Pussies galore
Issue #20
Artists and designers readopt the cat-power image
By Tizzy Asher
Published: June 1st, 2004 | 12:00am
The corpulent, pliable feline that stares out from Kat Hartman’s Pussy comics is hardly what one expects from a feminist icon. Round and soft and with utterly neutral facial expressions, “Kitty,” as Hartman has named her, seems like little more than an indie-rock version of the iconic 1970s Kliban cat cartoons.
But, as the comic’s title might suggest, Hartman created Kitty in order to explore her own relationship to patriarchal culture. Since debuting in the first Pussy comic in 2001, Kitty has faced gender roles, questions about sexuality, and the all-important concept of voice — who has it, who gets to express it.
“Kitty became the vehicle for me to explore why and how men usually command the power of a mixed-gender social space,” Hartman explains via e-mail. (She is currently working on assignment in Ethiopia.) “She represents me in my most weakened and quiet state attempting to live my life but being constantly bombarded by the patriarchal speech bubble.”
Hartman is just one of the young artists putting feline images to use in service of feminism. Artists like fashion designer Lidia Wachowska (responsible for the character Evil Kitty and her Web site, evilkitty.net) and graphic artist–postcard creator Stella Mars (stellamarrs.com) juxtapose adorable felines with the results of rigid gender roles and longstanding historical association between women and cats.
Hartman explains: “I have always had a love/hate relationship with the feline image and so I thought it served as a useful metaphor for discussing the love/hate relationship I have with my identity as a woman within a patriarchal culture.”
Indeed, the feline image is ripe with the sort of paradoxes and dual associations that make it ripe for feminist analysis. On one hand, cats are free spirits, kowtowing to no human and exerting a fierce and dangerous independence. On the other, they represent the ideal feminine: delicate, elegant, and, despite a nagging tendency to get into trouble (curiosity killed the cat?), ultimately domesticated. And while many women are often drawn to the first stereotype, it is more likely that they are expected to live up to the second.
“We were ‘trained’ to like cats,” says Wachowska via e-mail from her home in Chicago. “Women feel a connection with the feline species because of years of believing that femininity carries a lot of feline characteristics. Being graceful, subtle, elegant, and ‘domesticated’ was once associated with women and also with cats. Words such as ‘cat, kitty, kitten’ are used to address women. How about being a ‘sex kitten’ on a ‘catwalk’?”
Using cat images gives feminist artists a huge palette of stereotypes to reclaim. Pairing the word “pussy” with an elegant cat image evokes the free-spirited independence of cats while obliterating the crass connotations of the word. The adorable kittens that speak openly about political process and activism on Stella Marrs’ “Democracy Meow” calendar infuse the elegant, graceful cat image with a fiery anger and intelligent passion. In both cases, it moves the meaning of the cat image beyond its negative stereotyped origins.
But, as Wachowska notes, there is a delicate balance between using a graceful cat image to reclaim a stereotype and being lured in by the stereotype itself. “I think some women today overlook the negativity that such an association might carry,” she says. “Instead they cling to an idea of being a ‘catwoman’ — feminine but dangerous.”
Indeed, there are artists using cat images in ways that Washowska would certainly consider dangerous. The L.A.-based artist Cynthia Petrovic and her company Red Tango (tangoland.com) has chosen a long-necked, silhouetted cat as her flagship image, but she openly admits that she is not a feminist, nor is her work intended as political.
“That cat captures an elegance, a sophistication, a grace,” Petrovic says. “These are qualities that women want to pull out of themselves. The image is sexy in a classy way. It’s not trashy. There’s a big trend of blatant and overtly slutty images that women are wearing on their chests. Adding the word ‘pussy’ instantly changes the context of the cat. A kitten is innocent. Pussy means something else.”
And that, I think, is the point.
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