Don’t be fooled. ACMI’s walls cannot contain The Dame. The entire city has been transformed into a Thin White Duke theme park to rival Dollywood. With Aladdin Sane posters stretching from urban growth boundary to urban growth boundary, woe betide anyone who chose to tour Australia in July. Sorry Johnny Marr. Sorry Blur. You’ve been trumped in absentia by Her Royal Highness.
The first week of the exhibition was a love-in for the Bowie acolytes.It’s also been an excuse to dress up. A large part of the exhibition consists of Bowie’s ground-breaking stage wear – 50 years of design collaborations. Man, woman, either, neither, both – Bowie lets us express ourselves in all our androgynous glory!
That is, androgyny is what I’d like to achieve. I have one problem…well, two problems. Breasts. Try being a Bowie fan with these puppies. Did I say puppies? I meant belugas. Androgyny is fine until you’re trying to work around features that are genetically (and, in my case, laughably) designed for industrial strength breeding. All week there have been whippet-thin fans strutting about like every Bowie in the Boys Keep Swinging video. What do you do when you want to push stereotypes and you look like Jessica Rabbit with a pituitary problem?
For me, puberty meant suddenly being trapped in a very female body. Once the tits muscled onto the scene, there was an escalation of wolf-whistles, not being looked in the eye, groping, being shouted at in the street and generally feeling reduced to my flesh.
So it makes sense that David Bowie was alluring to me as a teen. He was neither gender…or both..? The problem was that while I longed to be a blank canvas, my body loudly replied “HA! No way, sister”. I harbour sartorial desires that are thwarted by physicality; braces repelling or attracting like magnets on either side of each breast; shirts with one unruly, popped button insisting that my brassiere is subject to The Freedom of Information Act; and anything off the shoulder requiring scaffolding to keep me, broadly speaking, clothed.
In 2010, I began working with designers, each of whom have a background in drag. For me, drag queens, kings, faux queens and everything in between use performance to challenge gender perception. My costumiers gently explained that the architectural lines I wanted were compromised by my proverbial sinkhole of a figure. We returned to the same three sticking (out) points: bust, waist and arse. And I wasn’t up to doing a Yentl just yet.
As we collaborated, I realised that rather than a canvas, we were working with a different medium: a female form that was not slight or boyish. Today, the result of these negotiations is a collection of supremely structured, shiny and defiantly womanly stage-wear. Amazingly, the extreme femininity of many of my costumes means some audience members have mistaken me for a man. For them, dressing to exaggerate my body shape somehow meant I wasn’t a woman anymore.
Bowie’s frame helped him mix male and female with fluidity. What about those who want to confuse gender, but whose bodies make the dominant concept of androgyny (thin and slight) problematic?
Androgyny is one sliver of a spectrum that messes with male/female fashion, and we can find other extremes to keep pushing the envelope – or in my case, the seams.
The reactions I get while on public transport in full cabaret make-up reinforces that we need to keep messing with those ideas in Australia. It’s been a century since women caused a fuss by wearing trousers, yet some people still struggle to cope with a man in a skirt or wearing mascara. The same thing goes with women being called “clowns” if they heighten their makeup. I’ve seen faux queens and ganguro girls being used as examples in lazy online “Worst make-up fails” lists, thereby missing the point of both movements. You’d almost think there had never been a Bowie…
Personally I’m tired of toeing that gender line. I want fabulousness, regardless of how you identify. If I confuse some audience members because they aren’t used to how I present my work onstage – great! I write songs. I am a cabaret artist. That is the point, not what you think I should look like. We don’t all want to look the same. I don’t care if you think I’m a Palamino: I have an Aladdin Sane lightning bolt evening gown. And that’s fabulous.
Geraldine Quinn will perform in Oh You Pretty Things, as part of Fringe for Bowie in this year’s Melbourne Fringe on 1 October at North Melbourne Town Hall and in her Green Room Award winning show MDMA: Modern Day Maiden Aunt.
