Bowie's Challenge to Heteronormativity: Turn and Face the Strange

Last week I considered some aspects of conducting activism in opposition to one of the most significantly engrained power binaries of human culture.  Now,as our month-long exploration of patriarchy winds down, I thought it might be nice to turn our gaze on a few figures that have made a significant (and I would argue positive) impact on the tenor of cultural conversations that take place around the intersections of gender, biology and power in our society.  What better place to start than by paying homage to a recently deceased icon that launched a pivotal challenge to people's normative perceptions of gender and sexuality: David Bowie.

Free Your Mind and Your Androgyny

Pressing an album on whose cover he appeared in a dress (The man who sold the world) was only a token of the totalistic way that Bowie's amorphous persona challenged the dogma of gender roles: an obviously identifiable trope that represented a deeper rejection of category that pervaded all things Bowie.  His physical features, his fashion choices, his language and mannerisms both drew from the hypermasculine (metal-riveted leather jackets and bulging codpieces) and the hyperfeminine (glitter, feathered blowouts and skin-tight leotards).  I think Bowie was the first truly mainstream figure that brought this type of gender-bending image to the fore; he was dangerous because he was a living manifestation of the message when radically masculine and feminine characteristics were both embraced, the result was not a failure or a cancellation (something like Pat from MadTV), but instead a potent summation of eclectic elements of human potential.  Bowie was amazing because he lived such contradictions effortlessly, dismissing the difficulty that the normal mind attaches to the liminal spaces that live between our well-defined notions.  Before Bowie, imagining the kind of male-female amalgam that he would become might have been well beyond the pale of many suburban imaginations.  With his establishment as a household name, people had a reference point to anchor their newly expanded imaginings about the range of the possible, and perhaps even the desirable when it came to enforcing particular gender traits on children with particular biological sexes.

What made Bowie particularly insidious, at least from the perspective of the dominant order, was the unapologetic element of his idiom.  Despite being so far ahead of the curve, despite challenging so significantly what many may have considered "normal", he refused to endorse others' frustration and confusion by giving it substance.  He lived in a world where normalcy was defined by his own perceptions of what a better world might look like, and with the force of his passion and his personality he shook the way that others looked at the world.  He knew that he, the emperor, was the only one wearing clothes, and his unflappable assurance that this was the case despite the indignation of so many of his naked subjects is what allowed him to pave the wave for futures icons like Prince to further blur the lines of identification that are used to normalize and substantiate roles of subservience and dominance in our patriarchal society.

We can all take a page out of Ziggy's playbook.  Live in a better world, and when you encounter others whose worldviews have been detrimentally polluted with prejudices and entitled expectations, invite them to leave all of that behind and join you in a better place.