IDENTISPLOITATION
PLAYING WITH THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION
By
Sophia Elan Zarders
BFA Illustration, California State University, Long Beach, 2016

A THESIS SUPPORT PAPER SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF FINE ARTS

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN
2023

© Sophia Zarders, 2023

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .....................……………………………………………………………………………… 2
Abstract ……………...................……………………………………………………………………………….. 3
Introduction ……………………………..................……………………………………………….…………… 4
Influences …………………………..............…………………………………………………………….….….. 6
Artworks ………………………………...........…………………………………………………….…..………. 10
Anita & Mary ………………............………………………………………………..….……………... 11
Skipper …………………………......................………………………………………….…………… 21
Josephine ………………………....................……….………………………………….…………… 26
Garments ……………………………………......................………………………….……………… 35
Conclusion ……………………………………………………...........………………………….……………... 43
Glossary ................................................................................................................................................ 45
Notes ..................................................................................................................................................... 49
List of Figures …………………………………………….................…………………………..…………….. 51
Bibliography ………………………………………….................………………………………..……………. 53

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I want to thank my loving parents, Mitchell and Kerry Zarders, my supportive family and friends, my
wonderful partner, Patrick Sales, and my dog, Bobo. I want to thank my graduate supervisor, Diyan
Achjadi, my fellow MFA peers, and the supportive staff at Emily Carr University of Art + Design for their
guidance and camaraderie throughout this journey.
I acknowledge that I grew up on the traditional and ancestral unceded land of the Gabrielino and
Tongva peoples. I acknowledge that I am an uninvited guest and a settler on the traditional and
ancestral unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
I want to thank you, the reader, for choosing to learn more about my thesis project, Identisploitation. As
you dive deeper into my research and practice, you are welcome to listen to a specially curated playlist
of music that influenced this body of work. Read, laugh, listen, enjoy:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/77eWBAvuQGJHayd0sH7AcJ?si=3a1860c50ea94127

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ABSTRACT
Identisploitation explores charged representations of identity in pop culture through painted paper
figures, video art, and garments. The complicated public images of historical figures, including the
iconic Black performer, Josephine Baker, are investigated, pulled apart, and recontextualized as
exaggerated, lifesize paper dolls. Grotesque embodiments of evangelical, conservative American
femininity are satirized through character performance in video. Historical costumes and unattainable
beauty standards are stretched and sewn into unwearable garments. Identisploitation is influenced
by the transgressive work of Vaginal Davis, Grace Jones, Bobby Conn and other fearless artists who
inhabit the outskirts of the mainstream art world. The concepts of disidentification, the oppositional
gaze, camp, and satire provide a critical and (pop) cultural framework, primarily through the texts of
bell hooks and José Estéban Muñoz. Identisploitation asks these questions: What do pop cultural
representations look like recontextualized through a Black feminist lens? How does a garment critique
the cultural establishment? This thesis project explores historical representations of race, gender, and
sexuality, and their lasting significance into contemporary visual language and pop culture through my
particular point of view as a Black femme visual artist.

