IT’S NOT THE SIZE THAT MATTERS, IT IS SHAPE

“The different forms of male genitalia displayed in Cardoso’s harvestmen sculptures and prints confront spectators with their remarkable heterogeneity. Some of the penises are long and thin, others short and fat. Many of the penis heads resemble flowers, one with a large orchid-like stamen and smaller hair-like tendrils surrounding it, others like an Easter lily. Some take the shape of a trident wrapped in a petal while others have a hollow bowl-shaped hole at the end surrounded by tiny hairs”.

“Art and science shape the kinds of narratives that we generate around our own and other species. Cardoso’s exhibition invites us to take an intimate look at an Australian animal species that is largely unknown to the general public. It playfully invokes the human animal’s cultural obsession with penis size, but in so doing it raises a number of other important challenges to normative understandings of how biology colours ontological perspectives along gendered lines and thus impacts on broader gender relations. As genomics develops, scientists play an increasingly influential role in how we see, document and interpret genotypes and phenotypes. As shown, the results of this research, or their popular interpretations, can often continue to reinforce traditional essentialising gender stereotypes. As technology advances and our understanding of the natural world broadens, Cardoso’s sculptures of invertebrate reproductive organs challenge us to be a little more flexible in how we think about membership of a particular species. Human exceptionalism is tested by Cardoso’s anthropomorphising of the harvestmen and by her enlarging of the ‘members’ to a human scale. The sculptures invite us to see what Derrida would describe as the ‘naked truth’ of each organism’s singular alterity.
The intricate, unusual and varied forms of the harvestmen penises offer an alternative to the hetero-normative dualisms of male-female courtship, reproduction and sexual difference”.

Stevens, Lara. Dismembering the member: rethinking sexual difference in Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s exhibition’ It’s not size that matters, it is shape’. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 15, 2: 1-13, 2015.