Grace Jones: The Androgynous Alien
Grace Jones embodies a “post-human” identity and space in which she pushes beyond the “human” and transforms herself into a post-human or transhuman identity. This can also be exemplified in her affectless object-machine aesthetic or the idea that she is robotic and “non-human”. Grace Jones’s identity exists between and within two normative gender binaries: femininity and masculinity.By tapping into fantasy, Grace Jones is able to push far beyond the established narratives. By confusing power relationships and leadership roles that tend to be masculinized she is also able to challenge systems currently in place as a means to define, confine, and restrict. Her fluid gender identity is most pictorially exemplified in her video for Corporate Cannibal. By displaying multiple gender identities, Grace Jones creates an imaginary character of art and representation that also challenges normative ideals of gender.
Grace Jones’s performance also continues to perpetuate her genderless identity. She deviates from gender norms by adopting clothing, behavior and performance associates with the masculine gender repertoire. In an interview in response to the question “are you feminine? Do you like being masculine?”, Grace Jones responds by stating, “I like being both, actually. I mean, it’s not being masculine. It’s an attitude really. Being masculine. What is that? You tell me what is being masculine?” Grace Jones refuses to be categorized and labeled as being of a particular gender continuing to blur the normative ideals of gender identity and gender expressivity by contesting ontologies of gender, race, and power. She refuses to restrict gender exploration in her performances. This is most explicitly shown in the music video for “Corporate Cannibal” in which she employs the usage of graphic art to depict herself as having a fluid gender identity and having a formless physical body. She intentionally confuses fender roles by enacting, singing, and staging acts that challenge limiting conceptions of gender. This allows her to create new forms of subjectivity providing her the ability to define herself on her own terms, void of societal definitions and pressures. This creation of the new subjectivity highlights current flaws existing in current gender discourse as it pertains to Black bodies.
Through costuming, performance, and her creative aesthetic, Grace Jones reclaims her body, identity and challenges ideologies of body politic. He crew cut seen in a variety of photographs and videos evokes a male-dominated military aesthetic while highlighting the masculine facial features that contribute to her androgyny. The makeup and stiletto heels she continues to adorn herself with suggest fetishization associated with the female dress and femininity. The male-tailored suits offsets her bare chest and the ambiguity brought about by the shadowing suggests both a bare chest of hard flat muscle and the presence of slight cleavage. These two opposing visuals provoke both a seductive and dominating androgynous look. She has also been seen to bend these gender lines by using her androgynous female body to invoke iconography of a primarily jazz tradition of players as opposed to singers usually being depicted as female (One Man Show). This performance wavered between exploiting the “feminine” myth of “primitive” sensuality and the “masculine” construction of savagery. These images can then be applied to the primitivism Grace Jones critiques in her work as well.
In the album artwork of “Slave to the Rhythm”, Jones focuses on the embodiment of space. The artwork cut, fractioned, multiplied, and intensified Jones’s image with the locus being her open, expressive mouth. This serves to discount time, reality and the physical restraints of the human body. This is an effort to “queer” normative gender ideals by once again introducing an alternative way to view gender expressivity. This aesthetic can also be seen in Demolition Man (1981) where multiple Grace Jones are shown stepping across the stage while the real Grace Jones sings in the background. The visual negation of a single “true” Grace Jones functions to suggest the reliance on artifice, such as make-up and fashion in the presentation of the self as it challenges normative gender ideologies.
