Gender

This title is only available on Kip Fulbeck Selected Videos: Volume One.

Pop-Pop Video: Kojak/Wang takes a shootout from Kojak and extends the shot and counter-shot into a potentially endless battle. In the original TV fragment, images, gestures and actions rebound off one another like the echoes of repeated bursts of gunfire. Birnbaum compares gunfire with the beams of laser light from a computer in a Wang commercial, connecting destruction and violence with the products of advancing technology.

You will never be a woman. You must live the rest of your days entirely as a man and you will only grow more masculine with every passing year. There is no way out.

Representing the complex lives of transgender and gender variant musicians in the US and Canada, Riot Acts offers a first-hand perspective of the intersections between gender performance and stage performance. The featured performers are talented, inspiring, sexy, critical and three-dimensional in a manner that purposefully counters mainstream media. Discussions range from songwriting, performance, voice presentation and voice changes, passing/not passing, audience, to the idea of the spectacle, drag, and media representation - the personal is always political.

In New Report, Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy are reporters at WKRH - the feminist news station that is "pregnant with information." As Henry Irigaray (Hardy) and Henry Stein-Acker-Hill (Greenwood), these two lesbian feminist artists stage reports on and with their friends, their social herstories, their nerves, and their bodies. It is urgently broadcast live to the newsroom and out to their studio audience.

An allegory recycling images from the past, still relevant to the present moment.

“Horses are lucky, they’re stuck with the war same as us, but nobody expects them to be in favor of it, to pretend to believe in it.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night, 1932

Taking queer artistic license, Dougherty and Leslie Singer together portray a gay male playwright who took 1960s London by storm. The result is a witty play on narcissism and split personality that captures the banality of stardom while paying tribute to promiscuity and transgression. Filmed in black and white pixelvision and color video, this tape continues Dougherty’s exploration of counter-culture identity through lesbian portrayal, the same ingenious bait-and-switch device seen at work in the lesbian portrayal of the Beatles in her earlier tape, Grapefruit.

In this angry answer to the expectations advertising culture places on women and their bodies, Tanaka deftly edits commercial images and sound-bite slogans to underscore the message such images carry: that women exist to please men, as wives, mothers, and lovers. Tanaka balances such mainstream images with black and white footage of herself lying naked next to her own doubled image, rejecting the mainstream model of female sexuality that regularly consists of seductive glances and suggestive poses arranged and pre-ordained for the male gaze of the spectator.

This experimental Pixelvision piece explores the tenuous boundaries of gender through a series of mini-sequences, among them a group of anecdotes told by women who have been mistaken for men and a must-see synchronized barbershop scene.

In this interview, American artist, independent curator, writer, and experimental filmmaker, Vaginal Davis reflects on her initiation into the punk rock and art scenes of Los Angeles during the 1980s and 90s, her stylistic influences, and her ongoing efforts to theorize queerness and visuality. Caught between the opposing poles of Hollywood classicism and the rawness of punk, Davis defines her unapologetically gender-bending, campy, and at times aggressively critical performances as scenarios, rather than spectacles or entertainment.

In this episode of The Brenda and Glennda Show, Glennda meets up with guest co-host Joan Jett Blakk to discuss Blakk’s 1992 presidential run. The pair interview people on the street outside of the 1992 Democratic Convention. They discuss topics including the police state, weaknesses of the two-party political system, feminism, and political elitism.

In this episode of The Brenda and Glennda Show, Brenda and Glennda comically debate changing the name of their show to Drag Queens for Jesus, in order to convert all the secular homosexuals to Christianity. They discuss topics like abortion and censorship from a drag queen perspective, exploring the hypocrisy and inherent bias of Christian ideals. Later, Brenda gets her nipple pierced in homage to Sandy Daley's Robert Having His Nipple Pierced (1971).

A family embraces the heart of evil in this Poltergeist re-make/drag show, circa 1992.

