Party Stick: An essay

Abstract

This article is a companion piece to the stop-motion animated film short Party Stick that I made and which is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70jfc7osN80. Here I describe my creative process, methods and motivations in making the film as someone who is both an artist and scholar concerned with dress as an embodied practice. I characterize Party Stick – animated through the juxtaposition and photography of different images – as a camp parody of white-supremacist hypermasculinity. While the carnivalesque film aims to subvert hegemonic normativities, I concede that such transgressive reinscriptions are necessarily controversial, ambiguous and meant to evoke ambivalent laughter. I posit that as a camp expression, Party Stick potentially highlights the constructedness of what gets naturalized visually – which includes naturalized beauty, desirability and sexuality – and what philosopher Heather Widdows characterizes as a hegemonic aesthetic ethos rooted in western beauty ideals.