Body and Transgression. Cindy Sherman and the Photographic Vision of Human Mutation

This text focuses on the issue of human mutation within the frame of contemporary feminist aesthetics through the analysis of Cindy Sherman’s photographic series Disastres (1986-1989) and Sex Pictures (1992). This work denounces harshly the gradual de-humanization of industrial society and questions obsolete socially established identity patterns. The theoretical discussion of Sherman’s pieces is based on Judith Butler’s concept of “performativity” and Donna Haraway’s idea of the cyborg. The paper seks a reformulation, within the context of the new technological media used in contemporary artistic practices, of the waning borders between real and virtual bodies of women and men, gays and lesbians, transvestites and transexuals. In other words, the text seeks to explain the deep transformation that affects the very concept of human