Pierre Molinier you dirty dog.
Inveterate seducer, staunch fetishist, unapologetic transvestite and accidental bisexual, Molinier was a virtually obscure French surrealist. He produced works featuring homemade godemiche (dildos) and casts himself as the star of the show. Typical.
Molinier endorses the fetishistic function of photography, allowing the viewer satisfaction through a fantasized object. His work portrays an array of objects which serve as fetishes for his photographic oeuvre and erotic stagings. Peter Gorsen documents how Molinier paid a great deal of attention to the crafting of his homemade godemiches (dildos), employed for anal-masturbation. These multiple perversions are compressed in Fig. 1 in a constellation of symbols, objects, and fetishes. A dramatically vignetted tableau, the image features a stockinged leg from the knee down clad in a high heeled shoe, bound to it by multiple leather straps. Extending from the heel is a sleek and erect phallic form; one of the artist’s self constructed godemiches. Almost in a stage-like setting, this leg, stiletto and godemiche composite is the protagonist Encircled in bright light, it alludes to the staging of an erotic performance.
The relocated phallus attached to a fetishized and feminine garment disrupts the system of binary oppositions by which we traditionally understand gender. Wayne Baerwaldt in his introductory essay on Pierre Molinier elaborates upon the idea of the godemiche claiming, ‘these became essential for his staged acts of transformation to the androgynous hermaphrodite.’ This was Molinier’s solution for attaining true androgyny; the godemiche could merely be brought up to the anus simple by bending back one’s knee, demonstrating an erotic self performance. He is both the seducer and seduced, the director, protagonist and antagonist in this proscenium of orgiastic narcissism.
His transformation utilizes surrealist strategies of defamiliarizing the female body towards the steps of remapping himself. Molinier documented extensively his posing and masquerade within the realm of an authentic transvestism. Fond of wearing his mother’s and sister’s stockings and shoes, he became a practicing transvestite by the age of eighteen. The visualization and aesthetic manipulation of transvestites in Molinier’s photomontages function as a negotiation of the social prejudices attached to the ambiguous sexuality and the effeminate male.
Molinier’s sexual, fetishistic kitsch is reminiscent of the Symbolist’s mythical chimera. In genetics, a chimera is defined as an organism, part female part male. Molinier’s efforts at transgression are what Laura Kipnis describes as the ‘prison- house of binary gender role assignment.’ Fig. 2 features a backlit hermaphroditic figure in high heels, stockings, corset, a garter belt and mask. Breasts and phallus are suggestively erect. By highlighting amalgamated structures of male anxiety and gender indeterminacy, the fragmented body’s hybridity raised questions of ideas of unity and coherence, defining a body associated with instability. Molinier successfully ‘destabilizes the viewers’s assumptions about the boundaries between apparently contradictory things: between conventional and “perverted” sex... and between men and women.’ Fig. 3 depicts two gender ambiguous figures are bound together. A strong theme of doubling, they appear to be identical replicas of one another. Do Molinier’s figures represent the ‘third sex,’ a reconciled androgyny? Was it possible for Moliner to reject gender specificity through these transformations towards the desire for a unified sexual being?
Feminists have argued that this assumed femininity demonstrates precisely what women lack: the phallus. Amelia Jones questions if this ‘feminized phallus’ simply operates ‘as a masculine strategy to define them as empowered in relation to a devalued feminine other?’ The man in drag is the phallus woman. Within this context, one can interpret Molinier’s feminine performance as a strategy to assert his own masculinity. However it is a comparison of the theories of Judith Butler and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan which creates a contrasting argument surrounding this performed identity. Lacan, preoccupied with oppositional binary notion of gender, believed the masquerade to be the enactment of sexual difference; ‘the masculine ideal and the feminine ideal are represented in the psyche.’ However, Butler’s theories along with Molinier’s guise, overcome Lacan’s fixed binary, oppositional, phallus-centred gender theories situated around the masquerade, promoting the idea of drag as performance. Rowe Burns writes that ‘feminist Judith Butler has done much to highlight the problems inherent in Lacan’s psychoanalytic economy.’ Butler claims that drag is neither imitation nor copy of a prior and ‘true’ gender. The parody of drag is, for Butler, a significant way to resist the power structures which regulate our identity in society by ridiculing normative cultural expressions. Following Butler’s examination of gender itself as performative, one can interpret Molinier’s strategy of dressing as a woman as delineating sexual difference and emphasizing the fluidity between the two.
Through his feminine performance, Molinier expresses Butler’s theories, distorting the original notion of a primary gender. He does not imitate a true gender but exemplifies the impersonation that gender is. Along with Butler, Marjorie Garber questions Lacan’s structural framework of binary identity through her description of the ‘category crisis’ evoked by a disruptive ‘third term,’ embodied in the ‘figure of the androgyne, the transvestite, the transsexual and the cross-dresser.’ For Garber ‘one of the most important aspects of cross-dressing is the way in which it challenges notions of binarity, putting into question the categories of “female” and “male” whether they are considered essential or constructed, biological or cultural.’ Lichtenstein theorizes a bi-gendered position produced for the viewer by the artist’s interruption of traditional gender oppositions of spectatorship.
Exploring issues of forbidden lust through the vehicle of the informe and uncanny, Molinier transcends Surrealist practice. Exploiting its boundaries and limits, he exploits the idea of the manipulated female form. Indeed, initially integrated into the group, Molinier was later expelled from the movement by Breton who decided Molinier’s work was too provocative, even for him. His explicit focus on mutilated, deformed or dismembered female body represents the socio-political climate in which it was made. With intentions to shock, Molinier challenges the viewer to question orthodoxies of art and morality, daring one to discover their true erotic sensibility.
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