In the book, Nelson - a political queer in a relationship with the butch, male-passing artist Harry Dodge - becomes pregnant by artificial insemination and gives birth to a son. In her book-length essay The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson is concerned with a dilemma she identifies in Opie’s photographs. The scarred word pervert is faint but still traceable on Opie’s chest. Neither of them seems concerned with the camera: in the picture, their gaze is very private. In this photograph Opie is unmasked, and she and the baby are looking at each other. She is naked, and cast in the saintly white light of a Hans Holbein painting, a cherubic blond child at her breast. In that picture Opie is again sitting before a brocade curtain, this time a red one. Ten years later, in 2004, Opie took another photograph, Self-Portrait/Nursing. Her face and neck are entirely obscured by a black leather fetish mask and collar. In the portrait, Opie sits shirtless and straight-backed, with her hands folded demurely in her lap her breasts hang down on either side like two great patties.
The word is accented with another carving beneath it, in the shape of underlining laurel vines.
Gay fucking shit vine skin#
The cuts are fresh: the letters are the five-alarm color of fresh blood, and the surrounding skin of Opie’s clavicle is swollen and bright pink. In Catherine Opie’s 1994 photograph Self-Portrait/Pervert, the artist poses in front of a black brocade curtain with the word pervert carved into her chest.