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INTRODUCTION
My name is Sophia Elan Zarders and I am a visual artist, illustrator, and pop culture queen from Long
Beach, California. I received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in illustration from California State University, Long
Beach, and I have been a professional freelance artist for almost ten years. My work has generally
centered figurative painting, drawing, bookmaking and zines, portraiture, and comics. Through this
interdisciplinary graduate program, my studio practice has grown exponentially with rigorous research
and exploration into unfamiliar media. My graduate thesis, Identisploitation, investigates the critical
intersections of identity, history, and pop culture through painted paper cutouts, video and clothing
experimentations.
I am a mixed race Black femme who grew up on the traditional and ancestral unceded land of the
Gabrielino and Tongva peoples, now known as Long Beach, California. My lens is shaped by my
point of view as a biracial person who grew up in the United States and often felt on the outskirts of
mainstream essentialized notions of Black or white identity. In my youth, I was particularly fond of artists
and entertainers who embodied a sort of ambiguity within gender, sexuality and race. My relationship
with my identity as a Black femme is richer because of this kinship with figures like Grace Jones, Betty
Davis, Josephine Baker, Sylvester, Shirley Bassey, and Vaginal Davis, some of whom reemerged as
crucial influences for my thesis work. I refuse to be confined by conformist and commodified ideas
of mixed-ness or Blackness or gender fluidity that are shaped by the deeply ingrained restrictions of
colonial, patriarchal oppression. Black is beautiful, luminous, radical, resilient, bold, androgynous,
proud, ancestral, and the future. “Femme” is a placeholder for my fluid gender as it transforms over time
and I welcome it to change daily. Currently at twenty-eight years old, I am actively and enthusiastically
embracing ambiguity in my racial background and gender identity, which also informs my formal and
conceptual strategies as a visual artist.
As a professional illustrator, my work responds directly to expanding social discourses surrounding
queer and trans liberation, racial justice, intersectional feminism, and working class solidarity.
I have had the privilege of collaborating with non-profits, academic institutions, and grassroots
organizations to create empowering visual images that inspire political change, including the ACLU,
New York Department of Education, and SaveArtSpace. Outside of editorial freelance work, I’ve
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built an extensive library of self-published comics and books highlighting underrepresented artists,
comedians, filmmakers, and activists; in fact during this MFA program, I finished my first professionally
published book, “You’re Funny For A”: An Illustrated Guide to Trans Comedians, Non-Binary Comics,
& Funny Women with independent publisher Silver Sprocket. My background in illustration is an
undercurrent throughout my thesis project, specifically in the painted stylization of the paper doll series
and hand drawn props in my video work. However, as I’ve re-entered academia and navigated this
interdisciplinary art program, I’ve been challenged to expand my understanding of illustration and forgo
the tools I had learned from many years of freelancing. The creative freedom was simultaneously
daunting and invigorating, coupled with the recent move to this foreign country and a new independent
phase of my life.
Throughout my career, my practice has focused on the human figure in visual art. As an undergraduate
student, I honed my skills with traditional figurative oil painting techniques in Florence, Italy, and
spent years figure drawing through the illustration program at California State University, Long Beach.
While building these technical skills, I began using self-portraiture to investigate representations of
Blackness through an art historical, cinematic, and intersectional feminist lens. In 2018, I was an artistin-residence at Somos Gallery in Berlin and held my first solo show, Tinsel Angels, featuring larger
than life watercolor figure paintings of myself that pushed my skills as an artist and challenged pop
media (mis)representations of Black women. Through these self-portraits, I played with humorous
and melodramatic archetypes in film history that are often reserved for white, European actresses,
including a jilted lover, a punk rebel, and a melancholic starlet. I view the human figure as a site of
empowerment, imagination, and disruption of societal norms. Whether it’s visible or not, the figure is an
active presence throughout my graduate work.
I define identisploitation as the complicated sweet spot converging identity, style, social critique,
satire and exaggeration. This collection of graduate work explores these themes through over the top
paper figures, campy video experimentations, and stretched symbolic garments. This thesis project is
framed by my intersecting identities, background in the illustration and figurative art, and unwavering
interests in representation and pop culture. Both this supporting document and my studio practice
reflect my maximalist, humorous approach to artmaking. Identisploitation pokes fun at the status quo
with subversive pizzazz.
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The rebellious Black queer ethos of Vaginal “Crème” Davis has been a compass for my current
practice in the graduate program. Davis throws high art and lowbrow filth in a glittery blender with her
confrontational performance art, campy short films, exaggerated aesthetics, and a devilish sense of
humor. She plays in the politically charged intersection of gender, sexuality, race, and performance,
often through drag characters that play with her identity as a Black, multiracial intersex person. Vaginal
Davis’ performance of these identities can be viewed as “terrorist drag,” or a genre of drag performance
that pushes against the status quo of acceptable, establishment-affirming drag.¹ One of her more
controversial characters is Clarence, a whiteface parody of a hyper masculine, white supremacist,
militia man. This dissonant performance includes original songs that satirize anti-gay ideology and
allege a love affair between Clarence and the artist’s own glamazon persona. The impression is so
wrong it’s right, dangerous in its proximity to hate yet undercut by Davis’ humorous, over the top
approach. I admire her ability to embody and deconstruct power structures with unhinged delight and
boundary-pushing drag.
Vaginal Davis often embodies and employs the idea of disidentification,² which is an investigation
into a subject and all its aspects, including the liberatory, detrimental, and contradictory elements. This
concept was theorized by José Esteban Muñoz, who describes the act of disidentifying as to “read
oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, objects, or subjects that are not culturally coded
to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject.” (12) By performing and parodying various archetypes,
Davis smartly critiques the dominant ideologies they represent without identifying with or rejecting
them. As the character Clarence, her disidentification with white supremacist patriotism makes a
humorous spectacle of social critique and subversive drag. As I researched disidentification in my
graduate studies, I was struck by how the idea resonated with my practice and pop culture obsessions.
As a Black femme media spectator who rarely identifies with cinematic narratives and images,
I often disidentify with representations that don’t reflect my lived experience. Beloved writer bell
hooks expounds on this idea with the “oppositional gaze,”³ or the complex position that audiences
of marginalized backgrounds take when consuming media not intended for them. “Black female
spectators, who refused to identify with white womanhood, who would not take on the phallocentric
gaze of desire and possession, created a critical space where the binary opposition [Laura] Mulvey
posits of ‘woman as image, man as bearer of the look’ was continually deconstructed.” (hooks, 123)
From my historically excluded “oppositional” point of view, I have the opportunity to dissect and
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reconstruct mainstream representations, and utilize an artistic strategy that works on and against
dominant ideology.
Camp has been a connective strategy between my disidentification with dominant media and
subverting its ideology. Susan Sontag popularized the term with her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,”
which she defines as “a vision of the world in terms of style… it is the love of the exaggerated, the
‘off’, of things-being-what-they-are-not.” (8) The sensibilities of camp speak to my appreciation of
queer aesthetics, humor, gender performance, satire, and “the glorification of ‘character’… a taste of
continual incandescence - a person being one, very intense thing.” (Sontag, 21) Camp is “capable of
transforming even the most vulgar manifestations of American culture into recuperative moments of
radical jouissance.” (Diffrient, 262) This intense appreciation for “vulgarity” can be morally ambivalent
depending on the strategy or form that camp takes place. As an exuberant fan of B movies and
exploitation films of the 1960s and 70s,⁴ I am no stranger to this wavering line between distasteful
humor and harmful stereotypes that is embedded in blaxploitation, hagsploitation, and the like. Often
this genre presents a cheap, misogynistic smorgasbord of women behaving badly, but over time these
films have garnered an alternative fanbase to their intended straight, male, and white audiences.
What was once “an insult to intelligence, and affront to sensibility and an abomination to the eye”⁵ is
reappropriated and recontextualized by queer, trans, and BIPOC film fans. The shadows of this genre
loom over Identisploitation, not only in name but as a visual manifestation of camp in my work. There’s
been much recent discourse about camp and its overuse in the cultural lexicon (lest we forget the 2019
Met Gala), so I will not dare to claim that my work is “camp.” Claiming one’s work is camp defeats the
purpose (and fun) of the concept! Is my work delightfully distasteful? Perhaps, but that’s for someone
else to determine. Instead, I will state that my work is campy, meaning it embodies the aesthetics of
camp and is influenced by its cinematic and pop cultural examples.
In traversing through politics of representation and strategies of camp, the transgressive icon of Black
artistry, Grace Jones, immediately comes to mind. As an awkward Black femme kid, I was fascinated
by her unique and radical Blackness that spoke to my fractured and eclectic interests, ambiguously
gendered, sexualized, and unplaceable in any time period or location.⁶ As I recontextualize her
artistry through a scholarly lens, I’m fascinated and influenced by the way Jones has crafted her stage
persona through visual citation, deconstructing identity, and a “fierce stage presence… [destabilizing]
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historical relations of power.” (Kershaw, 19) Like Vaginal Davis, Grace Jones employs disidentification
to dissect racist stereotypes, neither condemning or assimilating to the problematic visual language.
Minstrel imagery and colonial fantasies are costumes in her striking music videos, album art, and stage
shows, but the androgynous glamazon embraces the ambiguity in her message to control the power
dynamics between her and the audience.⁷ For an iconic live performance in 1978, Jones transformed
the Roseland, a beloved New York dance hall, into a concrete jungle with a caged live tiger at center
stage.⁸ She sings her disco hit “Do or Die,” snarling at its ferocious (frightened) demeanor, and slinks
around the cage in a skintight tiger print catsuit. Suddenly, the lights cut out and the audience shrieks;
a spotlight reveals the tiger has disappeared and the glamorous temptress has become the caged
beast. The performance and its accompanying promotional photos were met with extreme reactions
both in adoration, from her primarily queer, melanated fan base, and disdain from critics who read this
as flaunting with primitivism. Through this shocking, unapologetic display of the taboo, Grace Jones
“exposed processes of desire, projection, and prejudice… racist and sexist cliches became artificial and
unstable.” (Kershaw, 24) Jones tactfully walks this tightrope dance of representation as a Black artist in
her electrifying performances on stage and screen.
Another concept explored and implemented in my graduate practice is satire, a form of humor that
has historically been used by the working class marginalized communities to ridicule the bourgeoisie
and oppressive systems. One of my favorite artists who embodies the subversive potential of satire
is Chicago “no-wave” musician Bobby Conn, who critiques the collapsing American empire through
unconventional humor combining doomsday paranoia and capitalistic worship with disco, experimental
soundscapes, and glam rock. In one of the craziest television appearances to grace the beloved public
access childrens show,⁹ Chic-A-Go-Go, Conn performs his hit single “Never Get Ahead”, a motown
inspired song calling for the working class to abstain from servicing their capitalist overlords. His
small frame jerks across the stage in a burgundy Adidas sweatsuit, floral ascot, blue eyeshadow, and
bowlcut, an odd ensemble that visually translates the contradictions of his music persona. His erratic
movements and exaggerated facial expressions add to this persona and the performance is a hilarious
mix of camp and satire. Within my graduate practice, my critical strategies of humor and embracing
the grotesque are definitely influenced by Bobby Conn’s particular form of satire. These concepts are
reflected in my exaggerated, playful aesthetics; it’s a sneaky way to draw viewers in with bright colors
and cartoonish visuals while communicating the critical, political message at hand.
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ANITA & MARY
The visual form of paper dolls has been an exciting development in my current art practice and a
fascinating way to work through my ideas about history, politics, identity, and pop culture. It makes
complete sense why paper dolls have been my medium of choice, as they combine so many
specificities of my practice: illustration, clothing, celebrity, kitsch, play, retro aesthetics, the body and
lack thereof. Admittedly, I didn’t know much about their history or significance before embarking on
this journey toward lifesize, painted paper dolls. My personal relationship to dolls can be traced to a
collection of Barbies from the early 1970s that my mom graciously allowed me to play with as a kid. The
dolls (Barbie, Midge, Skipper, Ken, etc.) were kept in vibrantly colored Barbie brand cases, worn and
discolored from decades of play time, and included the grooviest, retro wardrobe of Day-Glo printed
fabrics and teeny tiny plastic shoes. It was through these toys I experimented with gender roles and
sexuality, specifically soapy melodramatic social situations that I probably mimicked from television
programs. My parents raised me to question the patriarchal, mass-produced images of women,
adding to the inner negotiation of my fluid gender identity, attraction toward hyper femme aesthetics
and questioning of the critical mainstream ideology toward femininity. As I hit puberty, I became
obsessed with dress up games on phishy, malware ridden websites where I could play with hundreds
of digital paper dolls.¹⁰ The simple game format used click and drag movements and relied on Adobe
Flash software (R.I.P.), and these layered digital images would then be translated into my “fashion”
illustrations, comics, and original characters. Dolls have always read as characters to create stories
with, and now as an artist, to work through ideology and social hierarchies.
In my first semester, I was looking for patterns in American history to dissect the country’s current
ultra conservative wave of heightened nationalism, anti-trans rhetoric, and violent fascism. Despite
moving abroad for this program, I couldn’t help but reflect on The States and its historical dissemination
of ideology through mass media and visual culture. My research turned toward the ways notable,
conservative women have continuously upheld white supremacy and patriarchal domination, and
how their public image fueled those narratives. Anita Bryant and Mary Pickford were selected as my
subjects as they represented this exact insidious relationship between exaggerated feminine aesthetics
and white supremacist politics. Bryant, a patriotic singer turned anti-gay politician, clawed her way into
the limelight in the 1970s as the second wave of feminism waned and the Religious Right rose
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to power. Her perfectly buoyant hair and regressive rhetoric to a homophobic blend of evangelicals
and conservatives. Mary Pickford represents a slightly different aspect of American history as an
icon of the silent movie era, America’s sweetheart of a bygone era, and heralded now as a pioneer
in entertainment and women’s rights. This Canadian-American entertainer and entrepreneur took
Hollywood by storm in the 1910s by creating many of the lasting cinematic archetypes for women that
reflected the intense nationalism of the time. She successfully crafted herself to represent the ideal
white woman and always upheld the American mythology of patriotism and colonial individualism. My
research of these figures culminated into the paper doll series Anita and Mary, “dolling up” their public
images as a playful strategy to critique the regressive ideologies they propagated. In a sense, I am
disidentifying with these ladies’ problematic legacies; I’m fascinated by their public roles as celebrities,
entertainers, political figures, and the retro doll-like garments they wore to complete their personae. I
am in no way assimilating with their dogma or communicating a nostalgia for the past, nor completely
rejecting them. My paper dolls are a way to work through these complicated, disidentifactory feelings
toward Bryant and Pickford by daring to exist between appreciation and dismissal.

