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Visual Analysis Paper

Mickalene Thomas and the Intersection of Black, Queer, and Feminist Identity

One of the most prominent current feminist artists, Mickalene Thomas, constructs a

visual dialogue between her intersecting identities as a black queer woman echoed in her usage

of mixed media. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Thomas earned a BFA from Pratt Institute and

MFA from Yale University, and has been creating powerful artwork for decades. (“Pleasure and

Danger: Sexual Freedom and Feminism in the Twenty-First Century,” Signs Journal, 2012) In

her mixed media piece titled Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires, she explores the beauty in black

lesbian love through woodblock, silkscreen, and photographic collage. This artwork features a

photograph of two women embracing on top of a bed of African textiles while collaged images

and patterns from Thomas’ travels to Africa frame their bodies. (“Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires,”

Telfair Museum 2013) The piece is inherently meaningful from multiple angles; it displays queer

representation, a celebration of blackness, and a feminist assertion of existence. Thomas’ art

serves to answer the intriguing question, How can intersectionality be authentically represented

in visual culture?

Through a feminist perspective, Thomas’ intentional use of the female body immediately

demands attention from her audience. The two bodies in the image appear to be at ease: eyes are

closed and limbs are relaxed in an ordinary moment of comfort and tenderness. The two women

are both supporting each other and being supported as shown through careful hand placement

and the apparent perfect fit of their bodies together. Thomas captures a rare yet habitual moment

in a dynamic photograph of pure love. Eurocentric art often objectifies the nude female form;

bodies are oversexualized, exoticised, and taken advantage of. Thomas challenges this lack of

female autonomy by mocking Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s The Grand Odalisque in which

a harem woman poses nude with her body draped across cushions. (“15 LGBTQ+ Artists to
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Know,” National Gallery of Art 2023) Thomas photographs and paints women posing similarly,

but there is a significant and fundamental difference between her style and Ingres’: the

fetishization of a foreign woman submitting to a man in the context of Ingres’ original painting is

degrading; the powerful illustration of women feeling confident in their bodies in Thomas’ work

is proudly feminist. Historically, the male gaze has dictated what conventional or acceptable art

is. Art that showcases natural beauty without overt sexual connotation is not always

mainstreamed. Thomas poses models to look regal and powerful while subverting popular

artistic tropes of nude orientalist paintings. (Murray 2014) In her art, Thomas refuses to let her

subject be labeled as an “other;” while Ingres deliberately associates foreign beauty with

eroticism in a way that strips the subject of her own personhood. Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires

displays a moment of intimacy and connection between two women with the sole purpose of

celebrating queer black love. Thomas reclaims the narrative of the white heteronormative male

gaze that has set the standard of quality art, and replaces it with an insistent declaration of

autonomy and existence as a woman independent of a man’s viewing pleasure.

The interconnected nature of Mickalene Thomas’ identities makes it impossible to

discuss this piece without mentioning the queer performance aspect of its form. Sleep: Deux

Femmes Noires is often compared to Gustave Courbet’s painting Le Sommeil (The Sleepers)

which also features two women in bed together. (“Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires,” Telfair

Museum 2013) His work was criticized for displaying such obvious homosexuality, an

unconventional act of defiance at the time of its creation in 1866. Thomas draws inspiration from

Courbet, but adds her own level of understanding and experience to lesbian art; both women are

black and surrounded by African imagery, a detail that introduces and supports the idea that

queer love exists globally and knows no borders. Not only does Thomas advocate for queer
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visibility, she creates a multifaceted image of black, homosexual love. Judith Butler argues that

“gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it

is performed.” (Butler 1990) According to this rhetoric, gender and sexuality standards are

constructed on the basis of repetition. Frequent exposure to images and visual culture contribute

heavily to the societal norms established regarding traditional masculinity and femininity. By

this definition, societal expectations of gender performance are fragile; if they can be constructed

that simply, they can be deconstructed just as easily. Gustave Courbet’s painting challenged

heteronormativity initially, but Mickalene Thomas takes that idea a step further by creating a

body of work that represents the true idea of performativity. Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires shows

lesbian love in a natural, realistic, and beautiful way that demands the same attention from

audiences as commonplace heterosexual images of love.

