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Improvisation within a Scene of

Constraint: Cindy Sherman’s
Serial Self-Portraiture

MICHELLE MEAGHER

In the artist statement included in a recently published collection of her work,

American art photographer Cindy Sherman explains that the characters who
populate her self-portraits were produced not through conscious selection of
specific roles, but through play and improvisation. ‘It was like sketching,’ she
explains, ‘I’d play with make-up for a while just to see where it took me . . . I
never knew what I was setting out to do – it wasn’t like I had these visions in
my head that I had to realize’ (2003: 6). Sherman’s oeuvre is largely composed of
self-representational photographs in which the artist seems to conceal herself
with disguise and masquerade. In the earliest work – for example, her ground-
breaking collection of black and white photographs called the Untitled Film Stills
(1977–1980) – Sherman seamlessly inhabits a variety of feminine roles. Based on
recognizable character types derived from mid-century American and European
film noir, the women of the Untitled Film Stills evoke familiarity in their spec-
tators. Although the work seems, at times, to reproduce scenes from specific
films, the stills are in fact photographs that are not connected by or to an over-
arching cinematic narrative.

Body & Society © 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore),
Vol. 13(4): 1–19
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X07085536

www.sagepublications.com
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Art critic Gerald Marzorati describes the characters who populate these and
other images in Sherman’s oeuvre as ‘women she has absorbed over the years,
beginning in her childhood’ (1983: 86). This is, I think, a provocative way of
describing the characters that Sherman embodies in much of her work. It is
particularly provocative insofar as it counters a theatrical model of identity with
a model in which femininity is understood as an effect of regulatory norms and
habits that have been practiced by and absorbed into what phenomenologists call
the lived body. Put another way, Marzorati offers a language for understanding
Sherman’s body as a body embedded in a gendered life world. Significantly,
Sherman’s description of her aesthetic practice (‘I’d play . . . I never knew what
I was setting out to do’) suggests that the work is motivated by improvisation,
not by politics, intentions, or plans. Taking up the language of habit, memory,
and embodied experience, it is possible and productive to consider the ways in
which these characters were not consciously chosen but rather emerged from
culturally embodied memories and knowledge.
Armed with descriptions provided by Marzorati and Sherman, I question
conventional readings that alight upon Sherman’s chameleonism or that highlight
her endless capacity for self-transformation. In the view of curator Regis Durand,
the work is a tour de force in artifice and chameleonism – its allure has to do with
the artist’s capacity to transform herself. Here, Sherman is celebrated as the art
world’s Madonna – a celebrity artist who constantly reinvents and reforms herself
(see Durand, 2006). In the view of curator Rochelle Steiner, the strength of the
work is derived not only from how it represents Sherman’s self-transformations,
but also from its capacity to reveal the fluidity of contemporary subjectivity
more generally. Here, Sherman’s costume changes are evidence that, in a post-
modern era, ‘we can adopt any role we want and we can change it on a daily
basis’ (Steiner, 2003: 23). Durand and Steiner are by no means alone in their
assessments of Sherman’s work. This is an oeuvre that is insistently read through
the tropes of chameleonism, self-transformation, self-reinvention, and the fluidity
of identity. For any of these arguments to make sense, however, one must first
agree that the characters Sherman inhabits do indeed represent a wide cross-
section of femininity and that, in addition, the characters are significantly differ-
ent from Sherman herself.
Despite constant claims by critics that these apparent self-portraits represent
a haphazard, motley collection of diverse characters (a wide cross-section of
femininity), I argue that the images involve the representation of characters who
are only slightly distinct from Sherman herself. In fact, taken together, the
characters in many of Sherman’s images appear to be ‘claustrophobically similar’
to one another (Phelan, 1993: 68). This recognition of the claustrophobic nature
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Improvisation within a Scene of Constraint ■ 3

of Sherman’s imagery necessitates, I argue, an entirely new look at the work.

Viewed as bearing more similarities than differences, the characters seem less
representative of feminine diversity and more like variations on a theme. Indeed,
the descriptions offered by Sherman (‘I never knew what I was setting out to do’)
and Marzorati (‘these are women she has absorbed over the years’) suggest that
Sherman is not creating a motley cast of characters so much as she offers
performative materializations of a specifically gendered habitus.
In what follows, I explore Sherman’s oeuvre with an eye trained on the body
that lingers beneath the artist’s impersonations. Looking at the work this way
means insisting upon the relative stability of the body; it means insisting upon
the existence of embodied constraints; and it means recognizing the ways in
which Sherman’s lived body impacts upon the kind of characters who emerge
from her improvisations. As will become clear, attending to the body in this way
is deeply contrary to much of the interpretive activity that has surrounded
Sherman’s work since the late 1970s. I take up this contrary approach in order to
stage an intervention against critics who have aligned Sherman’s work with a
rather breezy postmodern theory of the body as a blank slate, in which the body
is conceived as the ground upon which masquerades and disguises are effortlessly
donned and discarded. Confronted with the inadequacy of models that under-
stand bodies to be simply the inert ground upon which performances are enacted,
I draw on the work of feminist philosopher Judith Butler and French sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu to develop a model in which bodies are understood to be reposi-
tories of culture and in which performances are conceived as citational practices
delimited by embodied dispositions. Against the postmodern rhetoric that circu-
lates through popular critical writing on Sherman’s oeuvre, the viewing position
promoted here sets out to insist that the images are not exemplary of an appar-
ently limitless capacity for self-recreation, but rather may be indicative of what
Butler has called ‘improvisations within a scene of constraint’ (2004: 1).