Fig. 1: Anita Bryant holding a bottle of Coca-Cola. 1960 (circa). State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.
Fig. 2: Mary Pickford, The Photo-Play Journal, June 1916. Public domain.

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The paper dolls are relatively lifesize acrylic painted paper cutouts. Each doll comes with one scantily
clad body, four outfits and a collection of accessories. While the renderings are mostly accurate to the
source material (historical photographs, contemporary documentation of the objects), I’ve employed a
specific stylization that favors bodily gesture, exaggeration, and a kitschy quality found in paper dolls.
The cutouts were initially pinned to the wall with pushpins but later installations used magnets, allowing
the paper figures to float off the gallery wall.

Anita translates the aesthetic of 1960s-70s era paper dolls and plasticine public image of Anita Bryant.
Her skin is a saturated coral and her disturbing grin shines pure white, with tangerine heels and pearl
earrings painted onto her body. Her pose reflects commonly drawn fashion illustrations of the time,
with a comically cinched waist, cocked hips, slender ligaments, and large head. She wears a bouffant
auburn wig, cool toned plaid dress, and the Orange Bird cartoon character¹¹ floats above her raised
hand. When Bryant became a crusader against LGBTQ rights in the 1970s, she specifically stoked fear
in Dade County, Florida and disseminated attack ads to repeal an ordinance prohibiting discrimination
based on sexual orientation. Her homophobic rhetoric heavily contributed to the Religious Right political

Fig. 3: Sophia Zarders, Mary and Anita, 2021. Acrylic on paper, dimensions variable.

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Fig. 4: Sophia Zarders, Anita, 2021. Acrylic on paper, dimensions variable.

wave and built upon decades of segregationist talking points to oppress marginalized groups. This
led to her notable Save the Children campaign, which is referenced through a protest sign accessory
for her paper doll. Anita’s other outfits include a high neck, puritan style white dress with prop Bible
and cross necklace, an embellished cowgirl romper with fringe gloves and cowboy hat, and a floral
pussy bow blouse tucked into a 70s style A-line skirt. This last ensemble refers to the infamous pie
incident, where gay activist, Thom L. Higgins, smashed a cream pie into Anita Bryant’s face at a press
conference in 1977.¹² This direct action created an image of resistance that would be recreated by
drag queens for years to come. Her paper doll series includes the iconic pie complete with Higgins’
hand attached in the act of throwing, as well as an “Anita Dear, Shove It” tee shirt that was often worn
by LGBTQ activists at protests of the time. These images of resistance are not molded to the doll’s
silhouette to imply a separation between her persona and this anti-Bryant messaging. These props are
solely for the benefit of the viewer, as an implied opportunity to play out radical disobedience.

Mary’s more elegant, fashionable starlet contrasts against Anita’s super 70s crusader. Her body
conforms to the desired slender silhouette of the 1910s-20s with a slight contrapposto pose and pale
pinkish white skin; short golden finger curls and mauve eyeshadow are painted on with solid white filling
her smile. Mary wears the symbolic outfit of her greatest success, a long embellished champagne gown
with the coveted Academy Award statue.¹³ Her other ensembles include a dark velvet gown wrapped in
a fox stole, a ruffled Americana dress from her early acting days with hair extensions, and a feminized
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Fig. 5: Sophia Zarders, Closeup of Anita, 2021. Acrylic on paper, dimensions variable.

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short skirted klan robe, referring to her role in the 1919 film Heart o’ the Hills. In this movie, she plays
a plucky country girl who must defend her family’s land from developers in the Appalachian mountains.
Besides this glorified portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan, she heralded the infamous propaganda flick
Birth of a Nation (1915) and remained close friends with D.W. Griffith as founders of United Artists.
Unsurprisingly, Mary Pickford is widely recognized as a “feminist icon” for being Hollywood’s first starlet
and being an entrepreneurial girlboss,¹⁴ despite her very public connections to some of the darkest
corners of cinema history.

Contemporary iterations of paper dolls originated as mass produced affordable toys during the Great
Depression. Most viewers might associate them with childhood nostalgia and budget-friendly playtime.
I’m quite fascinated by one of the most renowned paper doll illustrators, Tom Tierney, who has
published over four hundred books since the 1970s. One of his first paper doll books was Attitude,¹⁵
a cheeky collection of LGBTQ archetypes complete with fabulous day clothes and kinky fetish wear.
Ironically, Tierney’s radical queer beginnings in the medium later became a mass produced vehicle for
heteronormative desires. In my paper doll research, I also came across the May Stevens painting,

Fig. 6: Sophia Zarders, Mary, 2021. Acrylic on paper, dimensions variable.

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Fig. 7: Sophia Zarders, Closeup of Mary, 2021. Acrylic on paper, dimensions variable.

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Big Daddy Paper Doll (1970), which depicts a simplified paper doll of a white man and his bulldog
with different outfits representing American imperialist patriarchy, including a policeman, soldier, and
executioner. The striking image reflects Stevens’ critical views of the Vietnam War and her conservative
father, thus illustrating the feminist tenet of “the personal is political.” The piece speaks directly to the
tension of “play” integral to Anita and Mary, where the audience is seduced by the aesthetics of the
paper doll and implicated in their embedded meanings. Kitsch and irony are also big components of this
dynamic in which the retro, cutesy style subverts the potent political message.

Fig. 8: May Stevens, Big Daddy Paper Doll, 1971. Screenprint on paper, edition 20/75, 21 x 35
inches (53.3 x 88.9 cm). Used by permission of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

In workshopping this piece with my peers, several students felt compelled to dress up the “dolls” and
urged me to mass produce the design or make the large paintings interactive. Upon first glance at
Anita and Mary, the retro aesthetics of the 70s and 20s are a playful visual dance; vibrant colors, funky
patterns, shining jewels and immense detail lull the viewer into feeling sentimental for bygone styles
and childhood memories of playing with paper dolls. Initially this desire to “play” with the piece left me
feeling uneasy about its impact on audiences; despite the obvious visual signifiers to hate groups,
the fun, kitschy aesthetics seemed to overpower the critical messaging. Over time, I learned to read
this uncomfortable reality as a strength of the series and I embraced its implication of the viewer; by
“playing” with these kitschy toys, the audience acts out the women’s contributions to America’s white
supremacist, patriarchal core.
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Fig. 9 - 11: Sophia Zarders, Closeups of Anita and Mary, 2021. Acrylic on paper, dimensions variable.

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I’ve been questioned a few times about my fascination with the past, especially in relation to Bryant and
Pickford as subjects for this work. Nostalgia is a phenomenon that I’ve struggled to come to terms with
as a Black femme artist who is drawn toward history and bygone pop culture. In a way, disidentification
factors into this inner negotiation, where I’m constantly seduced and repulsed by cinema, fashion,
art, music, and celebrities from previous decades. Media from the past tends to be overtly embedded
with racist, misogynistic, and queerphobic messaging, because the intended audience rarely catered
to marginalized audiences. However, I’ve cultivated a robust oppositional gaze to these narratives
and images that still appeal to my aesthetic sensibilities, because investigating the past is key for my
personal and artistic understanding of the present. Maybe this affinity for retro things stems from years
of obsessively watching old Looney Tunes¹⁶ and playing with my mom’s nifty Barbies in my childhood.
Or, maybe it mutes my growing anxiety of a likely climate change induced doomsday apocalypse
scenario. Regardless, I’m a firm believer that learning the faults of the past can only help to illuminate
and fix the social structures of the present.

Fig. 12: Sophia Zarders, Identisploitation installation, 2023. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation at
Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Photo: Michael Love.