Mickalene Thomas makes art with a distinct revolutionary attitude, setting aside

hegemonic understandings of identity as a monolithic idea. Her pieces are groundbreaking in

terms of the representation she is providing to black women with intersecting identities similar to

hers, and the inspiration for creating with this goal in mind stems from the revolutionary

sentiment of the Blaxploitation film movement of the 1970s, low-budget features made by black

filmmakers, for black audiences, starring black actors. These movies covered a variety of genres;

the classification of Blaxploitation as a movement refers more to the production and reception of

the films. Critics of the Blaxploitation movement argued that it perpetuated stereotypes that were

harmful to the greater civil rights reformist goals. (Kench 2021) Artists like Thomas saw the

radical aspirations of the movement as inspiration for honest depictions of blackness. Her piece

collages images of African landscapes to reinforce the idea that a person is inseparable from their

many cultural and social identities. Additionally, Thomas’ artwork defies the boundaries of a
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single medium, similar to how these films refused to sit within a distinct categorical genre. The

overlapping cutouts accompanying the central image cultivate a layered representation of all of

the components contributing to black queer identities. Introduced towards the end of the civil

rights movement, Blaxploitation films were crucial for constructing a real image of black

American life. However, soon after, thinkers coined the term “post-black” referring to the lived

experiences of black people after the civil rights and Black Power movements. Radical themes of

Blaxploitation are present in these artworks, and Thomas actively explores more current

understandings of what it means to be a black woman in today’s society. Post-blackness asserts

creative freedom and power in a climate of racial hostility within the art community. Many

artists struggle with the cognitive dissonance of making impactful art that reflects blackness

while trying to resist stereotypes put upon black people by the white gaze. (Murray 2014) Sleep:

Deux Femmes Noires rebels against the commoditization of black female bodies by the dominant

culture by simply highlighting the humanity inherent in a loving connection.

In her artwork, Mickalene Thomas displays an unapologetic acknowledgement and

celebration of her black, queer, feminist identities through her defiance against the white male

gaze, performativity, and authentic representation of post-black experience. Essential to Sleep:

Deux Femmes Noires is the idea of queering blackness. Perhaps the most important takeaway

from Thomas’ work is the way in which she is departing from white, straight, patriarchal norms

within black art. More specifically, the idea of queering refers to the unconventional non-

heteronormative lens through which the artwork is seen. In this work, the artist depicts the black

female body as something to be revered and to which new meaning can be assigned, thus

empowering black, queer women globally to access all uniquely vital pieces of their identities.
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Visual Analysis Paper

Mickalene Thomas
Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires
Collage of woodblock, screenprint, and photographic print
97.2 x 204.5 cm
2013
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Works Cited

“15 LGBTQ+ Artists to Know.” 2023. Www.nga.gov. May 31, 2023.

https://www.nga.gov/stories/lgbtq-artists-to-know.html.

Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in

Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–31.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3207893.

Kench, Sam. 2021. “Blaxploitation — an American Film Movement Explained.”

StudioBinder. May 30, 2021. https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-blaxploitation-

definition/.

“Mickalene Thomas - Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires (2012).” 2016. Signs: Journal of

Women in Culture and Society. September 9, 2016. https://www.google.com/url?

q=https://signsjournal.org/mickalene-thomas-sleep-deux-femmes-noires-2012/

&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1699915378571204&usg=AOvVaw1rm9kQyAXBNdB9gvQ

wA9eA.

“Mickalene Thomas | Artist Profile.” n.d. NMWA.

https://nmwa.org/art/artists/mickalene-thomas/.

Murray, Derek Conrad. 2014. “Mickalene Thomas.” American Art 28 (1): 9–15.

https://doi.org/10.1086/676624.

“Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires.” n.d. Collections.telfair.org.

https://collections.telfair.org/objects/28/sleep-deux-femmes-noires.