Masterclass with Virginia Lupu

Virginia Lupu’s most recent exhibition was “The Penis of a Female Photographer”, shown at the Museum of Recent Art in Bucharest in spring 2023. She then continued with the artistic residency offered by CdRF, where she explored the theme of the sexualization of women and femininity within a minority in Romania. Virginia chose to document the BDSM community, looking at sexualization as a form of empowerment and healing.

For the masterclass, Virginia will talk about how she developed this project, with guests from among the people she photographed. She will discuss both her artistic process and the BDSM community.

“Sexualization can be observed in various forms, especially in mass media and advertising, where women in particular are often represented in a patriarchal manner that emphasizes their physical attributes over their other characteristics. Mass media and the capitalist system play a significant role in shaping our understanding of our own sexuality and sexuality in general. In mass media, the image of women is often used to sell beauty products or encourage diet culture, which can create unrealistic standards around the idea of ‘femininity’ (and how we actually define femininity) and reinforce gender stereotypes. It also contributes to the propagation of gender-based violence by reinforcing harmful stereotypes and redefining sexuality as objectification.

In fact, sexuality can be therapeutic and healing, especially when it involves a consensual and positive experience that promotes physical, emotional, and mental well-being, based on intimacy and connection rather than unrealistic beauty standards and conservative ideas about sex and love.

At the beginning of the pandemic, out of fear of precarity and due to the lack of a creative context, I began working as an online Dominatrix, later moving my practice into live, one-on-one sessions. In this way, I managed to integrate into and gain access to the BDSM/fetish community—a marginalized community due to the way we have been educated by patriarchy and its media to perceive our sexuality, indoctrinated by the F/M binary and the idea that sexuality is only vanilla (that is, normative standards of penetration and reproduction).

Through my work as a Political Mistress, I managed to deconstruct certain ideas I had internalized about sexual dynamics, practicing BDSM in an ethical way—training beta men to become at least decent human beings through humiliation sessions, power exchange, orgasm denial, or placing them in chastity cages, consensually obliging them to read feminist theory and donate money to organizations that fight for women’s rights, etc.

I integrated a safe and consensual way to explore difficult emotions. BDSM activities and fetish exploration allow both parties (both the dominant and the submissive) to reclaim their relationship with their body and their own sexuality in a liberating and responsible way. BDSM dynamics are based on prioritizing safety, communication, and consent—things that are often missing in hetero-vanilla relationships.

Based on a conception informed by my experience as a sex worker in the BDSM field, I propose for this residency a series of portraits of women who actively practice as Mistresses/Dominatrices, including myself—women who understand that sexuality is more spectral than patriarchy would like it to be. Most of these Dominatrixes work in adult camming/videochat studios, but some are independent, working in personal ‘dungeons.’”

— Virginia Lupu

The masterclass will be held online, on Zoom. Participation is recommended for those over 18 years old.