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SKIPPER
The video Skipper arose as a character idea during the global racial reckoning of 2020.¹⁷ Feeling
overwhelmed and helpless by the evergreen reminder of racist violence, the image of a completely
out of control and violently vengeful Black femme in a flamboyant costume kept entering my tired
consciousness. As I took lonesome walks in my quarantined neighborhood, I would daydream this
imagined heroine jumping on cop cars and chasing Nazis with a chainsaw, and soon I began writing
a screenplay about this energizing character. The script was eventually shelved, but as my graduate
research focused on political satire, performance, and costume, I was drawn to the persona of Skipper
and compelled to embody her in a new light.
Skipper began as ruminations on clothing, politics, and character. Along with reading fascinating articles
about historical fashions,¹⁸ I collected a plethora of visual references from vintage sewing patterns to
movie costumes to beauty pageant garb to Christian regalia. This process of amateur archiving and
crafting a costume mood board helped connect patterns in clothing trends and regressive, conservative
waves in American politics. Color, silhouette, texture, and fabric must be read within the greater cultural
and political context, such as high neck corseted dresses responding to the 19th century Cult of True
Womanhood, or cinched crinoline poodle skirts of the 1950s. In times of intense institutional and
social pushback against liberatory movements, mainstream clothing trends mimic those sentiments.¹⁹
Taking these fashion trends and political patterns into consideration, I sketched ideas for a costume to
represent these connections.
The costume design combined the cupcake silhouette of a child pageant dress, a purely decorative
apron citing a maid uniform, and a hyper feminine color palette.²⁰ The costume base is a short, poofy
yellow polka dot dress with puffy sleeves, which was upcycled from a 1960s polyester maxi dress
purchased at a Vancouver based vintage shop. I utilized my skills in hand-sewing to hem and alter the
garment and repeatedly washed it in my bathtub, in an effort to get rid of that stinky old clothes smell
and to repurpose this historical item. I purchased short white gloves from a costume shop, pointing to
debutante and minstrel traditions, white knee high socks, and crafted a pink bow headband and tulle
bow necklace. The apron was also embroidered with a verse from the Book of Revelations, which
would influence part of the dialogue for the video.
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After costuming, I developed Skipper’s character mannerisms and overall tone for the production
design, which were overwhelmingly influenced by my love of campy exploitation flicks and my
disidentification with the complicated femme characters that dominate these problematic narratives.
In The Oppositional Gaze, bell hooks eloquently writes, “Looking at films with an oppositional gaze,
black women were able to critically assess the cinema’s construction of white womanhood as object
of phallocentric gaze and choose not to identify with either the victim or the perpetrator.” (123) Bette
Davis’ iconic transformation the 1960 flick What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was a major inspiration
for building the mannerisms of Skipper, specifically her exaggerated facial expressions, intense desire
to perform the perfect femininity, and messy clownish makeup.²¹ My acting of Skipper’s trademark
sinister delight is also influenced by Nuotama Bodomo’s 2016 short film, Everybody Dies!, a fantastic
and terrifying, short film that is in conversation with contemporary Afropessimist dialogue.²² Her
video imagines a horrifying public access game show hosted by Ripa the (Grim) Reaper, played by
Tonya Pinkins, who sentences Black children to the afterlife. The disturbing short film highlights the
exhausting, horrifying realities of racist violence in America through campy, horror sensibilities and deep
dark satire, and posits that even the mythical grim reaper is tired of ushering Black lives into the abyss.

Fig. 13: Artist modeling the orginal dress for the Skipper costume. 2022.
Fig. 14: Sophia Zarders, Skipper character design. 2022. Colored pencil on paper.

22

Lastly, I looked to Bobby Conn and his over the top musical embodiment of an evangelical capitalist
Antichrist, in which he makes fun of and reflects the disturbing realities of America’s hellish capitalist
present with plenty of camp and humor. In a 2008 interview, he says, “I’m just trying to take the music of
the day from when I was a kid, which was incredibly flimsy -- the disco and glam rock and all that stuff -trying to take it back, in a way. Politicize it, and also scramble it up so that it’s unsettling.” By combining
the plasticine qualities of 1970s pop with nightmarish camp, Conn creates an unforgettable experience
through his records and stage persona. Since I do not have a background in acting or theater, I reached
deep into my lifelong appreciation for movie stars, comedians, drag artists, and other big personalities
for guidance into crafting the character of Skipper.
The lowbrow aesthetics of B movies are woven throughout the production design in Skipper, due in
part to the minimal budget and restricted filming schedule. My studio apartment quickly transformed
into the set as I cleared one wall and hung cheap glittery purple fabric on the wall for a backdrop. The
entire video was filmed in one day by propping up my iPad on an end table, using one desk lamp as a
spotlight, and recording audio with a very simple microphone. This was not my ideal setup for making
a short film, but I believe my DIY attitude contributed to my frenetic performance and the overall tone.
I edited the video solely on my iPad with Adobe Premiere (Rush) and additional imagery was sourced
from the internet; I collected gifs from old commercials, news reels and films that reinforced the
outdated image of the ideal American woman, including a brief reference to a propaganda film starring
Mary Pickford. My own voice was a major aspect of the sound design, layered over and over again
to create a cacophony of high pitched cackling and demonic moaning, as well as a short jingle that
bookends the video. The script is divided into two prophecies, first addressing American women and
their patriotic duty to affirm the United States through piety, domesticity, purity, and submission. She
embodies each of the tenants via different (cheap) wigs and the speech breaks down into a chant with
a montage of visuals. The second prophecy alludes to the Biblical concept of the “Whore of Babylon,”
a doomsday figure mentioned in the Book of Revelations and has been evoked throughout history by
several groups (including the Klan) as a symbol for feminine evil and sociological destruction.²³ The
“Whore” here represents the contemporary ideological threats to god-fearing America, reinforcing the
irony of my Black femme body spewing this rhetoric through transgressive drag. Skipper is a jolt of
anarchic energy and it pinpoints that feeling of disturbing whimsy that I want to evoke throughout my
studio practice.
23

As much as Skipper was a huge step in my exploration of video, the performance aspect was a
necessary exorcism for my personal well being. Perhaps it’s this familiar feeling of “possession”
that’s often brought up with musicians and actors, alluding to a lack of control and full body spiritual
experience within the performance. I certainly felt possessed in front of the camera, embodying the
horrors of the ideal American femininity and working through this ideology with campy drag and humor.
There is a strange empowerment in acting out this character built on the harmful, violent verbosity
designed to hurt me, a Black femme trying to survive and live authentically in this colonial, patriarchal,
capitalist hellscape. Playing this character was as cathartic as it was challenging.

Fig. 15: Sophia Zarders, Identisploitation installation, 2023. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation at
Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

24

Fig. 16 - 18: Sophia Zarders. Stills
from Skipper. 2022. Digital video.
https://vimeo.com/694631791

25

JOSEPHINE
After Skipper, I felt compelled to return to paper dolls and my research pointed toward the legendary
performer of stage and screen, Josephine Baker. In reading about identity and performance, Baker had
been cited in several texts²⁴ as a pivotal cultural figure who crafted her public image and performed a
complicated view of race, gender, and sexuality. Since I had spent a good chunk of time excavating
the problematic visual language of white womanhood, I wanted to challenge myself by exploring the
ambiguity in Baker’s artistry. It made perfect sense to take a deep dive into her legacy and how her
specificities spoke to historical and contemporary discourses about representation.
Josephine Baker’s career in the arts began in the same way as so many other Black artists of her
time, in vaudeville productions from St. Louis to New York City. She crafted her signature performance
style by combining the exaggerated comedic sensibilities from minstrel traditions, the work ethic
and technical skill of the chorus line, and the exhilarating creative energy of the impending Harlem
Renaissance. At the beginning of the 1920s, Baker moved to Paris and quickly became a household
name from her titillating, exhilarating stage performances that showcased exaggerated depictions
of “authentic” Blackness and cultures of the African diaspora. Her embodiment of the Other can
be traced to the construction of the “Black Venus” archetype originating to the tragic exploitation of
Saartjie Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman who was taken by French colonizers in the 19th century and
exhibited as a traveling freak show. This violent colonial exploitation and obsession with Black bodies
transformed later into the postwar cultural movement negrophilia, or “négrophilie,” in which French
artists and theorists fetishized “primitive” notions of Blackness and appropriated African art. Josephine
Baker tapped into this national obsession with her wild moves and unfiltered sexuality, dabbling
in her vaudeville roots with broad minstrel performance to evoking the hypersexual, Black Venus
stereotype of the French colonies. A reimagining of Blackness was brought to the stage night after night
through Baker’s melanated body, and there is a contemporary discomfort in navigating her complex
embodiment of racial caricature.
Josephine Baker’s fractured performance of race, gender, and sexuality is dissected in her paper doll,
titled Josephine. Using the same formal strategies as Anita and Mary, a paper cutout figure and a
collection of costumes, accessories, and props are rendered with acrylic paint on heavyweight paper.
26

Fig. 18: Josephine Baker by Stanislaus Julian Walery, 1926, gelatin silver print, from the National Portrait Gallery
which has explicitly released this digital image under the CC0 license.
Fig. 19: Josephine Baker in banana skirt from the Folies Bergère production “Un Vent de Folie.” 1927. Public
domain.

27

Her caramel tinted body is centered in the map of her belongings; she stands with a slight
contrapposto, her left arm propped on her hip and her right arm curved over her perfectly coiffed hair.
She flashes a bright white void for a cheeky smile, and her hair and makeup evoke the quintessential
glamor of the 1920s. The outfits point to Baker’s prism of representations: the legendary banana skirt
from the stage production La Revue des Negres, a feathered costume from the silent film Zouzou
(1934), a classic tuxedo, and a fur trimmed champagne gown. Beauty products, accessories, and other
objects float around the central ensembles, including a blonde wig, top hat, heels, jewelry, Bakeroil
and Bakerfix hair products, and her official babydoll. Each of these objects presents its own critical
examination into the ways she used racial caricatures to capitalize on the European negrophilia wave,
create wealth, and survive in an oppressive, racist society.

