Communications in Humanities Research ISSN: 2753-7072
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Research Article

Cindy Sherman’s Construction of Female Identity —— a Practice more than Depthless Pastiche

Huiyang ZhangBeijing National Day School, China*

* Corresponding author: [email protected]

Abstract

Cindy Sherman, a female post-modern artists, experiments with multiple identities in her artworks to disclose issues related to gender power structures, such as male gaze, voyeurism, and flawed aesthetic pursuits forced by males, and to promote positive female images, scraping off stereotypes of women being emotional, brainless, and dependent. Though she alludes to twentieth-century Holleywood B movies, fashion posters, and fairy tales, the humor and sarcasm used in her work and the groundbreaking feminism ideas altogether leads Cindy Sherman’s portrait photographs beyond a superfacial use of pastiche, a technique of “blank mimicry” that Fredric Jameson believes most postmodernists employ. Cindy Sherman achieves a complication in her topics through choices of props and settings, wearing makeups, and employing gestures.

Keywords: postmodernism; Cindy Sherman; feminism; pastiche; Fredric Jameson
Published: February 28, 2023
DOI: 10.54254/2753-7064/2/2022629
Volume: CHR Vol.2
pp. 582-590
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