Conventions
Key to Sherman’s work is the observation that these are self-portraits that fail
to do what self-portraits have generally been thought to do: reveal aspects of
the artist’s true self. Sherman’s self-portraits are self-portraits that refuse self-
revelation and instead can be said to question the very nature of the self portrayed
in this genre of art. That her work is produced through the mechanisms of
photography, conventionally associated with discourses of truth in representation,
serves to complicate the conceptual schema of her oeuvre. Ultimately, in order
to make sense of these multiple and apparently contradictory self-portrayals,
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most critics are compelled to insist that none of the characters bear any similarity
to Sherman – thus her chamelonism. Moreover, many alight upon the observa-
tion that the women who populate the fictional frames of the film stills, for
instance, are not the ‘real’ Cindy Sherman. To the extent that these photographs
refuse the discourse of authenticity that self-portraiture conventionally arouses,
they are often said to affirm that the self is a fiction, that the accoutrements of
selfhood are socially constructed, and that selfhood is an ongoing project on
which individuals embark. The allure of the work, then, is its capacity to ‘show
the self as an imaginary construct’ (Crimp, 1979: 22), to show that ‘the self is
just a fiction, an image, a role chosen or imposed, invented by you or by
society’ (Lubbock, 2003: 14). On one level, descriptions of a de-centered self (an
‘imaginary construct,’ a ‘fiction’, an ‘image’) may be nicely aligned with post-
modern cultural theory, and especially postmodern theories of subjectivity. More
troublingly, however, Sherman’s presentation of self in multiple roles has been
adapted to a breezy postmodernism that displaces the subtleties of postmodern
models of subjectivity in ways that unwittingly reinstall a modern, autonomous
subject.
In an incisive article that examines shifting critical responses to Sherman’s
work, art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau points out that ‘the earliest serious
consideration of Sherman’s work was animated by the most rigorous formula-
tions of a deconstructive and oppositional postmodernism’ (1991: 112). Specifi-
cally, scholars like Douglas Crimp and Craig Owens include Sherman’s work in
their trenchant explorations and examinations of the emergence of a postmodern
sensibility in contemporary American art. In an article originally published in the
art journal October in 1980, Owens argues that Sherman’s work is an example of
the ways in which this new sensibility in art turns on troubling the referent. He
argues that postmodern art foregrounds the politics of representation by produc-
ing ambivalent signs, signs that are ultimately unreadable. Like Charles Jencks,
who offered the term ‘double-coding’ to describe the combination of stylistic
elements in postmodern architectural design (Jencks, 1977), Owens suggests that
postmodern art produces signs that evoke incongruous, even contradictory,
meanings in order to disrupt the conventional assumption that a coherent message
might be extracted from an image or sign (Owens, 1992: 70–6). For Owens,
Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills are images that foreground the politics of represen-
tation, and in doing so, they reveal the instability of referential meaning. Crimp
similarly argues that Sherman, along with a number of young New York-based
artists of the late 1970s, was exploring representation not as the ‘re-presentation
of that which is prior’, but rather as an ‘unavoidable condition of intelligibility’
(Crimp, 1979: 77). Within this context, he argues that the Untitled Film Stills
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Improvisation within a Scene of Constraint ■ 5

