She's Funny That Way

"She's Funny That Way"...she's a Southern Belle at a beauty salon, she's an Amish Man, she's a Reigning Pageant Winner, she's a Young Jewish Intellectual, she's Always the Virgin and Never the Vixen, she's a Goddess Accordion Folk Singer, she's a Dirty Ol' Carnival Caller. She's a Lady-Killer, she's a Private Dick, and she’s the Devil.

"She's Funny That Way" interrogates the possibilities of lesbian representation by appropriating presumably heterosexual identities and re-deploying these identities through a lesbian reading. For example the image "Amish Man" represents an idealized way of life, a self-sufficient, intimate and wholesome community that exists independent of contemporary society. This image provokes stereotypical parallels between Amish communities and utopian lesbian communities. The images are infused with camp humor and irony, showing that irony and drag are closely related.

These fantasy scenarios disrupt expectations of standard lesbian representations. She's never dreamed of beating Martina Navratilova in a tennis match nor does she desire singing a duet with the "great dyke hope" Melissa Etheridge. Her representations could not sell unisex colognes nor newsstand magazines, although lesbian bodies in post modernity are being seen everywhere, in broadcast, in technoculture, in advertising and in the print media. These standards of lesbian representations are going mainstream making lesbian bodies all the more difficult to read. Her lesbian representations are disruptive, even sometimes pathetic, striving for mediocrity and relishing in Middle-American ideals.