Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

Exhibiting the expulsion of transgression 25
In Jew (1998) he subverts and challenges anti-Semitic stereotypes by
the use of hunting symbols to address social persecution. 26 Symbols
are defined as important in identity formation in both ethnic and
nationalist lines. However, Cohen deploys them in a manner that
stages the ideological construction of their identity. In Jew, the Star
of David is attached to his chest with blood that alludes to it being
imposed by violence, as a form of a brand. 27 Furthermore, in Jew,
Cohen wears a gas mask with an exhaust pipe and tusks attached to it
and attached to his feet an elephant foot on his left shoe and a bull’s
hoof on his right shoe, thus making a direct reference to the perceived
connotations of the Jew’s foot and nose as racial markers of their
identity. Not only does Cohen make a direct reference to the Jew’s
racial markers, but following his use of symbols, he foregrounds the
ideological construction of the perceived markers of race. The fact
that only certain physical characteristics are signified to demarcate
‘race’ in specific circumstances indicates that the categorisation of
race is not a natural division of the world’s population but rather the
embodiment of history and culturally specific connotations to the
differences of human physiological variations. 28 The belief of homosexuality
as pathological to the male gender is illustrated in the
following section through discussing the violence and expulsion that is
inflicted upon Cohen by patriarchal prescriptions of masculinity
within his performance art.
4. The hypermasculine and homosocial context of Cohen’s work
Cohen’s Ugly Girl (1998) public intervention at Loftus was aimed
specifically at rugby culture in South Africa. By choosing rugby as his
conceptual terrain, Cohen ‘finds a way to strike at the very heart of
masculinity that allows no exceptions’. 29 The rugby culture of South
Africa accepts no exceptions to gender performance in that it is a
context of unambiguous masculinity and associative hetero-normative
values. Cohen scourges this terrain as Ugly Girl who wears nine-inch
fetish shoes, stockings, a corset and exposing his penis underneath a
26 S de Waal & R Sassen in Carman (n 7 above) 51.
27 The Star of David is also attached to his nose and his penis (a vital site of identityformation
for Judaism) in various other performance works. See S de Waal & R
Sassen in Carman (n 7 above)19.
28 G Doy ‘Objectified bodies or embodied subjects?’ in G Doy (ed) Black visual
culture: Modernity and Postmodenity (2000) 111 126.
29 L van der Watt in Van Eeden & du Preez (n 19 above) 125.