disturb the representational codes of photography in which the photograph or

snapshot is conceived as an authentic representation of the real.
By their writing, both Crimp and Owens placed Sherman squarely and
definitively at the forefront of postmodern art activity that was emerging in
North America in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Thus, to use Solomon-Godeau’s
language, it was early in her career that Sherman was placed within the frame of
postmodernism and postmodern art practice. This has had a lasting impact upon
the reception and circulation of her work. By the end of the 1980s and well into
the 1990s, Sherman was increasingly recognized as an artist whose work not only
offered a mere illustration of postmodernism in art, but who stood as a model for
it. Sherman’s work is, as Nadine Lemmon points out, saturated with what have
become the signs and strategies of postmodern theory (Lemmon, 1993/4: 101–2).
One of the key ways in which postmodern theory circulates in the mountains
of art criticism on this artist and her work concerns the question of postmodern
models of subjectivity. Postmodern theories of subjectivity disrupt modernist
fantasies of autonomy, self-identity, and independence, arguing instead that
contemporary subjectivities are characterized by fragmentation, instability, and
multiplicity (see Elliott, 2001). In the hands of art critics, however, Sherman’s
apparent capacity for self-transformation came to stand as an exemplar of what
feminist philosopher Susan Bordo has called a ‘postmodern imagination of
human freedom from bodily determination’, a postmodern fantasy that defies
‘the historicity, the mortality, and, indeed, the very materiality of the body’
(Bordo, 1993: 245).
Consider this description, offered by Rochelle Steiner in a 2003 catalogue:
‘Sherman’s work confirms our freedom to choose how we present ourselves to
the world: we can adopt any role we want and we can change it on a daily basis’
(p. 22). Steiner celebrates Sherman’s ability to slip, apparently effortlessly, in and
out of a whole cast of characters. She recognizes in Sherman’s photographs a
subject who is free to choose the roles she occupies, and, indeed, a subject for
whom identity is little more than a role. Viewing Sherman as an actor dispassion-
ately taking up roles, Steiner is led towards a model of a subject who is at a
distance from, in control of, and separate from social roles. This is a model of
a subject who can slip in and out of identities, a subject who can flit from role
to role without recrimination, without anxiety, without disruption. It is a model
of subjectivity that invokes the logic of postmodernism but reduces this logic to
cliché. Steiner’s celebration of Sherman’s adaptability, which is typical of the
ways in which the work is received, is founded upon a theatrical model of subjec-
tivity that re-installs this modern subject beneath a patina of pastiche, parody,
mimicry, and appropriation.
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Sherman’s capacity to stand for a fantasy postmodernism marked by endless

self-transformation has influenced interpretations of her work and has had, in
particular, lasting implications for how Sherman’s body has been seen – or rather,
how it has remained unseen. The idea that Sherman’s work provides evidence that
identities are easily changed and infinitely malleable is founded upon models of
subjectivity that fundamentally fail to engage with the bodily aspects of subjec-
tivity. To the extent that Sherman’s work has been framed by these discourses,
the question of the body – Sherman’s body – has been inadequate and under-
theorized. When they do attend to Sherman’s body, many critics and scholars
describe it as a blank slate. Art critic Arthur Danto, for instance, once described
Sherman’s face as ‘a neutral base on which she inscribes the countless faces of the
Girl in her myriad embodiments’ (1990: 10). Sherman herself has used a similar
language: ‘I just think of [my face] as just sort of blank’ (in Koski, 1990: n.p.);
and ‘I wanted to go blank’ (in Marzorati, 1983: 81). Performance theorist Peggy
Phelan has also described the role of Sherman’s body in the work as being a
‘neutral, unmarked canvas’ (1993: 68).
Indeed, although the presence of Sherman’s body is key to much of the work,
it is often described as an unmarked body, a body capable of limitless transform-
ation. It doesn’t take much, however, to recognize that Sherman’s transformations
are in some ways quite limited. The characters she enacts are not radically differ-
ent from one another – they share physical features, they take up similar postures,
they enact similar poses toward the camera. The women in Sherman’s oeuvre are
virtually all white, thin, female, and feminine. Armed with this observation, it
becomes clear that Sherman’s ‘lexicon of feminine identities’ (Williamson, 1986:
92) do not in fact represent a motley collection of diverse characters. On the
contrary, the vast majority of images involve the representation of characters who
are only slightly distinct from Sherman herself. In the mad scramble to associate
this oeuvre with the postmodern fantasy of limitless transformation, the specific
materiality of the artist’s body has been overlooked. Against the suggestion that
Sherman’s body is a blank slate, a ‘neutral base’, or ‘unmarked canvas’, I argue
that by looking at and for the body, the work can be used to shed light on the
materiality of the lived body and its capacity to both enable and to constrain the
artist’s performances.
To return to Marzorati’s description, the personae Sherman manages to repre-
sent are the women who populated the artist’s youth; they are the women she has
absorbed over the years. This notion of absorption strikes me as a productive
way to think about the relationship that Sherman has with the characters she
embodies. In contrast to a theatrical model in which Sherman is conceived as an
actor who simply tries on culturally produced roles, the language of absorption
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Improvisation within a Scene of Constraint ■ 7

points to the ways in which these culturally produced roles are in fact consti-
tutive of subjects. The language of absorption involves recognition that the
feminine roles Sherman enacts are guided by a bodily knowledge, by an uncon-
scious store of cultural knowledge that she, like any subject, has absorbed over
the years. In an effort to counter what seem to me to be inadequate and largely
unconvincing models that understand bodies to be simply the inert ground upon
which performances are enacted (i.e. blank slates), I draw on the work of feminist
philosopher Judith Butler and French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to develop a
model in which bodies are repositories of culture and performances are citational
practices delimited by embodied dispositions.

