Untitled (shaving performance 2010)

Untitled (shaving performance 2010) is a document of a privately held performance, in which Hubbard used a straight razor to remove the hair from the lower half of Burns’ body. The work looks at how desire, intimacy and fetish operate for queer woman through a re-staging of images found at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco of a shaving fetish shot in a dungeon in the 1970’s. Can a gesture historically reserved for men—since it’s (full body hair removal) socially normalized for woman—be reactivated as a query of beauty standards and their relationship to libidinal engagements?