Kat Toronto - Miss Meatface

First monograph on the work of American photographer Kat Toronto, whose alter ego 'Miss Meatface' is a feminist cultural icon.

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Kat Toronto was born and raised in
the San Francisco Bay Area, and currently resides in London. In 2010,
she was diagnosed with a rare form of cervical cancer, which three years
later led to a full hysterectomy - a traumatic procedure that alienated
the artist from her body. Toronto developed her alter ego, 'Miss
Meatface', as a way to process that trauma and to give her an outlet to
explore her sexuality beyond what is typically expected of those who
have a womb. "I found myself stopping to think about what the heck
gender really was", she recalls, "and why society historically placed so
much emphasis on sculpting gender stereotypes."


In the beginning,
she experimented with special effects makeup and took self-portraits
with a Polaroid camera. "That's where the Meatface thing came from", she
says. Then gradually, as she explored her relationship with the fetish
community and reflected on her personal history, 'Miss Meatface' began
to evolve: "it's interesting, how with the twists and turns that my life
takes, she just kind of goes with it and reveals something new to me
every time."


Wearing masks and dressing in fetish-wear is a joyous
process for Toronto, as it liberates her from the restraints set on her
physical body by a society obsessed with defining and policing gender.
In her Miss Meatface self-portraiture, Toronto stages
fetishised domestic scenes that play with dominance and submission -
games of power that mirror heterosexual power hierarchies - while her
sexually ambiguous figures subvert conventional standards of beauty,
gender, and power. In the world of 'Miss Meatface', she says, the role
of homemaker is not the stereotypical ideal of feminine domestic
submission, it is one of ultimate control over her domain.


This
book, Kat Toronto's first large-scale publication, brings together some
250 scenes from 'Miss Meatface's' life over the past six years, drawn
from locations in the US and UK, and captured on Polaroid.