Improvisations
Writing in a poststructuralist mode on the topic of sexuality, Butler insists that
one’s gender and sexuality are not one’s own, but rather they are the effects of
regulatory norms and forces of social power. Of particular concern is the
question of agency and how it might be possible to understand how individuals
are capable of performing gendered acts without rehearsing existential models of
subjectivity that are founded upon freedom, self-determination, and indepen-
dence. In her view, gender and sexuality are historically constituted norms that
both enable and constrain claims to self-determination and freedom. Butler
considers this state of affairs not as a challenge to agency, but rather, as constitu-
tive of an agency that is always ‘riven with paradox’ (2004: 3). Within this frame-
work, agency is not the capacity to choose freely and indiscriminately who I will
be, how I will ‘do’ my gender, or how I will enact my sexuality. Rather, in
Butler’s schema, agency is reformulated as something more like a capacity for
improvisation within a scene of constraint. In this view, sexed and gendered
performances are ‘never fully reducible to’ the effects of regulatory norms, but
nor are they ‘free and wild’ (2004: 15).
By invoking the phrase ‘improvisation within a field of constraint’ to describe
this state of affairs, Butler circumvents some of the common theoretical jugger-
nauts that have plagued the reception of her previous philosophical work, specifi-
cally, the temptation to interpret her description of gender as a performance in a
theatrical manner. Indeed, a theatrical model of performance is at odds with her
description of gender as a stylized repetition of acts and her understanding of
gender as an act that has its origins outside the actor. Butler’s approach to
performance and performativity is clearly elucidated in a Theatre Journal essay
entitled ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’ (1988). Here, Butler situates
her argument between an existentialist position, in which a gendered actor’s
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performances reflect individual choice, and a poststructuralist position, in which

this actor’s activities are ‘imposed or inscribed upon the individual’ (1988: 526).
Although this work most certainly relies upon poststructuralist moorings, Butler
distinguishes her arguments from those in which the body is understood to be
passively scripted by power and discursive regimes. The body, she insists, ought
not to be perceived as a ‘lifeless recipient of wholly pre-given cultural relations’
– indeed, a blank slate (1988: 526). And yet, at the same time, embodied subjects
are beholden to pre-given cultural relations: ‘Actors are always already on the
stage’ (1988: 526). Actors, in other words, are always already situated in social
fields that are cross-hatched by power. Although surely operated upon by regu-
latory power, bodies – qua embodied subjects – are hardly reducible to those
norms and regulations. Put another way, embodied subjects do not follow cultural
directives automatically or mechanically, but rather can be said to interpret them.
Butler’s use of the term ‘improvisation’ seems to refer to such an interpretation.
An improvisation here suggests the capacity for social actors to act appropriately
within a particular scene without recourse to, or requirement of, a script. The
improviser depends not on a script or a set of clearly articulated directives but
rather draws on her embodied knowledge of the limits of cultural intelligibility
– her embodied knowledge of what may or may not be appropriate action not
only within a specific setting, but for a specific body.
In thinking about improvisation as an activity neither imposed nor freely
chosen, it is helpful to turn to the formulation of habitus offered by French soci-
ologist Pierre Bourdieu. Like Butler, Bourdieu emphasizes the practical activity
of embodied social actors – both scholars set out to describe the ways in which
practical activity is simultaneously generative and limiting. Like Butler, then,
Bourdieu is in search of a model in which cultural laws or rules are present and
influential but not fully determinative of human activity. Central to Bourdieu’s
sociological understanding of activity is a desire to transcend the opposition
between the freely choosing social actor of individualistic voluntarism and the
rule-bound subject of structuralist determinism. Habitus is central to the eluci-
dation of such a model. For Bourdieu, habitus is a key sociological principle that
explains the activities of actors who are neither fully free from, nor entirely
constrained by, social imperatives. It refers to enduring, shared orientations
toward the world that arise from specific shared conditions of existence (see
Bourdieu, 1980; Jenkins, 2005).
Although habitus is said to predispose individuals to act in particular ways,
and thus serves as a model to explain cultural coherence and reproduction, it
stops short of reducing subjects to being mechanical rule-followers. Indeed, in
an essay entitled ‘Habitus’, written shortly before his death, Bourdieu insists that
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Improvisation within a Scene of Constraint ■ 9

habitus is not offered in order simply to explain social reproduction. ‘Habitus,’

