Trans, Marimachas, Queers and other Resistant “Impostures” from the Language of Art

Abstract

The feminist medium and its activisms state subjects today that divide and confront them decisively. One of these is gender identity and more precisely masculinity construction. This article is an exploration of how the language of art has reflected queer dissidence at this context and what strategies have been used to not succumb to rejection and explicit qualifications of falsification and imposture analyzed from Sarah Ahmed’s (2006), Rossi Braidotti’s (2000) and Dona Haraway’s (1984) texts. We will be able to see, coming from the image reading of the works created by two queer artists connected at their careers: Shu Lea Cheang, interviewed for this research, and Toxic Lesbian, approached from participant observation, how already from the nineties, these works knew themselves to be part of the gender resistance and its identity positions revealing the threat that society has not quit turning against them. We will, more specifically, describe the reproach of falseness expressed and which are the strategies returned from the artistic medium. We will see the use of the privilege of artistic expression in order to ideally place other ways of existing in the world in connection with not straight masculinity, being the artists immersed in protagonist communities and giving us back their testimony as privileged witness of these social processes.