The Norms in Rockwell

It was actually k.d. lang herself that came up with the theme for this photoshoot. lang devised the scene where she would be “shaved by a beautiful model, a playful fantasy realized… as a sort of modern twist on Norman Rockwell” (Bennetts). lang chose Rockwell as an inspiration because she "loves to play with stereotypes, and the more provocatively and irreverently the better, as far as she's concerned” (Bennetts). The norms and stereotypes in Rockwell's work become a source of queer inspiration. Let’s take a look at Rockwell, his work, and the norms that appear within them, to understand just how this Vanity Fair cover breaks them down.

The women in Rockwell’s paintings have things to do as well. On the few covers where women are featured on their own, they are engaged in low-impact activities, including (but not limited to) sitting doing needlepoint (fig 7), sitting exhausted after cleaning (fig 8), sitting eating candy ( fig 9) or sitting gossiping (fig 10). There are some women who are mobile, but few and far between (fig 11). They are often engaged in domestic tasks, which will inevitably contribute to and benefit the home. They are the administers of care and never the recipients. The most dynamic female characters are children.

lang is everything that the men on Rockwell’s covers hope to be. She wears the same kind of suit that the men on the Saturday Evening Post covers wear and her shoes similarly shine. As a woman taking on this masculine role, she queers this entire image. lang completely steps outside of the female gender expressions in Rockwell’s work by fully embodying her masculinity in this photo, . She has displaced the man entirely, making this image comprised of only women, which again, is rare for Rockford. Her female masculinity also signals her butch identity. It’s not just the fact that lang is a woman wearing a suit, but that she is a butch lesbian who is wearing the kinds of clothes that butch lesbians wear. Not only would the average audience at this time know that lang is a lesbian, part of why she is on the cover is the fact that she refuses to hide or deny who she is, but the romantic tension between her and Crawford clears up all doubt. lang’s embodiment of the masculine role shakes expectations. Her place in this photo triggers a cascade of broken norms, making this image fundamentally queer.

This image was created in response to the norms frequently depicted in Rockwell’s work, but he did not invent them. Rockwell created images that would sell, images that fell within the boundaries of what he was “allowed” to make, what the Saturday Evening Post would allow to be published. He was confined by the same norms that he would reproduce in his magazine covers, he was not meant to create anything too “radical” or “alternative.” This Vanity Fair cover is creation unrestrained, playing with restrictive norms to break them down. The greatest art is driven by genuine passion and desire, it cannot be created while the artist is concerned about following rules. Rockwell knew this too, when he finally left the Saturday Evening Post and created his first commission for a magazine called Look. He created perhaps his most famous painting, The Problem We All Live With (Cooks 41).