he writes, ‘is never a mere principle of repetition. . . . It is a principle of invention,
a principle of improvisation. The habitus generates inventions and improvisations
within limits’ (2005: 46, emphasis added). The sort of improvisation that is
enabled by habitus is, fundamentally, bodily. Indeed, embodiment is, as Richard
Jenkins put it, ‘utterly fundamental’ to the concept of habitus (2005: 353). It is a
collection of bodily dispositions that shape how individuals exist in and experi-
ence their bodies. What is known by habitus is known bodily. In the same way
that Bourdieu places the body at the centre of this key principle, Butler too insists
upon the body as a site upon which and through which historical possibilities
(e.g. of gender) are materialized, as she puts it, through ‘various corporeal styles’
(1988: 522). Corporeal styles are at once actively produced by bodily subjects –
‘in some very key sense, one does one’s body’ (1988: 521) – and delimited by
clearly punitive consequences. What appeals here is that neither Bourdieu nor
Butler conceive bodies as determining, nor do they conceive bodies as blank
slates. They offer a corporeal explanation of subjects as actors that challenges
models in which actors freely take on cultural roles.
If, as the theory of habitus suggests, our bodies are repositories of culture, and
if in our bodily activities there is a whole cosmology of cultural values, morals,
and social markings, then Cindy Sherman’s improvisation before the camera
might be understood as something more complex and more revealing than theatri-
cal performances that exemplify some capacity for effortless self-transformation.
They are not the effect of any ‘singular or deliberate act’ (Butler, 1993: 2), but
ought to be considered performative – in Butler’s sense – and habitual – in
Bourdieu’s sense. Sherman’s descriptions of her art practice suggest that her
relationship to the characters she embodies is less instrumental than has been
imagined by critics and spectators. The characters aren’t chosen in any direct
fashion, they emerge from embodied memory and from a culturally shared sense
of what it means to ‘do’ femininity. More specifically, these characters are impro-
vised by a particular body – a body that is white, female and feminine.
Against the common critical assertion that Sherman’s body is a blank slate
with an uncanny capacity for transformation, I suggest that attention be paid to
the enabling constraints of this particular body. Sherman’s female body allows
her to explore a wide variety of femininities, but femaleness becomes a constraint
when she attempts to explore masculinity. Masculinity doesn’t settle easily on her
female, feminine body. Put another way, hers is a body that fails to pass as mascu-
line, it fails to adequately approximate a masculine habitus. Sherman’s is also a
body marked by whiteness. Although she can quite readily inhabit a range of
femininities, that range is limited by race. Aside from a few early images, which
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I discuss below, Sherman’s parade of femininities rarely steps outside whiteness.

Both whiteness and femaleness are enabling constraints that impact Sherman’s
improvisational capacities. They impact, in other words, the cast of characters
who can appear in her oeuvre. The improvisational quality of Sherman’s perform-
ances comes starkly into relief with the circulation of images from Sherman’s
juvenilia, images that can, in some particularly important way, be described as
failed images.

Failed Performances: The Bus Riders

The Bus Riders is a set of black and white photographs that Sherman composed
in 1976, the year she graduated from Buffalo State College, and released publicly
25 years later, after she had gained fame and fortune in the world of art (see
Sherman, 2001). They are studio shots taken before a simple white backdrop; in
each image the shutter release cord, placed under the foot of a disguised Sherman,
winds visibly toward the camera. In each shot, Sherman performs a different
character. Each of these characters approximates the sort of person that might be
found on a public bus – they stand, sit, and slouch as if in the midst of a daily
commute. Most of these bus riders seem caught up in their own thoughts; they
are bored, passive, and simply waiting to arrive at any kind of destination. In
their self-absorption, the characters are made available to a voyeuristic and public
gaze that is largely unreturned. The images thus capture and permit the idle
voyeurism that is so much a part of the experience of public transportation. The
woman with sunglasses in Untitled #369 wears a kerchief over her curly blond
hair. She sits primly, knees and ankles together, and clutches two shopping bags
in her lap (see Figure 1). The young woman in Untitled #374 is spaced out, lost
in thought. She wears large glasses that fall down on the ridge of her nose. A
schoolbag over her shoulder and a lap full of books suggest that she’s taking the
bus home from school. Her plaid skirt, hitched up well over the tops of her knee
socks, is lined by a wrinkled, scratchy crinoline. In Untitled #364, Sherman trans-
forms herself into a slightly rebellious brassy blond teenager. Wearing wide
legged jeans and a dark button-up sweater, she sits confidently on the chair that
stands in for a bus bench, her legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. She looks off to
her right and seems to be involved in her own appraisal of imagined patrons with
whom she shares transit.
Although the majority of the images that constitute The Bus Riders (1976–2005)
represent women of a variety of ages, the series does include impersonations of
several men. In Untitled #366, Sherman, dressed in light trousers, plaid sport
jacket and a wide tie, clutches a briefcase and appears to be a young white
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Improvisation within a Scene of Constraint ■ 11

professional on his way to or from work (see Figure 2). Her frame, however, is
too diminutive to carry this off as an effective masquerade. The manner in which
she holds her body, while approximating the signs of masculinity, doesn’t quite
measure up. Again, in Untitled #373, she approximates a swarthy young white
man reading a book on the bus. As this character, Sherman wears a light coloured
suit with fashionably wide lapels, a dress shirt unbuttoned to reveal a sleeveless
white undershirt, and a thick gold chain around her neck. In yet another untitled
image from this series, she takes on the role of black goateed hipster sporting a
leather jacket, dark glasses, and a jauntily placed fedora. Droll as they may be,
these images stand apart from those in the series in which Sherman performs
versions of middle-class white femininity. Unlike the white female characters,
which Sherman inhabits comfortably, her male characters fall flat. The signs and
markers of masculinity sit awkwardly on her body; her bodily habitus strains
against these impersonations in a way that limits their success. Sherman’s imper-
sonations of male characters have what art critic Barry Schwabsky has described
as ‘a larky, play-acty quality that’s just too light’ (2001: 132). Indeed, these images
stand apart from most of the female impersonations insofar as they are marked
by a distinct awkwardness that suggests, in some particularly important way, that

