Michelangelo's Beef Cake Dykes and Egon Schiele's Feminine Masculinities
As a muscly queer woman myself, more like 'wiry' actually, (I don't have the skeletal framework to hold up a lot of bulk), I was very frustrated when I first saw images and videos of trans women who were giving advice to other trans women in early transition on how to 'pass' and conform their bodies to a thin, 'feminine' ideal. This included NOT working out and most of the time freaky (let's just call them what they are, puritanical hippiedom and anti-fat) diet plans. I am NOT saying anything against thin women, trans or cis, since I was 5' 11" and 140 pounds most of my life, but like I said before, I enjoy being 'wiry'. Think 'Bad Santa Era' Billy Bob Thornton with tits.
My childhood well muscled heroines were few and far between, but thanks to the gender bending 1980's, (yes I am 41 years young), they were at least there. Private Vasquez, played by Jenette Elise Goldstein, in all her tough, rippling glory steals the show in the 1986 film Aliens and there was also Annie Lennox flexing her guns on the covers of Eurythmics' albums and MTV. And last but NOT least, Grace frickin' Jones.
Then, let's just say my vision got blurred from the ages of 11 to 31 with alcohol. A LOT of alcohol. And pretty much anything to do with, or even thinking about my body, disappeared. Fast forward through early recovery and all the great triumphs and beautiful missteps of THAT voyage, and I finally started to live my life as a trans woman, but I wasn't seeing the women I wanted to be. That wouldn't come until I entered the world of that most anti-punk edifice of 'Art Theory'.
To give you some background on my education, I really didn't have much. I'm not playing the victim here, I'm just pointing out that school and I never really got along. It didn't help that I was bullied and messed with since pre-school for being an overly emotional kid, at that time living my life as a boy and failing miserably. So from the ages of 12 to 17 I was mostly hanging out in Midwestern drainage ducts drinking straight gin or driving around in my crappy car listening to the Cramps, the Minutemen and Heavens to Betsy and wishing I was anywhere else but Nebraska. I usually only showed up for English class and creative writing courses, but that was about it. I dropped out at 17 because I would have had to spend another year to graduate. I'm surprised Lincoln Public Schools let me last that long. BUT, and this is a big but, I also had the advantage of a great, and I do mean great, public library system in Nebraska and had no censorship on what I could read. I was a curious kid, and still consider myself a proud bookworm.
But art was beyond me. I always thought it was too high brow and stuffy and for college kids. And then I started dating a woman with an MFA from Syracuse, who I fell deeply in love with and whom I'm still lucky enough to have in my life today. We're actually 'gay married', or 'Queermied', and while I'm writing this she's in the other room working on her own artsy projects. Being the artist she is, she took me to the Sheldon Art Gallery, which little did I know is recognized as having the best collection of Modern art in the Midwest besides Minneapolis. All in my own humble hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska. I've seen Alice Neel's work there, Hans Hoffman 'colored squares' pieces, a picture of a sandwich by Jasper Johns, Franz Kline's signature black and white abstract paintings, a Mark Rothko piece, and I was even lucky enough to view a magenta and turquoise period piece by my favorite of all the New York Abstract Expressionists, Lee Krasner. And what did I do after seeing all this genius? I made fun of it. Because, as the three or four people who know me know, I'm kind of a dick.
But, being the curious bookish type I've always been, I wanted to know more. At my partner's place later that night I started flipping through her art history books. Then I saw what I had been looking for instead of the thin stereotypical beauty standards that a lot of trans women were pushing my way. I saw big, tough women who could kick ass. The infamous women of Michelangelo. These portraits of women are often denigrated by art critics as being done only because they think since Michelangelo was a big ol' homo he just slapped tits on male bodies because he didn't know how to paint women. I think we're REALLY underestimating Michelangelo here if we just stick to that simple conclusion. He was a bright guy, a hell of a lot smarter than most of the folks of his time period, and definitely smarter than me. Or can't we return to that beautiful (almost lost) art of 'queering' an image or song or film? And just interpreting art as WE see it, individually, instead of always listening to so called experts? I myself would just personally like to give Mikey the benefit of the doubt, and say he was doing it on purpose, especially because if you look through his body of work not all of his women were portrayed like muscle queens, although a large and in charge majority of them were. What his purpose was I'm not sure, but I really don't think it was because he didn't know how to draw women. He just didn't know how to draw the 'Right' type of women.
And what about the right type of 'man'? Or images that can't be interpreted as easily identifiable as male/female in art, the gender-queers of the art world, as it were? Here we have to go to the short lived Austrian Egon Schiele.
Any old or new breed of 70's feminist will probably be offended by his work, and by saying that I realize I'm an old fashioned oversexed 90's feminist, which was 25 YEARS AGO, and to all the Millennials and Generation Z's out there, time has a way of sneaking up on you eventually, and yes even you will seem old fashioned someday. It happens to the best of us. Some left and right wing puritans will be offended by his blatant objectification of women. But the point they're missing is that he objectified EVERYTHING, even himself.
The figures he created are splayed almost always pornographically/erotically, and no there is no difference between the two. I mean that in the best way possible. He drew a lot of lesbian images in the early 1900's, which is saying something, and no I don't think he did it just to titilate a male audience. ALL art is for ALL people. It's how we choose to see a piece of art that defines it, period.
His women are lush, varying from razor thin to voluptuous. His male figures tend to lean towards the 'waif' category, possibly emulating his own stick figure frame. But a large body of his work sticks to the 'inbetween' of gender. His 'males' seem to thrust their breasts forward wantonly, and yes males have breasts, trans men and cis men alike. His women are brazen and intelligent, even with their skirts up to their waists and their legs spread there is still personal agency and they possess ownership of themselves. Sometimes it is impossible to guess the gender of the figures he is painting or drawing, which is, you know, perfect. He died very young of the Spanish flu, the Covid-19 of his time, but produced a beautiful body of work before he and his wife were so cruelly cut down by the disease.
In these times we have to look for our own heroes or heroines or just plain beautiful people, to our eyes at least, to keep on truckin' as we Nebraskans say, and keep on loving, and keep on living. We'll get through this ugly and despicable time in American History, and once again enjoy the freedom to create our own desires and dreams and wishes, whether written on the page, painted on a canvas, or the feeling of your dream self's flesh leaning against the shoulders of the giants who came before us.