Fig. 20: Sophia Zarders. Josephine, 2022. Acrylic on paper, dimensons variable.
Installation at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Photo: Michael Love.

In addition to the Josephine doll, I painted a cartoonish paper cutout portrait of Josephine Baker
expanded to a grotesque caricature. Inspired by animation and advertising of the 1920s-30s, her
large circular face features giant Kit-Cat clock eyes glancing to the side, a white toothless grin, curly
shellacked hair, and shimmering jeweled earrings. The piece speaks directly to Baker’s exaggerated
public image and her strategic use of caricature to reinforce her iconography. However, this visual is an
amalgamation of these representations translated through my illustrative style, and in this way is
28

Fig. 21: Sophia Zarders. Closeup of Josephine, 2022. Acrylic on paper, dimensons variable.
Installation at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Photo: Michael Love.

29

conceptually separate from her Jospehine paper doll. It resonates closest to my personal
disidentifactory views toward Baker’s artistry, encompassing both my reverence and irreverence.
Her transgressive representations of social ideology are beguiling, exhilarating, disturbing and utterly
fascinating.

Fig. 22: Sophia Zarders. Untitled (Josephine), 2022. Acrylic on paper, 36 x 24 inches.

The complex implications of “playing” with the paper doll are further complicated by the biography
of Josephine Baker and the nude representation of her body. This was certainly an uncomfortable
decision when I initially designed the piece, wherein I had to consider both the practical necessity of
“dressing” her body in the burlesque costumes and the historical implications of displaying a naked
Black woman’s body in a public academic institution. Even though I resolved to cover her body in the
infamous banana skirt, I thought about my responsibility as a Black femme artist in representing her
30

Fig. 23 - 24: Sophia Zarders.
Closeups of Josephine, 2022.
Acrylic on paper, dimensons
variable. Installation at Emily
Carr University of Art + Design.
Photo: Michael Love.

31

with as much agency as I could through the flattened visual lens of a paper doll. I hope Josephine is
successful in this way, though I recognize that the piece will always be complicated by the relationship
of the image to the viewer, especially within the environment of an overwhelmingly non-Black audience.
Just as Baker had done as a public figure, I had to negotiate this image of her as an empowered Black
femme rather than an object of consumption that continued the harmful legacy of the Black Venus
stereotype. While the piece was installed for a few weeks in the bustling main hallway on ECUAD’s
campus, I couldn’t help but feel stressed about reactions to the work from students, staff, and faculty,
particularly those who might have felt compelled to “play” with Josephine. These emotions were of
course heightened by my hypervisibility as the only Black student in the MFA program and one of a
handful in the entire student body. However, my desire to investigate and critique power structures is
a driving motivation in my artistic practice, and these feelings of discomfort and anxiety come with that
territory.
As I work through these complicated feelings, I think about Diana Ross’ saying, “She was a hot lady,
but deep in her thinking. Intelligent woman. I’m fascinated because Josephine, to me, is me, in this
time.”²⁵ This sentiment rang true when I had the privilege of paying my respects at Baker’s crypt deep in
the Panthéon in Paris. While visiting family in Europe, we took a brief trip to the city and I made time to

Fig. 25: Sophia Zarders, Studio documentation of Josephine, 2022. Acrylic on paper, dimensions variable.

32

see all of her old haunts, including the lavish restaurant La Coupole and the main neighborhood
she lived in, Montparnasse. This journey invigorated my deep connection to Josephine Baker and
instilled a haunting feeling as I geographically retraced her path and visually revived her artistic
essence. I became a mixed race Black femme following the ghostly footsteps of an iconic mixed race
Black femme. (Not to mention we somewhat look alike.) It was exciting to dive deep into the life of
someone who fully embraced her racial ambiguity, Black roots, gender fluidity, sexuality, and the art of
performance. I truly revere her incredible standing as a fearless Black entertainer who pushed every
social boundary. I hope my work depicts Josephine Baker for the multi-faceted person she was, and
illuminates the intricacies of her legacy.

Fig. 26: Photograph of the artist at Pl. Josephine Baker in Paris. 2022. Photo: Kerry Zarders.

33

Fig. 27: Sophia Zarders, Closeup of
Josephine, 2022. Acrylic on paper,
dimensions variable. Installation at
Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Photo: Michael Love.
Fig. 28: Studio documentation of
Josephine, 2022.

34

GARMENTS
In the third semester, I felt compelled to play with fabric and sewing as an explorative studio practice.
After the paper dolls, I became curious about constructing these painted representations of costumes
into physical garments, especially from Josephine Baker’s glamorous wardrobe. This material
exploration became a big breakthrough in my practice, and I named these new sculptural series
Garments. I do not prescribe the term “sculpture” or “soft sculpture” to my three dimensional pieces. I
view them as “garments”, thus situating them within fashion, costume, performance, and pop culture;
they are somewhere between clothes, costume, and art. These works pushed my technical handiwork
with sewing (mechanical and by hand), clothing construction, and embellishing; I have some sewing
experience making Halloween costumes and hemming my personal wardrobe, but I had never used
this skill set in my studio practice. The results are a collection of stuffed, flattened, stretched, squished,
and overtly campy garments.
The first work from Garments is a comically skinny, elongated white gown hung on a tiny, fuzzy
coat hanger. The 9 foot long dress floats about a foot off the ground and creates a strange optical
experience that emphasizes its exaggerated trumpeted silhouette. Unrealistic beauty standards are
stretched to uncomfortable, cartoonish proportions. The imagined body is grotesque and the garment
becomes horrifying yet humorous. This sewn object becomes the costume for a historical ghost,
haunting contemporary aspirations of beauty with the horrors of the past. My strategy with exaggerating
the design was to accentuate the silhouette lengthwise and stretch the implied body underneath, as
well as shrink the bodice to create a trumpet shape. After my initial sketch, I scavenged Dressew, my
favorite fabric shop in Vancouver, and bought a few meters of cheap polyester silk blend, lace trim,
faux fur trim and rhinestones that were labeled “tarnished.” With the help of the awesome Soft Shop
technicians at ECUAD, I measured and configured the elongated base of the gown, then constructed
the garment with a sewing machine and embellishments were handsewn.
Ironically, I actually made a white dress for my high school graduation almost ten years prior to this
project. As a student at a Catholic “all girls” high school, I was forced to wear a plain floor length white
dress and satin gloves for our graduation ceremony.²⁶ I decided to take sewing classes at my local
community college and make a unique dress that reflected my desire to rebel against the institution.
35

It wasn’t until my first installation of this piece that I made the personal connection between that long
white dress of my past and this long white dress of my present day studio practice. To commemorate
this strange irony, I wore a white dress to the opening celebration for the graduate show.

Fig. 29: Sophia Zarders. Untitled (Garment), 2022. Polyester, faux fur, rhinestones, lace, wire. 108 x 18 inches.

36

While working on the dress, I knew my next Garment would be a reinterpretation of Josephine Baker’s
iconic banana skirt. I sketched the design in my notebook and returned to the fabric store to purchase
more tarnished rhinestones, plush stuffing, and upholstery fabrics in shimmering greens, browns, and
yellows. Using my skills in hand sewing, I crafted sixteen soft organic objects that evoked bananas,
plantains, roots, and other exotic fruits and vegetables, each around nine inches long and two
inches thick. These plush forms were sewn to a central flexible wire ring, also encased in fabric and
polyester stuffing, mimicking the curve of Baker’s scandalous hip movements. The entire garment was
embellished with more discounted rhinestones, which shined in all their cheap glory under the gallery
lights. Then, I constructed a pillow for the banana skirt to sit on, made of magenta faux fur (same as
the dress hanger), plush stuffing, emerald green tassels, and a blue button that caves in the center of
the cushion; the rectangular shape measures to around twenty by twenty-two inches and eight inches
thick. The cushy object sits on a plinth slightly smaller than it, bringing attention to its peculiar oversized
demeanor and relation to the hand-crafted off-gold garment on its Seussian surface. Absurdity atop
ridiculousness with a side of playful social critique.

Fig. 30: Sophia Zarders. Untitled (Garment), 2022. Polyester fabric and stuffing, wire, rhinestones, faux fur,
tassels, button, dimensions variable. Installation at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Photo: Michael Love.

37

Fig. 31: Sophia Zarders, Identisploitation installation, 2023. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation at
Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Photo: Michael Love.