Figure 1 Cindy Sherman Untitled #369, Figure 2 Cindy Sherman Untitled #366,
1976/2000 black and white photograph 1976/2000 black and white photograph
10
8 inches 10
8 inches
Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures
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12 ■ Body & Society Vol. 13 No. 4

they are failed images. They are images in which the persona under consideration
has devolved into stereotype. Moreover, Sherman’s attempts to embody these
stereotyped masculinities results in a performance in which an ill-fitting disguise
displaces attention away from a potentially convincing performance. Certainly,
all of the images that comprise the Bus Riders – and indeed, the vast majority of
images that Sherman has produced since the Bus Riders – turn on the recognition
that any one of the personae on display is in fact constructed through simulation
and disguise. With the male figures in Bus Riders, however, the productive tension
between the performer and performance gives way to an explicit incongruity.
Speaking of subsequent efforts to include male characters in her work, Sherman
describes how her male impersonations simply ‘didn’t work out’ (2003: 6). She
describes them, moreover, as being ‘too much like drag’ (2003: 6). Sherman’s self-
distancing from drag sensibilities is particularly significant given the extent to
which drag has become a key trope for postmodern theories of subjectivity.
Indeed, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Moon have argued, by the mid-
1990s, drag had become ‘the dominant image in feminist theory for the purely
discretionary or arbitrary aspects of gender identity’ (Sedgwick and Moon, 1993:
219). Drag, in other words, was celebrated as a symbol of a postmodern capacity
for self-transformation. Although drag would seem to be a mode of performance
that Sherman – an artist proclaimed to epitomize that postmodern capacity –
would celebrate. However, for Sherman, performances that approximate drag are
failed performances, performances that ‘didn’t work’ (2003: 6).
Sherman’s self-distancing from drag resonates with the concerns expressed by
Judith Butler. Although Butler’s engagement with performativity of gender had
fuelled feminist and postmodern scholarly investigation of drag, she registers a
significant concern with the ways in which theories of drag performance, which
she had provocatively described as a ‘subversive bodily act’ (1990: passim), risked
re-installing a modern conceptualization of subjectivity. In Bodies That Matter,
she writes specifically against the re-installation of the figure of a choosing subject,
a subject who selects a gender of choice, dons it for a time, and returns it, like a
garment, to its place (Butler, 1993: x). For Butler, socially constituted identities
are not ‘done’ by subjects in the same way that characters are performed by
actors. Identity, and specifically gender identity, might have a performative
quality, but this does not mean that subjects are capable of donning and discard-
ing accoutrements of identity at will. Sherman’s self-distancing from postmodern
appropriations of drag performance suggests that her work may be aligned with
the sensibility expressed by Butler here. Sherman’s work, I have suggested, is
better conceived according to a model in which a subject’s performances are
improvisations constrained by habitus. From this perspective, her improvisations
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Improvisation within a Scene of Constraint ■ 13

of men ‘didn’t work out’ because her work is less about exemplifying an un-
limited capacity for transformation and more about exploring the limits of one’s
body and habitus.
Although a handful of white male characters have appeared in her oeuvre
since the mid-1970s (The History Portraits from 1988–90, discussed below; see
also The Clowns from 2003–4), the representations of non-white characters is
restricted to The Bus Riders. In some images for this series, Sherman performs
blackness by covering her skin with a thick layer of dark make-up. The mono-
chromatic blackness of these characters is forced and uncomfortable. Certainly,
part of the sense of unease they arouse has to do with the political trouble of a
white woman in blackface. In the context of American cultural politics, this
cannot help but hearken the history of minstrelsy in American popular arts. The
anxiety of minstrelsy aside, however, the problem to which I attend concerns
Sherman’s white body and its apparent failure to pass as black. In describing
the Bus Riders series, art critic Ana Finel Honigman points out that Sherman
‘appears as an individual when white and as an immediately recognizable “type”
when wearing blackface’ (2005: 100). Like the performances of masculinity,
performances of black femininity tend toward stereotype. In Bus Riders, there
is little variation between the black characters. Aside from having precisely the
same skin tone, several of the black women bus riders take up the same posture.
In each of Untitled #367, #376, and #378, Sherman inhabits characters who sit
slouched in their chair; their bodies are all shifted slightly to the their left; their
eyes are glassed over and directed towards the ground; their mouths all appear
to be slightly open (see Figures 3 and 4). Whereas Sherman’s performances of
white femininities are richly evocative representations of a variety of different
recognizable types, her performances of black femininity falls flat. The perform-
ances of black femininity are too much performances – the accoutrements and
props she uses in these images sit awkwardly on her body. The effect, ultimately,
bears similarities to the failed performances of masculinity insofar as these
images all highlight not only the incongruities between the performing body
and the performance, but also the performer’s rather theatrical attempt at self-
transformation.
In a televised interview from 1980, Sherman reiterates the limits of her trans-
formations. She describes stopping to take photographs during a family trip
through the American southwest. Although several of these shots were eventu-
ally included in the Untitled Film Stills series, the images in which Sherman
attempted to embody the habitus of American indigenous women did not make
the cut. Like her efforts to represent herself as black in the Bus Riders series, her
efforts to represent herself as ‘Indian’ produced failed, ‘really ridiculous’ images
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14 ■ Body & Society Vol. 13 No. 4

