What It Means To Be Here
by: Jeanette Spicer , June 25, 2022
by: Jeanette Spicer , June 25, 2022
In my series What it Means to Be Here (2018-ongoing), I capture the intimacy between non-heterosexual women with a sense of ordinariness and reverence for sex, pleasure, and desire, with agency, honesty, and spontaneity. We have been taught to see the representation of sex and the female body through the male gaze with a particular lack of lesbian perspective, and through this work, I call into question the historic photographic erasure of lesbian representation.
My use of light and shadow generates a tension between the known and unknown, as I often cut the body’s signifier from its signified. This creates fragments of perceived union and allows for space to open up new possibilities of being seen and represented as a queer/lesbian woman. The shadows also function as a blurring of boundaries, opening opportunities for desire and wonder. I often challenge the constraints of the frame by using various technical strategies in which I disrupt the normative gaze in order to reimagine and reclaim a distinct, lesbian gaze. When creating in-camera collages of bodies and other objects within a space, I point out the androgyny and gender ‘signifiers’ of some of my subjects, inevitably challenging the bi-polarisation of gender identity.
Historically, interiors have represented isolation and confinement for women. However, the interiors in my work represent independence and a reclaiming of ownership. My photographs of exterior scenes, sometimes shot in gay male cruising sites, offer an opportunity to explore these sexual playgrounds dominated by men, and to imagine our bodies in spaces dedicated to cruising, to which lesbian and queer women rarely have access. What it Means to Be Here emerged from a desire to grapple with the absence of lesbian photographers, the lesbian gaze, and the long history of patriarchal constructs that shape our ideas of the female form, intimacy, and the creation of images.
![Jeanette Spicer, Stretch [nd].](https://maifeminism.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Figure-6_Jeanette-Spicer-683x1024.jpg)
WHO SUPPORTS US
The team of MAI supporters and contributors is always expanding. We’re honoured to have a specialist collective of editors, whose enthusiasm & talent gave birth to MAI.
However, to turn our MAI dream into reality, we also relied on assistance from high-quality experts in web design, development and photography. Here we’d like to acknowledge their hard work and commitment to the feminist cause. Our feminist ‘thank you’ goes to:
Dots+Circles – a digital agency determined to make a difference, who’ve designed and built our MAI website. Their continuous support became a digital catalyst to our idealistic project.
Guy Martin – an award-winning and widely published British photographer who’s kindly agreed to share his images with our readers
Chandler Jernigan – a talented young American photographer whose portraits hugely enriched the visuals of MAI website
Matt Gillespie – a gifted professional British photographer who with no hesitation gave us permission to use some of his work
Julia Carbonell – an emerging Spanish photographer whose sharp outlook at contemporary women grasped our feminist attention
Ana Pedreira – a self-taught Portuguese photographer whose imagery from women protests beams with feminist aura
And other photographers whose images have been reproduced here: Cezanne Ali, Les Anderson, Mike Wilson, Annie Spratt, Cristian Newman, Peter Hershey