On Gender Performance

Brice Dellsperger pushes the boundaries of genre and gender. In his multifaceted reprises of iconic film sequences—all assembled under the title Body Double—the cineaste and artist reenacts the selected scenes from well-known films frame for frame and lets his “body doubles” perform all of the roles, be they male or female. In this conversation between Dellsperger and Marie-France Rafael, following current (post-)gender discussions, the artist describes sexuality and (sexual) identity as products of a cultural construction informed by audiovisual technologies. Film, video, and the Internet do not depict a pre-existing sexuality but establish an image of it and its (normative) framework. Throughout this exchange, the artist highlights how he, starting from travesty and doubles, undermines existing identity systems in order to develop new artistic strategies for subjectivity.