THE MEN IN THESE PHOTOS ARE NOT MODELS.  THEY ARE CUSTOMERS THAT FREQUENTED THE STRIP CLUB I WORKED AT.  

How to transform average men into convincing women?

Interview with ARTery Magazine for SHOWGIRLS

PRESS RELEASE                                                                         

“While this series of color photographic light box images of men of various body types and ethnicities posing in burlesque drag may at first read as synonymous with that brand of queered kitsch originated by outlandish photographers such as the campy duo Pierre et Gilles, or fashion photographer David LaChapelle, there is more to these images than initially meets the eye. As viewers, we may come to these awkwardly posed portraits of hairy, overweight, and disheveled-looking drag queens with preconceived and stereotyped expectations of who and what these men are.”

“In reality, these men are not drag queens at all. Indeed, Soroudi has effectively turned the tables on all expectations of both the gendered power dynamics of these images and her role as the author of the gaze that frames and dominates them. Having worked as a stripper—a profession she undertook with the zeal of an undercover detective investigating the underbelly of the sex trade—she tasked herself with probing gender performativity and the dynamics of the gaze within that context. She ultimately approached her own clients and somehow convinced them to pose in drag for her outside of the club—in her own studio, no less. The results are varied: at times her subjects appear emotionally naked, exposing a deep sense of isolation and seclusion as in Jodie (2008), a bedraggled lady-of-the-night in fishnets, clutching her face in her hand; at other times her models effectively embody their own fantasies of the women they usually ogle, as in Vivian (2008), an African American tart who poses for the camera in a seductive frontal position, her bikini zone artfully obscured by a glamorous disco ball.”

“By dressing these men up as stereotypes of femininity, she complicates the masquerade of gender, as described by Judith Butler in her pioneering book, Gender Trouble, in which she makes the convincing case that gender is not a stable or intractable identity, but rather one reinforced through repeated performances, social sanctions, and taboos. Drag, Butler tells us, “implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself,” deconstructing the notion of authentic gender identity. Through these faux-drag scenarios, however, Soroudi takes this a step further, revealing more layers of the instability of gender construction. In her re-staging of the sexualized looking situation initially enacted upon her own body in the strip club, she now functions as the ravenous spectator and author of fantasies; these former voyeurs are transformed into the objects of the gaze.”