38

The historical inspiration for both of these Garments comes from my expansive digital archive of
Josephine Baker images. The banana skirt is perhaps the most well known symbol of her flirtatious
performativity of racial caricature and overtly sexual costuming. Despite the racist history of bananas
as a French colonial signifier, Baker’s activation of this controversial object through her dancing enacts
a “queer plasticity and a transferability of the phallus… because of its femme orientation, the [banana
skirt] offers a new host of sex and gender potentialities.” (Hammer, 166) This garment, a charged
symbol of Baker’s transgressive performativity, was an obvious choice for my material translation.
The dress, on the other hand, is a lesser known stage costume from a musical number titled, “Si
j’etais blanche,” translating to “If I were white” in French. The promotional photographs²⁷ from this
particular performance show Josephine in a blonde finger curled wig, lightened makeup foundation,
and an extravagant white fur-trimmed bias cut gown. The costume represents the white feminine ideal,
constructed and disseminated by Western colonialism, and embodies the impossible act of her own
assimilation in European high society. I knew I had to confront this disturbing imagery and work through
the uncomfortable reality of Baker’s contradictory relationship with whiteness. I read “Si j’etais blanche”
as Josephine working through her oppression as a Black woman in a patriarchal, white supremacist

Fig. 32: Fashion illustration of the “Si j’etais blanche!” costume and sketch of Untitled (Garment). 2023.
Fig. 33: Closeup of Untitled (Garment), 2022. Polyester, faux fur, rhinestones, lace, wire.

39

society, as well as a subversive negotiation with a primarily French audience who fetishizes and
profits off of her Blackness. On multiple levels, Baker is disidentifying with the white feminine ideal by
projecting a desire to assimilate and dressing in the “appropriate” garb, thus reducing whiteness to a
stage costume. Both the banana skirt and white gown were fascinating conduits for this new phase of
sculptural work and provided a different way to work through my research.

The remaining Garments lean more into accessories and props that fit perfectly into my cartoony,
campy point of view: a clamshell compact, makeup powder puff, perfume bottle, fuzzy mirror,
satin gloves, pumps, and a vinyl record. A few of these pieces incorporated found objects that
were transformed to be more absurd, colorful, and strange. For example, the music record and its
accompanying sleeve are an actual Anita Bryant record that I found at a local music store’s dollar bin.
It felt great to hot glue faux fur, felt, and other fabrics to this record, effectively erasing her appearance
and turning the design into a collage of prints, textures, and psychedelic colors. This chance encounter
inspired me to use more found objects as a way to materially alter cursed artifacts from pop cultural
past and my own vast collection of random garbage. The pumps, for instance, were a dreaded pair of
cheap heels I bought for a friend’s wedding a few years ago. I covered them in a floral fabric, glued

Fig. 34: Sophia Zarders, Closeup of Untitled (Garment), 2023. Polyester stuffing, faux fur, rhinestones, felt, wire,
cotton fabric. Installation at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

40

more faux fur to the bottoms, and attached a pair of white stuffed socks into their soles. The lumpy,
fleshy appendages are decorated with long pink leg hairs and fringe trim at the top. The effect isn’t
quite gory, but certainly leans horror in contrast with the cutesy, retro color palette. Dollhouse props
and vintage beauty products are a throughline for the other objects in this group. An oversized plushy
perfume bottle beckons viewers to squish it and funky mirrors seduces the visitor to admire their
appearance, even if that reflection is warped. These Garments invite the audience to step into the “doll”
role and embody cuteness with the grotesque.

Fig. 35: Sophia Zarders, Closeup of Untitled (Garment), 2023. Anita Bryant album cover, faux fur, felt, cotton
fabric. Installation at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Fig. 36: Sophia Zarders, Closeup of Untitled (Garment), 2023. Heels, polyester stuffing, faux fur, fringe, wire,
cotton and polyester fabrics. Installation at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

41

Fig. 37: Sophia Zarders, Identisploitation installation, 2023. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation at
Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Photo: Michael Love.

42

CONCLUSION
In my final installation for the MFA thesis show, I decided to exhibit selected paper cutouts from
Anita, Mary and Josephine, the Garments experimentations, and Skipper. My intention was to create
an overwhelming environment that took over the stark “white cube.” This vibrant, nostalgic collage
of flattened cutouts, soft objects, and an absurd video extended to each corner and crevice of the
gallery walls. I chose not to display any of the human figures from the paper dolls, so that the specific
biographical references embedded in those outfits, accessories, and props would be more ambiguous
to a broader audience. The installation, as a culmination of my entire graduate process, challenged
my deep attachment to “figurative art” and positioned these garments as vessels of meaning and
significance. The viewers, including myself, became the subjects by participating in the installation.
This iteration of Identisploitation emerged after two years of intense research, studio investigations, and
personal catharsis.
As I completed the installation of my graduate work, it occurred to me that the only human figure
visible in my thesis project was my own body in Skipper. This video had been my most demanding
work during the graduate program, and ultimately a giant breakthrough. It was created during a manic
moment in my artistic and personal life, and putting myself on display as a campy, satirical character
added to that chaos. Like generations of graduate students before me, I had to go through a catharsis
by sharing my most vulnerable inner self and allowing others to see that. Though I received positive
feedback in my initial presentation in the prior year, I had to push through an anxious fog of selfcriticism to feel confident enough to include it in the MFA show. At the end of the exhibition’s run, the
strongest reactions I received from the public were responding to Skipper. This video acutely reflects
the conceptual core of Identisploitation, but it also is the most raw expression of these ideas through
my own body. Though far from self-portraiture, it’s my most personal piece in a collection of works
that often cites the biographies of other people or is aesthetically fixed in the past. Skipper completely
questioned my stable, comfortable position as a figurative artist. Within the layers of satire in this
video was a negotiation between my identity as a Black femme and the embodiment of this disturbing
character. Self-portraiture has been a fixture of my practice for many years (as exemplified in the
illustrations in this document), but I strayed away from it during the graduate program. The genre has
been an expressive way for me to explore my Blackness, gender fluidity, and sexuality by depicting
43

myself as different characters, which have always been closely tied to my identities. I was in control
of these depictions of my biracial Black body. There is a definite lack of control in exhibiting Skipper
in the gallery space, where my body and intersecting identities are subverted and contorted. In a way
it’s liberating to enthusiastically act a fool²⁸ in the art institution, even when it feels embarrassing or
terrifying to do so. For a moment, my Black femme body took up the space it wanted in this prestigious
environment and seduced the public to witness my personal, creative exorcism.
As I finish the MFA program, I must assess my position as an American Black femme living abroad
and reflect on the increasingly, outrageously absurd anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric running rampant in the
United States. Just in the last few months, the state of Tennessee has passed an anti-drag bill that
effectively prohibits the trans community from existing in public places. Of course, this moral panic
surrounding drag and queerness is not a new phenomenon (ahem, Anita Bryant), nor is it uniquely
American. However, it is a more overt and obvious way to harm generations of trans individuals who
deserve to live unapologetically without fear of harm. Across the globe, the LGBTQ+ community is
under attack by oppressive governments, regressive public figures, and the dissemination of age-old
anti-queer misinformation. The most disturbing part of all the historical context in Identisploitation (but
especially Skipper) is how much it resonates with this contemporary wave of evangelical, patriarchal,
colonial conservatism. It has been infuriating and distressing to make political art at this time, and yet I
am continuously compelled to channel these feelings into my practice. Artists have a unique ability and
responsibility to respond to the ever changing world around them.
I came into this MFA program as an illustrator yearning for artistic growth and self discovery after
devoting many years to my professional career in freelance art. Throughout this degree, I’ve had the
opportunity to really sink my teeth into the questions that had always hovered above my work and
develop my voice as an interdisciplinary visual artist. I experienced a few breakthroughs in my research
and practice, by personifying a wild character, pushing out of my figurative comfort zone, and better
understanding my own identity in relation to my art. I’m thankful for the opportunity to grow my practice
and come into my own as a visual artist and scholar, and I don’t think this work would have emerged
the same way at any other art institution. I hope Identisploitation speaks to other like-minded nerds who
are endlessly fascinated with the intersections between history, identity, pop culture, and garments.

