Female St. Sebastian: Parallel lines in the radical lesbian art of Gina Pane and Catherine Opie

• Main Author: Paweł Leszkowicz
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ośrodek Studiów Amerykańskich Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 2010-09-01
• Series: InterAlia

This paper is a comparative analysis of works by two contemporary artists: Gina Pane, an Italian, and Catherine Opie, an American. Both use performance and autobiography and raise the subject of lesbian identity. Moreover, both share themes of suffering, pain and relationships between women. They were active in various cultural contexts, however. Pane worked in Western Europe during the moral revolution of the 1960s and '70s. Opie has been active in American art from the beginning of the '90s and she has been participating in political changes from the AIDS crisis and the radical queer movement to the present day assimilation of the LGBTQ community. The tradition and symbolism associated with St. Sebastian serves as the historical background the for the analysis in this paper, as both artists used the iconography of this male homoerotic idol in their subversive depictions of femininity and sexual dissimilarity. The works of the two artists are subjected to a comparative interpretation considering various contexts, similarities and differences, and evaluated in terms of contemporary artistic and political challenges of queer culture.