And yet. Yet. Among this abundance of hairy joy \u2013 there is no direct gaze. Among the 21 slides there are faces in profile, lower portions of faces, averted glances with pupils looking away. There is only one woman directly glancing at the viewer, and even as her defiant brows dominate her face she is neither fully seen nor subsequently fully known.\u00a0Also, nowhere in the 21 slides does the women\u2019s whole body occupy the visual frame. The pictures show a bushy underarm with barely a chest wall or breast, a lushly forested pudenda without whole legs or torso, or a lightly furred arm without a hand attached.<\/p>\n
Counter this power and gaze conundrum with Kim Kardashian\u2019s photoessay for Paper\u2019s<\/em> Winter issue\u00a0where she appears<\/a>, full frontal, body hair free, and fully faced. With the hashtag #breaktheinternet, the intent of the shoot is clear. Neither during the photoshoot\u2019s extended video interview or the accompanying print piece does Kardashian invoke feminism\u2019s ideals of choice, power or acceptance. Yet, in her direct gaze and whole body there is a definitive power of being fully present in the visual medium.<\/p>\n Censored to be safe for work, but you can see the original here<\/a>: In his classic Disidentifications,\u00a0<\/em>Munoz interrogates the intersections between queer theory and life as performance to illustrate the ways hegemony is constructed. All the women in the photoessay above are performing: to disrupt a gaze by capturing the consumer; to deliver through visual imagery a counternarrative to normed assumptions; to shine a spotlight upon their bodies so that other stories can be told about them that subsequently reflect the world. These are all photos of \u201cnaked women\u201d, but they are not equal in power.<\/p>\n Make no mistake, Kardashian\u2019s photoshoot does not aspire to be anything but <\/em>\u00a0performance \u2013 a denuded spectacle that we can believe \u2013 illustrating her power to create reverberating social narratives. But the theme of empowered, hirsuit women who embrace the social, sexual, and personal repercussions of their decision is undercut by the disembodied visual presentation. The\u00a0power of these\u00a0women has no whole body in which to reside. They are intended to be read as both brave and everyday, but they are visually reduced to decontextualized hair clumps; the\u00a0performances of pride do\u00a0not ring true because the viewer does not witness the incorporation of their\u00a0body pride into a fully human landscape. Frankly, if women are going to \u201cgrow hair there\u201d \u2013 we need to fully embody it.<\/p>\n![\"5\"](\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/03\/53.png\")
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