44

GLOSSARY
Ambiguity - Neither here nor there. In its most radical form, it can be used to break a falsely prescribed, socially
enforced binary (gender, sexuality, etc.) I have learned to embrace ambiguity in my personal life and utilize it as
an artistic strategy.
Assimilation - The social and political pressure to fit into a tiny little ideological box that has been pushed by
imperialism, colonialism, patriarchy, or other dominant structures. It is historically a violent form of oppression that
has been used to suppress the vibrant cultures of marginalized communities.
B movie - Cheap thrills on the silver screen. Monsters, rock ‘n’ roll and cleavage.
Blackness - The magic spark connecting melanated ancestors and descendents from the continent of Africa and
its diaspora. Blackness cannot be essentialized, but it is a living, breathing identity that has undeniably influenced
every corner of popular culture. Black is beautiful, luminous, radical, resilient, bold, androgynous, proud,
ancestral, and the future.
Black Venus - Fetishistic term referring to a beautiful, curvaceous Black femme. This phrase stems from
European colonial violence against Africans and the horrifying legacy of human zoos, wherein African people were
captive displays for European gawkers. Over time, the term has been reappropriated and reclaimed by notable
Black women, including Josephine Baker.
Blaxploitation - Genre of exploitation film primarily completely produced, directed, written, and acted by Black
creatives. This genre rose to fame in the 1960s-70s as a fuck you to dominant Black stereotypes in movies,
playing on these outdated caricatures and creating their own simultaneously. While these films are narratively
and aesthetically absurd, they often reflect very real issues within the Black community with a heavy dose of sex
appeal, humor, and violence. Cue the afros, Camaros, funk, drugs, sex, bell bottoms, and pistol-whips.
Bricolage - A collection of random things or images that come together to create an interesting visual dialogue.
My apartment is itself a bricolage of postcards, posters, art, and random shit that I have curated over the years.
Together they translate the beehive of ideas that is my brain.
Camp - An appreciation for things that are obscene, distasteful, garish, and tacky. Does camp even exist
anymore? Is pop culture just a never-ending self-referential loop nowadays? No one’s fun anymore! Whatever
happened to fun? I’m so bored I could die.
Caricature - An exaggerated representation of a person that leans into the grotesque. This idea is a big influence
on my practice, often visually (portrait cutout of Baker) or conceptually (the implied caricature of Garments.)
Cult of True Womanhood - A conservative set of morals placed on bourgeois women in the U.S. at the turn
of the century. The central philosophy touted piety, purity, domesticity, and submission, which influenced the
political satire embedded in Skipper. The Cult of True Womanhood has heavily inspired contemporary puritanical,
oppressive views toward gender equality, sexuality, and body autonomy. For a deeper dive into this subject, I
recommend “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860” by Barbara Welter.

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Disidentification - The critical space between assimilating and rejecting an image, narrative, or idea that is not
intended for you as the audience. This concept was theorized by José Esteban Muñoz in relation to queer artists
of color who use drag performance to critique mainstream ideas toward gender politics, racial identity, and popular
culture that they are excluded from.
Doll - An malleable, beautiful thing that contains all of the world’s pressure to be unattainably perfect. A still,
plastic body to dress up, undress, stand, sit, throw, drown, defile, squish, snap, worship and destroy.
Drag - An art form that threatens the porous fabric of gender essentialism, sexual oppression, and wet blanket
attitudes of conservative ideology in the United States. Currently banned in Tennessee, but hopefully that idiotic
law has been reversed by the time you’re reading this.
Exorcism - Supernatural release of negative energy from within the human body. This process has been coopted by the Catholic Church as a way to push their insidious agenda against Satan, but I aim to reclaim this term
through a secular lens. Acting out Skipper was a form of exorcism on an intrapersonal and artistic level.
Fetishization - A form of exploitation that labels a differing culture, race, sexuality, identity, etc as the “The Other”
and treats it as a sexual fantasy or curious oddity. This stems from Western imperialism and colonialism wherein
anything not regulated to stringent European cultures is defined as “exotic” and therefore coveted, appropriated,
commodified, etc. White Parisians’ obsession with Josephine Baker can be examined as fetishistic.
Figurative Art - The human body represented visually in an artwork. This genre stems from humans’ obsession
with the question of whether the soul and physical body are separate entities. This question is the undercurrent
of all political discourse regarding bodily autonomy, reproductive justice, and transness. Figurative art attempts to
capture both the human body and the soul.
Garment - Something between clothing, costume, prop, accessory, and artwork. Outside of fashion or art, yet in
conversation with both.
Glamazon - Diva of the ultimate caliber. The embodiment of glamour, attitude, and fashion. Think Grace Jones,
Anita Ekberg, Donyale Luna, and Sasha Colby.
Grotesque - Deemed by dominant culture as obscene, disgusting, uncanny, weird, strange, gross. Gives you that
icky feeling… or maybe you’re into that, you sicko!
Hagsploitation - A sub-genre of exploitation cinema that stars deranged older women with an itch for bloody
revenge. This became a popular trend during the 1960s when casting opportunities dwindled for legendary
actresses of Hollywood’s bygone Golden Era. Popular “psycho biddies” include Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and
currently Mia Goth.
Horror - A way for people of marginalized backgrounds to work through their daily anxieties and fears of existing
in this cruel world. Perhaps the queerest film genre, wherein misunderstood monsters and unpopular girls with
telekinesis reign supreme.
Humor - Another strategy to survive and make sense of this cruel world. Humor is a connective tissue between all

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my thesis work, which is used as a formal and conceptual vehicle to deliver political and social commentary with a
wink and a smile.
Irony - Another strategy to survive and make sense of this cruel world. When the optics clash humorously with the
message. The juxtaposition of demonic imagery and overtly Evangelical “anti-demon” dialogue points to irony in
Skipper, which also employs horror and humor. What a coincidence!
Kitsch - Something that is deemed lowbrow, obnoxious, or naïve by so-called cultural tastemakers. Garments
certainly dips into this aesthetic and celebrates it with bright colors, cheap materials, and playful references.
Minstrel - A form of racial caricature that stems from cartoonishly negative depictions of Black Americans that
became popular during the Reconstruction Era. These images and stories permeated American pop culture and
were disseminated through theater performance, graphic arts, propaganda, etc.
Negrophilia - A fetishistic obsession with Black people and culture. The term stems from the négrophilie craze in
the 1920s, where white Parisians craved “primitive” Black art and appropriated culturally significant aesthetics for
their art, music, etc. This cultural phenomenon is very much alive and well in contemporary pop culture, in which
Black artists are routinely excluded, fetishized, appropriated, and then erased from the lineage of that art form.
Nostalgia - A wistful (or dangerous) longing for a bygone era. This can be an effective, subversive tool for
uncovering and addressing harms of the past. The Paper Doll series can make viewers nostalgic for their
childhoods, even if the content of those visuals is jarring.
Oppositional Gaze - Theorized by bell hooks, this term refers to a critical gaze toward cinema that is particular
to Black women spectators. This idea is key to my relationship with pop culture, wherein I rarely feel reflected or
represented in the media I watch, leading me to take in these visuals and stories through a critical, outsider lens.
Satire - Using humor as a strategy to mock the status quo. This was a major component to the storytelling in
Skipper, wherein my performance style and dialogue are satirical of political leaders of the Religious Right.
Televangelism - Religious (typically Christian) television broadcasting that hinges on spectacle, televisual
healing, and money money money. One of the largest televangelist networks, Trinity Broadcasting Network, used
to run in a gigantic, garish studio that I would occasionally drive past in Costa Mesa, California. Televangelist
icons Tammy Faye Bakker and Jan Crouch were major influences for my character mannerisms in Skipper.
Terrorist Drag - A subgenre of drag performance that is very confrontational and a big middle finger to social
norms. This genre was theorized by José Esteban Muñoz in reference to the transgressive performance art of
Vaginal Davis. Does Skipper fall into terrorist drag? Perhaps. :)

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NOTES
1. Theorized by Muñoz in “The White to Be Angry”: Vaginal Davis’s Terrorist Drag (1997).
2. See Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999).
3. See Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992).
4. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), Myra Breckinridge (1970), Cleopatra Jones (1973), What Ever
Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), and Barbarella (1968).
5. Time, 1970 “Cinema: Some Sort of Nadir”
6. I first encountered Grace Jones in the Pee Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special, where she emerged from
a giant packing box and sang “Little Drummer Boy” dressed in a sculptural metallic dress and headdress. This
rocked my world as a kid and I still revisit this episode every holiday season: https://youtu.be/98JrWm9IMMA
7. See Jones’ controversial collaborations with French photographer and ex-lover, Jean Paul Goude:
https://www.jeanpaulgoude.com/en/archives/grace-jones
8. Grace Jones performing with a caged tiger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5EyewfIODI
9. Bobby Conn performing on Chic-A-Go-Go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2XmrmaXeLg
10. Many of these websites are gone now, but i-dressup.com made news in 2019 for a data security breach. This
is an apology to my parents, for using their ancient email address to make many accounts on these sites. I’m sure
it’s very corrupted by now.
11. Bryant is also well known for her role as a spokesperson for Florida Orange Juice in the 1970s. She sang
the official theme song for the brand and starred in a commerical series animated by Walt Disney Studios. The
“orange bird” character can be seen today on Disney merchandise and is beloved by super fans for some reason:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ffEJJhB8qI
12. Watch Anita Bryant get pied in the face: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tHGmSh7f-0 Bryant’s vitriol was
met with vocal protests by the gay community across the United States, including a boycott on orange juice and
screwdriver cocktails. Some of my favorite protest signs include “Anita Bryant Sucks Oranges” and “Anita Who?”
13. Pickford won the 2nd Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Coquette (1929). She also
received an honorary Oscar in 1976.
14. She has several theaters and buildings named after her, a star on the Hollywood (and Toronto) Walk of Fame,
and a prohibition-era cocktail. Yes, I’ve taken a photo with her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
15. Original editions of Attitude are understandably a collector’s item, but you can purchased the re-issue from
your favorite bookseller. Be sure to gander at these scandalous page spreads:
https://www.parigibooks.com/pages/books/33205/tom-tierney/attitude-an-adult-paperdoll-book-signed-presentation-copy

