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First off, let me say that your reference to Sherman’s work as art with footnotes is a brilliant. In that one phrase I get exactly what you mean. The paintings you posted were helpful too. As we said in class, Sherman’s photographs harken to another time and place, a reference we recognize but cannot pinpoint. This is her playful use of similacra, referring to some aspect or part of a whole to create and represent the “unreal.”

As for your last question, femininity is not real to Sherman. Gender, race, and any other category or cliche is just a social construct used to order our world. Like women fitting themselves into the role of feminitiy, painters only appear to represent the real because they have been trained to conform to certain techniques while we have been taught to accept these representations as such. If we were told throughout history that potato carving was the best form of representing the real, we’d probably see value in that instead and try to sell it to every Third World country we could.