The contemporary artist lives under uninterrupted surveillance. Not merely state surveillance (though that cobweb is always humming in the rafters), but the softer, more insidious surveillance of algorithmic witnessing — data trails, metrics, likes, biometrics, aesthetic categorisation. Our identities, once private negotiations, have been turned outward, flattened, and fed into machines that decide what kind of human we are allowed to be.
For women, this is not new.
We have always been watched.
What is new is the ability to weaponise the gaze rather than flee it — a tactic feminist artists have honed for decades, sometimes consciously, sometimes instinctively. For me, the development of personas such as Pasha du Valentine or the Countess of Brighton and Hackney was not a theatrical flourish. It was a calculated feminist intervention: a deliberate exaggeration of gender, class and erotic codes that refused passive consumption.
A persona is not a mask.
A persona is a mirror turned inside out.
It reveals the architecture of expectation:
How should a woman speak?
How should she desire?
How should she perform femininity, or resist it?
What is the acceptable ratio of softness to steel?
By crafting a heightened identity, the artist creates a rupture in the surveillance loop. The gaze is forced to work harder; its assumptions become visible — and therefore vulnerable. When I staged the Countess persona, I took the aristocratic feminine ideal and mutated it: sensual but confrontational, glamorous but bruised, erotic but intellectually armed. The Countess became a feminist critique disguised as decadence.
Meanwhile, Pasha du Valentine emerged from the punk instinct to dismantle beauty politics. She was deliberately excessive, deliberately unhinged from normative femininity. Where institutional feminism sought to educate, Pasha sought to contaminate. Her power came from exaggeration — the grotesque as rebellion, sensuality as critique, erotic flamboyance as academic argument.
In a world where women are constantly categorised, a persona is a refusal of categorisation.
It is a feminist detour.
A sabotage of the machine.
The digital age adds an interesting twist.
Algorithms cannot read irony.
They cannot interpret performance.
They cannot understand queering, camp, or persona as feminist resistance.
To an algorithm, the Countess is a “glamorous woman.”
To an algorithm, Pasha is a “provocative performer.”
To a human, they are ruptures in patriarchal logic.
This is why persona-based feminist art is more necessary than ever. We are dealing with a world that reduces women to data categories (“beauty”, “violence”, “soft content”, “adult”). By introducing persona as performance, we jam the code. We create noise. We reclaim narrative.
A persona can say things the “real” woman is not allowed to.
She can rage.
She can contradict.
She can mock.
She can expose.
She can be too much — which is another way of saying she can be free.
The truth is this: the feminist persona is not a lie.
She is a deeper truth.
A truth that needed a louder outfit.
In my current work — digital glitch, feminist essays, alternative archives, and the slow re-curation of decades of counterculture — I see all my personas merging. Not erased, not discarded, but integrated. Surveillance has changed, and so has my strategy. Today the work is less about deflecting the gaze and more about asserting authorship over how I am seen.
The persona remains my tool.
My armour.
My megaphone.
And sometimes, my scalpel.
Feminist identity is not a fixed object. It is a fluid choreography of resistance and invention. Through persona, the artist becomes many things at once: subject, object, author, critic, creature. And it is in that multiplicity — excessive, contradictory, deliberately unmanageable — that true feminist power resides.