I just got this tattoo — you can see it's still healing, the edges are raised like some sort of fancy business card — to mark the completion of this, Series One of my on-going project, Final Thoughts. So, on one wrist, facing fistward, a skull and, on the other, still tender and healing, a ghost. Let them be the mascots for the series, little cartoony avatars.

Born out of an "objective hazard" (a 16mm roll where two different subjects were imprinted by mistake), jeny303 is a composite work intertwining two portraits. On the one hand there is jeny, the feminine alter ego of a transgender millennial dealing with a heroine addiction. On the other hand there is the 303 building, an iconic modernist architecture in a public university in Bogota (Colombia). The images of the body and the edifice interlace and depict jeny303, a character on the threshold of a transformation to come.

The setting for The Politics of Intimacy recalls the widespread consciousness-raising (CR) groups in the late '60s and early '70s inspired by the emerging feminist movement. CR groups provided a forum to openly and collectively validate women's otherwise private experiences. In the tape Dr. Sherfy, one of the first doctors to write about female sexuality, and nine women of different ages, sexual preferences, and economic and social situations discuss their sexual experiences.

This is the story of two young girls who dig up a tiny woman from the back garden. They incubate her in their mouths, in their bed, they lock her in a dolls house wallpapered with pornography to make her grow up faster, feeding her through a tube in the door. When she is life-sized and ready to play they take her to the disco. A dark, comic, experimental fantasy on the implications of Little Girls Toys — with the existential melancholy of Frankenstein's monster.

"A compelling exploration of a child's inner life and logic. Impressive and distinctive."

The image comes up suddenly and then continues unwavering: a young person (Mirra) dressed in a black watchcap and pea coat stands at the edge of a large body of water and sings a sea shanty, occasionally flinching to emphasize certain lyrics or fend off the steady drizzle of rain. The frame is broken up into simple shapes—sea, sky, hat, face, coat—and the longer Mirra sings, the more rain collects on the lens of the camera—threatening to obliterate the subject into the background of sea and sky.

A short, poetic QuickTime video about the gray areas of gender identity."

Identically dressed, and with sibling-like resemblance, performance artists Trevor Martin and Kym Olsen shift between spoken word and athletic dance choreography in a collection of 29 scenes. Set in various locations--including a gymnasium, an abandoned hospital, and a trailer park circus--Martin and Olsen slip between a ventriloquist and his dummy, a seducer and his surrogate, a doctor and his patient, and synchronized dance partners. The film examines a complex social psychology--questioning the colonization of the human body for various political, medical and religious agendas.

Purify shows a disconnected women washing herself in blood.

You will never be a woman. You must live the rest of your days entirely as a man and you will only grow more masculine with every passing year. There is no way out.

After a long period in life identifying as a Butch Lesbian, Cuthand considers transitioning to male. This experience involved a six month period of his life during which he went by the name Sarain, which he would have been called had he been born a boy, and asking to be called by male pronouns. Complicated by mental health crises, Cuthand found themselves in a mental health group home for women, having to hide their gender dysphoria. After a considerable amount of thought and discussion, Cuthand changed his mind and decided to remain a Butch Lesbian.

In New Report, Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy are reporters at WKRH - the feminist news station that is "pregnant with information." As Henry Irigaray (Hardy) and Henry Stein-Acker-Hill (Greenwood), these two lesbian feminist artists stage reports on and with their friends, their social herstories, their nerves, and their bodies. It is urgently broadcast live to the newsroom and out to their studio audience.

In this cooking demonstration/performance, Sobell wears a chicken carcass over her face while dressing (literally, in baby clothes) a chicken to be cooked for dinner. Cooing and breast feeding the chicken as she would an infant, Sobell brings two stereotypical female roles—that of care giver and that of cook—psychotically close, emphasizing the potential dark side of women’s intimate association with food in a way similar to Suzanne Lacy’s Learn Where the Meat Comes From.