The Lavender Menace

LAVENDER MENACE 2024 .

Giclée Prints on Hahnemüle Pearl

Photographic performance for camera

LAVENDER MENACE , looks at the history of queer coding, flowers and clothing where often used to signal to other queer people. As with Oscar Wilde and green carnations, Oscar Wilde also wrote about the purple hours in The picture of Dorian Gray.

Lavender as its own historical significance in representation, resistance and power. and it being the flower for lesbians.

With this work I"m exploring this hiddenness and coding. In the work you see glimpses of someone behind the lavender. Clothing is visible denim jacket and Cherry Doc boots often worn by butch dykes.

The term “Lavender Menace” originated as a negative term for the association of lesbianism with the feminist movement, but it was later reclaimed as a positive term by lesbian feminists. The Lavender Menace was a group of lesbian radical feminists in the 70s who formed to protest the exclusion of lesbians and their issues from the feminist movement. .