scene of the day

You can check out artist Mark Bradford's Practice along with other works at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Hard Targets—Masculinity and Sport until January 19, 2009.

gender is burning

When Isis, the diva from America's Next Top Model made history as the first transgendered person to compete on the show, the airwaves went crazy. In fact, the producers created so much hype around Isis's gender that it inevitably overshadowed her performance on the show. But this was not the first time that the blurring of gender lines seemingly occurred in the mainstream. I think back to the overwhelming popularity of the 1990 documentary, Paris is Burning, in which characters like Venus Xtravaganza and Willi Ninja were born. Or even Marc Jacobs' controversial ad campaign which employed androgynous male model Cole Mohr to showcase a few dresses within his Spring 08 collection for Marc by Marc Jacobs. In 2003, Jean Paul Gaultier favorite Omahyra Mota even appeared in Jay-Z's video for Change Clothes. Whether in hip-hop, fashion, or mainstream popular culture...could the lines be blurring/burning before our eyes?