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Women Looking at Men Loving: Eve Sussman, Kathryn Bigelow and the Women Writers of Mad Men. The work by these several women artists articulate nearly every fathomable aspect of women's desire and socialization, either as it has been codified and perpetuated by women, or historically legislated and imposed on women by men. Cultural critic published with Parkett, Art in America, Bijutsu Techo and Duke U’s Cultural Politics.

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This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email. On International Women's Day, 2011, I published on Huffington Post, Part 1 of XX Chromosocial: Women Artists Cross the Homsocial Divide"--a 7-part series surveying art made by women that conveys the many complexities of the homosocial enclaves of men and women and the social codes that keep them in many senses apart. This year on International Women's Day, I'm publishing Part 7, "Women Looking at Men Loving"--the final installment in the "XX Chromosocial" series. Links to the first six parts follow the article. Women's homosocial art is different than most feminist art made over the past forty to fifty years. It extends both beyond and beneath the terrain in which feminism challenges patriarchy to articulate what we've come to call the homosocial divide--the great, if willful, breach separating men and women that is as much the result of women's desires as it is the requirement of men. In this respect, the homosocially-oriented work by the several women artists discussed in parts 1 through 6 articulate nearly every fathomable aspect of women's desire and socialization, either as they have been historically legislated and imposed on women by men, or newly analyzed and codified by women in the effort to achieve gender parity. Yet, as comprehensive as has been the art of women about women over the last half century, by comparison it seems astonishing that so little of women's art essays the male homosociety--what occurs when men are alone with men, or boys with boys. Men, on the other hand, have shown no hesitation to depict either men or women homosocially. We need only recall John Boorman's film, Deliverance , Oliver Stone's Platoon , or Terrence Malick's Tree of Life to recall the intricacies of male homosocialization projected onscreen. And then there are the numerous male artists who have made women's homosocieties the subject of their art--Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers and Yimou Zhang's Raise the Red Lantern stand out in the history of cinema. Or we can easily summon to mind all the women populating the paintings of Alex Katz and the sculpture of Edgar Degas, and most recently the formidable women body-builders who command our attention in the photography of Martin Schoeller. One of the more renowned works by women to depict sexual politics as the product of homosocial conditioning is Eve Sussman's 80-minute video, The Rape of The Sabine Women . An impressionistic, at times surreal, composite play, dance, and musical, Rape proceeds from scanning the range of behaviors from gender conformity to gender defiance as a newly emancipated generation of women cross the gender divide by taking charge of their own sexual needs instead of merely attending to the needs of men. Made with The Rufus Corporation to an original score by Jonathan Bepler, and with choreography by Claudie De Serpa Soares and costumes by Karen Young, Sussman cast hundreds of young men and women to act out the millennia-old sexual rituals for men and women at the outset of the 1960s--the decade that in the West is the last to see the male homosociety go unchallenged in their domination of the codes of sex and gender. Sussman's work is by no means analytical of the homosocial condition, but her semiotic intuition is precise in ferreting out the iconography of homosocial codes at work as men and women at first act out the millennia-old mating rituals each generation must revive--but then, as befits the 1960s generation, which they transform before our eyes. Men and women virtually circle each other with singular purpose, yet as the women depart from the homosocial script that women for centuries followed, we see both men and women uncertain, even confounded, about how to get what they need and want from one another. Sussman doesn't need to reference the introduction of The Pill and the other contraceptives introduced to the public in the 1960s to liberate sex from the risk of unwanted pregnancy. It suffices that the period clothing, hair styles and furnishings that identify the decade registers onscreen as the setting for a hesitant sexual curiosity that evolves first into awkward, then bold, then outright crude gratification. Sussman's restless, attractive and affluent creatures are reminiscent of Alain Resnais's effete socilites populating his film, Last Year At Marienbad . But Marienbad was made in 1961, at the beginning of the sexual revolution, and before people knew what such a revolution entailed, and what would be its outcome. Sussman's mimicry of Last Year at Marienabad is largely restricted to matters of narrative style, and then only on the surface. For whereas the eroticism of Marianbad is perpetually stalled, or perhaps perpetually caught in a loop of some unfufilling and effetely absurd chase, (as written by the novelist and screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet), Sussman's male homosociety is bewildered not by a chase that leads nowhere, but to more sexual opportunity among a newly liberated homosociety of women than they know what to do with. Sussman's sexual ritual begins as it always did, with young men and women traveling in same-sex packs as they sniff out the haunts of the opposite sex. More evocative are the opposite but converging homosocial structures driving the scenes leading to the "rape." Sussman makes it difficult for us to turn away from the twin studies unfolding―those of brash young men and nubile young women moving on mutually exclusive tracks of compulsive behavior wildly at odds with custom and ritual.

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