Man Up!
“When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
                                                                                                                                         ----Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
                                                                                                                    
As Diane Saco writes in Constructing Masculinities, masculinity is constructed through a series of signs or information, such as style of clothing or mannerisms.  It seems among many other things, masculinity has something to do with embodiment, with presence, with gesture, with voice, and with costuming.  
In this is a short, abstract film I explore masculinity through embodiment, moving through a series of gestures.  I created the movement poem out of observation and improvisation, incorporating the poses that felt most masculine to me.  
While editing the movie, I was particularly struck by how differently my masculinized and feminized body read through the controlled gaze of the camera.  A pose that felt powerful to me regardless of costuming, read very differently depending on whether I was wearing baggy jeans and men’s shoes or a dress and high heel shoes.  Sitting, legs spread might reads as casual and masculine, or as overtly sexual depending on masculine or feminine dress.
In Man Up!, I was specifically interested in exposing the construction of masculinity, denaturalizing it through the performativity of my gesture work, the objectifying eye of the camera, and the text.  My hope is that at end of the piece, because the masculinity has been so performative, when the female body is introduced, it might be seen as the more normative body in a way that femininity is rarely naturalized.
In the spring of 2007, I conducted an ethnographic exploration of masculinities.  I interviewed six people: two queer, masculine-identified women, two straight, masculine-identified men, a gay, masculine-identified man, and a bisexual man who emphatically refuses to identify as masculine.   I transcribed the interviews, and adapted portions into a poem about how “trapping” masculine performance can be.  As Steven Craig notes in Men, Masculinity and the Media, “Masculinity is a set of social expectations…what a culture expects from its men.”  These expectations are often rigid and restrictive, and although masculinity is often naturalized as non-performative as compared to femininity, living up the expectation to “be a man” requires a specific type of performance.