Figure 3 Cindy Sherman Untitled #367, Figure 4 Cindy Sherman Untitled #367,
1976/2000 black and white photograph 1976/2000 black and white photograph
10
8 inches 10
8 inches
Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures

(Cindy Sherman: An Interview, 1981: n.p.). The so-called ‘failed’ images are
images in which Sherman moves beyond the limits of her habitual corporeality.
Analysis of the failed images thus helps to think about the ways in which the rest
of the work actually works and, at the same time, draws attention to the limits
of conventional arguments about the work. Moreover, to identify these as failed
images is to raise the question of what, in the context of Sherman’s oeuvre,
constitutes a successful image. Ultimately, what makes her performances of white
femininity successful is a certain comfort and ease with the way in which she
inhabits these characters. They are, to return to Marzorati’s provocative phrase,
the women she has absorbed over the years.

Prosthetic Habitus: History Portraits and Beyond

In The Bus Riders, Sherman explores multiple identities, but seems to discover,
through play and improvisation, that her capacity to inhabit identities is not
unlimited. Although her subsequent self-representational photographic work is
largely centred on the representation of women characters, Sherman revisits the
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Improvisation within a Scene of Constraint ■ 15

possibility of male characters in a series called the History Portraits. This is a

series of photographs that Sherman produced while living and working in Rome
in the late 1980s. They are large photographs in which Sherman takes on the guise
of Renaissance portrait sitters through irreverent performances of characters
coming apart at the seams. The figures in these portraits are pieced together with
visibly false prosthetics – wigs, false noses, broad foreheads, false breasts and
breast plates, heavy cosmetics. Although Sherman goes on to further explore the
use of prosthetics, and, later in the 1990s, medical mannequins, this was the first
time that her performances involved alteration of her body beyond cosmetics.
Certainly, the prosthetics incorporate a playful sensibility into the imagery.
Consider Untitled #216 (1989), in which Sherman takes up the pose of the
Madonna clutching a lifeless infant. Set against a tapestry background, Sherman
poses demurely, the top of her gown opened to reveal a single rounded breast
affixed to the center of her chest. Equally irreverent is Untitled #194 (1989), in
which she channels a swarthy Renaissance rake with dark flowing hair. He wears
tight trousers and a shirt open to the waist, revealing a false breast plate complete
with lark dark nipples and a mass of curly chest hair. These images, though in
some ways dramatically different from Sherman’s earlier work, continue to
address questions of habitus and the dispositional limitations of the artist. They
confirm the extent to which Sherman’s work is not predicated on her capacity to
easily become anyone she wants. She cannot, in other words, seamlessly embody
either the Madonna or a Renaissance ladies’ man. In other words, to articulate
and inhabit the bodies, and more significantly, the habitus of Renaissance portrait
sitters, her own body (her bodily dispositions, her habitus) requires both conceal-
ment and adjustment. That these performances require the use of prosthetics to
both conceal and adjust her bodily habitus suggests that this work is deeply
shaped by a recognition of limits, boundaries, borders.
I have used the examples of cross-race, cross-gender, and now cross-historical
performances to explore the ways in which bodily dispositions may be said to
impact the execution of Sherman’s self-representations. A careful look at the
gender and racial cross-performances that have been relegated to her juvenilia –
work produced while still a student and developing artist, work, for that matter,
not widely circulated until she had reached star status in the art world – can
constitute a challenge to conventional arguments that celebrate Sherman’s
chameleonism or that hold her project up as evidence for limitless transform-
ation. Read in relationship to the juvenilia, Sherman’s later work seems less
obviously about self-transformation than it is about exploring the limits of one’s
bodily dispositions. Arguments about Sherman’s capacity to stand for a post-
modern subject who can ‘adopt any role’ and ‘change it on a daily basis’ (Steiner,
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16 ■ Body & Society Vol. 13 No. 4