16. Is there anything funnier than the Abbott and Costello cats? I watched this several times in a manic state while
writing this thesis document: https://youtu.be/m5GdhX0rVMA

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17. Black Lives Matter, Stop Asian Hate, and many other social movements defined the tumultuous year of 2020.
18. I especially recommend the essay “Do These Sequins Make My Butt Look Fat? Wardrobe, Image, and the
Challenge of Identity in the Music of Black American Women” by Gail Hilson Woldu.
19. The United States (and many other countries) is currently facing a horrifying wave of regressive social
attitudes and oppressive legislation against the LGBTQ+ community. Coincidentally many mainstream
clothing outlets are pushing a “cottagecore” aesthetic (aka Puritan chic) that fits right in with the past trends of
conservative political movements.
20. I also pulled inspiration from Japanese “lolita” street style, 1950s babydoll aesthetics, child beauty pageants,
Catholic communion garb, debutante ballgowns, and turn of the century Victorian styles.
21. “You mean... we could’ve been friends this whole time?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cth9aakWf38
22. Frank Wilderson III coined the phrase Afropessimism, which positions anti-Blackness and violence against
Black people at the core of white, Western history and society. Nuotama Bodomo’s film, Everybody Dies!, reflects
this ideology through surrealism and campy aesthetics that disorients the viewer:
https://nuotamabodomo.info/everybody-dies I highly recommend watching the television series Random Acts of
Flyness, which features many segments directed by Bodomo.
23. MYSTERY. BABYLON THE GREAT. MOTHER OF HAROLTS. ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. Book of
Revelations, 17:5.
24. My first reading of Josephine’s work in a critical context was Malik Gaines’ Black Performance on the Outskirts
of the Left: A History of the Impossible, which was another influential text in my graduate research.
25. Diana Ross has paid homage to Baker throughout her career: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUFUFW4PfVI
Other celebrity nods include Beyoncé, Lynn Whitfield, Laverne Cox, Yara Shahidi, and problematically Miley
Cyrus.
26. There is so much I could say about making teenage girls dress up as virginal child brides for Jesus, but I’ll
reserve that for another document.
27. The photographs are shared on my MFA blog:
https://fullresgradstudios.ecuad.ca/szarders/2022/11/04/fall-2022-explorations/
28. Act a fool, girl... Act a fool: https://youtu.be/PmvQp1KBWTQ

50

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. Anita Bryant holding a bottle of Coca-Cola. 1960 (circa). State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory. This 		
work is released to the public domain in the United States under the terms of Section 257.35(6), 			
Florida Statutes. Accessed 13 Feb. 2023.<https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/144437>
Figure 2. Mary Pickford on the cover of The Photo-Play Journal, June 1916. This work is in the public domain in 		
the United States because it was published (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before January 		
1, 1928. Accessed 13 Feb. 2023. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mary_Pickford_1916.jpg>
Figure 3. Sophia Zarders. Mary and Anita, 2021. Acrylic on paper, dimensions variable. Installation at Emily Carr 		
University of Art + Design. Photo: Sophia Zarders.
Figure 4. Sophia Zarders. Anita, 2021. Acrylic on paper, dimensions variable. Installation at Emily Carr University 		
of Art + Design. Photo: Sophia Zarders.
Figure 5. Sophia Zarders. Closeup of Anita, 2021. Acrylic on paper, dimensions variable. Installation at Emily 		
Carr University of Art + Design. Photo: Sophia Zarders.
Figure 6. Sophia Zarders. Mary, 2021. Acrylic on paper, dimensions variable. Installation at Emily Carr University 		
of Art + Design. Photo: Sophia Zarders.
Figure 7. Sophia Zarders. Closeup of Mary, 2021. Acrylic on paper, dimensions variable. Installation at Emily Carr 		
University of Art + Design. Photo: Sophia Zarders.
Figure 8. May Stevens. Big Daddy Paper Doll, 1971. Screenprint on paper, edition 20/75, 21 x 35 inches (53.3 x 		
88.9 cm). Collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. Gift of Mr. 		
and Mrs. Samuel Dorksy, 1973.29.1. © May Stevens. Courtesy of the artist and Ryan Lee, New York.
Figure 9 - 11. Sophia Zarders. Closeups of Anita and Mary, 2021. Acrylic on paper, dimensions variable. 			
Installation at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Photo: Sophia Zarders.
Figure 12. Sophia Zarders. Identisploitation installation, 2023. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation at 		
Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Photo: Michael Love.
Figure 13. Artist modeling the orginal dress for the Skipper costume. 2022.
Figure 14. Sophia Zarders. Skipper character design. 2022. Colored pencil on paper.
Figure 15. Sophia Zarders. Identisploitation installation, 2023. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation at 		
Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Photo: Sophia Zarders.
Figure 16 - 17. Sophia Zarders. Stills from Skipper. 2022. Digital video.
Figure 18. Josephine Baker by Stanislaus Julian Walery, 1926, gelatin silver print, from the National Portrait 		
Gallery which has explicitly released this digital image under the CC0 license. Accessed 13 Feb. 			
2023. <https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.95.105>
Figure 19. Josephine Baker in banana skirt from the Folies Bergère production “Un Vent de Folie,” 1927.

51

Photographed by Stanislaus Julian Waléry. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and 		
other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 70 years or fewer. Accessed 		
13 Feb. 2023. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baker_Banana.jpg>
Figure 20. Sophia Zarders. Josephine, 2022. Acrylic on paper, dimensons variable. Installation at Emily Carr 		
University of Art + Design. Photo: Michael Love.
Figure 21. Sophia Zarders. Closeup of Josephine, 2022. Acrylic on paper, dimensons variable. Installation at 		
Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Photo: Michael Love.
Figure 22. Sophia Zarders. Untitled (Josephine), 2022. Acrylic on paper, 36 x 24 inches. Installation at Emily Carr 		
University of Art + Design. Photo: Sophia Zarders.
Figure 23 - 24. Sophia Zarders. Closeups of Josephine, 2022. Acrylic on paper, dimensons variable. Installation at
Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Photo: Michael Love.
Figure 25. Sophia Zarders. Studio documentation of Josephine, 2022. Acrylic on paper, dimensions variable. 		
Photo: Sophia Zarders.
Figure 26. Photograph of the artist at Pl. Josephine Baker in Paris. 2022. Photo: Kerry Zarders.
Figure 27. Sophia Zarders. Closeup of Josephine, 2022. Acrylic on paper, dimensions variable. Installation at 		
Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Photo: Michael Love.
Figure 28. Studio documentation of Josephine, 2022.
Figure 29. Sophia Zarders. Untitled (Garment), 2022. Polyester, faux fur, rhinestones, lace, wire. 108 x 18 inches. 		
Installation at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Photo: Sophia Zarders.
Figure 30. Sophia Zarders. Untitled (Garment), 2022. Polyester stuffing, wire, rhinestones, faux fur, tassels, 		
button, dimensions variable. Installation at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Photo: Michael Love.
Figure 31. Sophia Zarders. Identisploitation installation, 2023. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation at 		
Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Photo: Michael Love.
Figure 32. Fashion illustration of the “Si j’etais blanche!” costume and sketch of Untitled (Garment). 2023.
Figure 33. Untitled (Garment), 2022. Polyester, faux fur, rhinestones, lace, wire. Photo: Sophia Zarders.
Figure 34. Sophia Zarders. Closeup of Untitled (Garment), 2023. Polyester stuffing, faux fur, rhinestones, felt, 		
wire, cotton fabric. Installation at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Photo: Sophia Zarders.
Figure 35. Sophia Zarders. Closeup of Untitled (Garment), 2023. Anita Bryant album cover, faux fur, felt, cotton 		
fabric. Installation at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Photo: Sophia Zarders.
Figure 36. Sophia Zarders. Closeup of Untitled (Garment), 2023. Heels, polyester stuffing, faux fur, fringe, wire, 		
cotton and polyester fabrics. Installation at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Photo: Sophia Zarders.
Figure 37. Sophia Zarders. Identisploitation installation, 2023. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation at 		
Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Photo: Michael Love.
Figure 38. The artist in front of their work, 2022. Photo: Patrick Sales

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Figure 38: The artist in front of their work, 2022. Photo: Patrick Sales.

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