized caucasian practices of hegemonic right to name first, to colonize, to mis/represent and other exclusionary practices. Likewise, Cover Girl denotes an exfoliation of interventionist discourse of the regarded self, i.e. "The Noble Savage Is Dead" (Town & Country), "Hysteria Over The Death Of The Noble Savage" (British Vogue), etc.

As for the gender aspect of this project, I see myself operating in a similar post-gender axis of the Igbo Adamma where male embodiment of femininity is performative, critical, ritualized and celebratory--a remarkable contrast with Western culture, where male embodiment of femininity (even in the arts) is myopically misconstrued as homosexuality. If women's progressive adaptability to the masculine world of clothes, work ethics and mannerisms do not motivate us to define all women as homosexual, then there is no reason to believe that if men emulated femininity in equal measure, they would automatically transform into homosexual. In other words, gender markers are a superficial constructs that bear no biological equivalency with sexual desires or practices. The Woodabee men's feminized courtship with their potential bride clearly lends further credibility to my point.

The appalling truth is that the lack of, resistance to, or reluctance of men's unwillingness to feminize themselves only aids to underscore men's unwavering investment in their patriarchal privilege or "Gender Apartheid." Or, put another way, "it's a man's world," which is to say that it is women who bear the burden of masculine adaptation, an adaptation that will ensure or hopefully allow women-as-men access to patriarchal domination: i.e., the site and apex of power. The female gender thus debased, sexualized and usurped, signifies a step-down, whereas the male gender desexualized and empowered signifies a step-up.

Cover Girl transgresses through the evident use of cosmetics, socialized feminine signs and formal simulacra of feminized allure. However, it's still a surface act--a successful exteriority of the opposite gender--but not a biological realization of the opposite interior sex (which is not my aim), nor a sign of queer desire. On the contrary, via Cover Girl, I have demonstrated essential femininity as a mode of anti-gender apartheid and post-gender space, rather than as a mode of subversive patriarchy. which most drag queens use it for. For the drag queen's space (despite all of its glamour, pancake, mascara, and high heels) is still a man's world, a misogynistic space where women are virtually absent (replaced by "the girls"), or policed as acquiescent "fag-hags."

Cover Girl, therefore, is not a mere representation of images, but rather an earnest union of the visual and textual strategized in order to shed light on racist, sexist, and other prejudicial matters--with due regards to beauty.

As a critical intervention, I hope that a sincere appreciation of Cover Girl will facilitate in liberating men and women (especially men) of different sexual persuasions to interchangeably adopt trans-gender signs without the pigeonholing instinct of "Gender Apartheid."