This is the first of three responses I wrote about our object project "Assembling Face." //MSJ
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You are made up. Well, you’re halfway made up. You are a
performance and your character is a split woman. The right side of you is bright and
shiny. Emphasized. Your cheekbone bold, your eye color lucid in contrast to a
blackened fringe of lash and a shimmery lid. The jagged scar over your upper lip
is gently blotted into skin color, though your skin is still raised. The bluish tone under your eye and around your
socket is concealed. Makeup performs erasure and emphasis. “You look
great.”
Your left side is blurry. Your pigment dulls at the edge of
your facial features. For instance, your eye is small inside the socket, your lips
blend into your chin, and your nose is red. “What’s wrong?” people ask you when you aren’t made up.
“Are you not feeling well?”
Your two-sided face signals this two-faced social reception. It’s
okay, you can feel irritated by this polarity. It is irritating to be asked if you are
ill when in fact you simply didn’t engage in the feminine activity of painting
your face. You wonder: do people so believe in constructed appearances of erasure and emphasis that they are evaluating my wellness and normalcy based on my under eye brow?
Probably not everyone, you hope.
As a girl, makeup was fun. Playful. You experimented with makeup with your friends. And you performed in theater and ballet
performances where makeup signaled the ‘big day.’ Makeup was an exciting mask: permission for
boldness, changing characters, being on stage.
Now, how do you feel? Do you different from one side to the
other? Or from one day to the next? Do you grimace when you see photos of
yourself without makeup, particularly as you age? In
wearing makeup do you think you’re performing a theatrical act of wellness or playfulness
or do you actually feel more comfortable when your blemishes are concealed from
others and your eyelashes are emphasized? (Let’s analyze you. Your own response is part of the
performance, too, you know.)
Yes, it’s true that gone are the days when a white woman’s
face made up with makeup signaled looseness. At least, those days are gone as long as
you’ve applied certain kinds of makeup in specific ways. Because even if you despise the
fact that women can be blamed for adverse social treatment because of the
way that they look, you also know you aren't exaggerating or contorting for fun or drag. (Are you scared?)
You've been one class shy of department store
femininity – an unconscious embodiment of mainstream beauty magazines advising you on how to appear “natural” in a very typical, white
North American woman-kind of way. You know the privileges that are afforded to
you for doing this, and you comply with the rules -- enough makeup to appear 'normal' but not too much. Though you are grateful that you’re not around people who judge
you too harshly for your look alone, you have to admit to yourself that you like the times when someone tells you that
you look great. And you
often tell people this, too. (You’re not innocent).
What’s the meaning of assembling a face using makeup? This
question isn’t about deciding whether or not dolling yourself up is either emboldening and or repressive. Nor is it about whether or not concealments and emphases are coded as meaningful. (They are not, of course, devoid of meaning). The question you have about assembling face is how what it is you face with your face depends on who is looking and
when they’re looking, and how your own interpretation of these looks shape how you look -- and look back.
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