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The catalogue includes all visual and textual works that are a part of the EnGendered Species Exhibitions.

George Dinhaupt | Long Beach, California

“By donning “feminine” coded attire and other accoutrements such as wigs, jewelry and make-up, the drag queens in Nan Goldin’s work perform, and therefore create, the “feminine” gender of the two-sex system. Yet, while performance places them securely within the binary male/female gender system, it also fractures the same system by “undoing” gender through slippage.”1

To explore this further, we need a definition of the word slippage in the excerpt above from Cynthia Wilson’s essay. Drag performers dress in attire that signifies female in our gender-coded clothing system but they don’t fit within the classification of female, so slippage occurs. If they are not “doing” or dressing for the male role then they must be female in a simple binary system. In a society that identifies us as either man or woman, we have no useful definition for someone who may fall in between those two rigidly boundaried sites. This is “undoing” gender through slippage. And it is at that point of slippage where George Dinhaupt places himself in Diptych.

Dinhaupt plays out the “undoing” of gender through performance with comedy. “. . . gender is created through enactment; it is played out in the surface of the body as well as through coded actions. Because gender is outside the body, it remains fluid, changeable.”2 He dons feminine coded attire with the objective of asking his viewers to look at his performance with humor and question the traditional binary gender system. Dinhaupt seems to be saying, “here I am, a clearly naked male, donning feminine coded attire,” and asking whether or not his performance transforms his gender. Is he less of a man for wearing a pink boa? Gender is created here through his enactment, played out on the surface. This is not the same change undergone by a male to female transgendered person through the surgical process of becoming a women. The objective there is to transform from one sex to the other.

The end result of Dinhaupt‘s piece is to show the “doing” of gender as a performance with himself as the performer. The putting on of feminine coded attire doesn’t change the physiology of the male body, just how we read the surface through his coded actions. The end result isn’t about changing male to female, it shows instead the complexity of gender variations that refuse to be reduced to the simple binary of male/female labels.

1 Wilson, Cynthia, Gender as Performance in the Work of Nan Goldin.
2 Wilson, Cynthia


- by Tina Johnson




George Dinhaupt
Diptych
30”x30”
photographs