2003: 22) crumble in the face of an oeuvre that represents, as I have pointed out,
figures and characters who are, to invoke Phelan’s language, ‘claustrophobically
similar’ (1993: 68). Ultimately, the significance of the work comes into view not
when it is celebrated for crossing boundaries, but rather when it is recognized as
lingering at the edges of boundaries in ways that explore limits and limitations
not as naturally occurring things ensured by naturally different bodies, but
rather as lived realities of bodies that enact the markers, signs and symbols of
their limits.
Against models of gender and identity that celebrate a capacity to take a
particular identity on and off again, Sherman’s work lingers at and thus implic-
itly recognizes the existence of limitations. I am interested in these limitations.
In a postmodern or late capitalist theoretical framework, limitations seemed, well,
limiting. I am suggesting that limitations, conceived through models of habitus,
might better be conceived as providing the stage upon which improvisations
might occur. The improvisational social actor is neither fully bound by, nor
liberated from, cultural scripts. This is an actor whose relationship to scripts is
not conscious but rather embodied in habitus. By habitus, subjects are pre-
disposed (but not bound to) behave in particular ways. Habitus generates impro-
visations; habitus generates improvisational actors (Bourdieu, 2005: 46).
Moreover, improvisation is a mode of activity situated somewhere between
two popular models of the acting subject. In one of these models, individuals are
posited to be freely choosing social actors; in the other, they are understood to
be rule-bound subjects. This is a model of subjectivity. Neither voluntarist indi-
vidualism nor structuralist determinism seem sufficient for explaining human
agency, social reproduction, and the possibility for change. This is an observa-
tion made by Butler and Bourdieu, both of whom insist that any understanding
of social change ought to understand first the social realities of constraint. These
social realities are, as I have argued throughout, embedded in corporeality and
articulated through the dispositions of social actors. That social constraint is
coded not only onto our bodies as signs but into our bodies as practices is a vitally
important recognition that opens up the notion of improvisation as a model for
thinking both about the body and about performance.

Conclusions
Some people can cross-dress convincingly and others can’t. . . . some people’s bodies make
more sense to themselves and others when they’re cross-dressed than when they aren’t. . . . the
embeddedness of cross-dressing in routines, in work, in spectacle, in ritual, in celebration, in
self-formation, in bodily habitus, in any sexuality, can vary infinitely from one person to
another. (Sedgwick and Moon, 1993: 219)
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Improvisation within a Scene of Constraint ■ 17

Contrary to conventional interpretations of Sherman’s work that invoke a post-

modern breeziness to argue that the work exemplifies a capacity for contempor-
ary subjects to effortlessly don and discard multiple identities, I have suggested
that Sherman’s masquerades are constrained by habitus. Her body, I argue, is not
a blank slate, so much putty to be moulded and transformed. This body is more
than the ground upon which a performance is executed; it marks the limits and
constraints that enable particular performances and limits the success of others.
This is not to re-install determinist models of embodiment, but rather to suggest
that the body is always a lived body that is not easily transcended. Underpinning
my insistence upon Sherman’s body and Sherman’s habitus is a desire to temper
postmodern-inspired arguments in which identity, and specifically gender identity,
is posed in the language of performance, in which performance is understood to
be purely discretionary and ultimately arbitrary. Against a model that celebrates
what Sedgwick and Moon describe as arbitrary, caricatural, and exciting free play,
I insist upon recognizing the presence of bodies that both absorb cultural
conventions and interpret social directives.
In this context, considering performances to be improvisations executed
within scenes of constraint offers a productive model for re-thinking subjects as
social actors. I have suggested that the scene of constraint within which impro-
visation occurs is not simply a social field cross-hatched by power – although it
is this as well. Insofar as specific particular bodies absorb the lessons of, for
instance, gender, race, class, and sexuality, bodies themselves are also scenes of
constraint. The body conceived here as a site of social markings is constrained –
but not determined – by dispositions instilled via habitus. Habitus, Bourdieu
reminds us, ‘is not a fate, not a destiny’ (2005: 45). It is, however, a force to be
reckoned with. Seeing gendered and racialized dispositions at work in Sherman’s
early work draws attention to the lived body beneath the performances and gives
the lie to the conventional assertions of her work’s capacity to speak for limitless
transformation. The efforts to make the oeuvre speak for postmodernist sensibil-
ities may well have been exciting and even invigorating. However, this desire was
founded upon an untenable disavowal of the body. In the current intellectual
moment, there is a much-needed call for postmodern approaches to be tempered
with a strong sense of materiality. From this perspective, it seems particularly
valuable to advocate theories of social actors that recognize the body as some-
thing more than simply the inert ground upon which performances are enacted.
Recognizing social actors as subjects who enter into a performance equipped
with corporeal dispositions means to, among other things, begin to understand
and theorize the space of agency, described by Butler as deeply paradoxical, that
exists at the cusp of freedom and constraint.
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Michelle Meagher is an Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Alberta, where
she teaches in the areas of popular culture and feminist cultural studies. She earned a PhD in Cultural
Studies at George Mason University in 2005. Her research is centred on feminine and feminist self-
representational practices, particularly within art photography. Her current research project considers
the ways in which such practices engage with vulnerability and, specifically, the vulnerability of the body.