Marilyn in Negative | Video, 2017
Marilyn is an icon of femininity within the white imagination, frail and submissive, yet in embodying this persona Marilyn (who was a very different person in life from her on-screen character) wielded a lot of power. She made herself into a fantasy figure, a vessel of problematic desire, and drew a lot of power from it while being completely objectified, at once liberated and entrapped. The persona is so watertight that the image of the hair, the dress, the stance, immediately signifies the avatar of Marilyn, an empty costume that anyone can step into to embody the clichés of white male desire. In wearing this persona as a woman of color, I perform a transubstantiation of the iconic imagery of Hollywood, interpreting an icon of American female desire personas provide a vehicle to imagine our own singular identities, layered with the problems of cross-racial identifications and the cultural colonial entertainment system disseminated to audiences around the globe.
Marilyn is an icon of femininity within the white imagination, frail and submissive, yet in embodying this persona Marilyn (who was a very different person in life from her on-screen character) wielded a lot of power. She made herself into a fantasy figure, a vessel of problematic desire, and drew a lot of power from it while being completely objectified, at once liberated and entrapped. The persona is so watertight that the image of the hair, the dress, the stance, immediately signifies the avatar of Marilyn, an empty costume that anyone can step into to embody the clichés of white male desire. In wearing this persona as a woman of color, I perform a transubstantiation of the iconic imagery of Hollywood, interpreting an icon of American female desire personas provide a vehicle to imagine our own singular identities, layered with the problems of cross-racial identifications and the cultural colonial entertainment system disseminated to audiences around the globe.