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The Bullfighter's Braid
Cristina Sanchez was a professional Spanish bullfighter
from 1996-1999. I photographed her at a novice performance
in Valdemorillo during my fieldwork about 'Women and
Bullfighting'. The Bullfighter's Braid is a challenging
image. In the same way that women performers disturb the
'traditional' masculine bullfight, it places a woman in a
frame usually occupied by a man, exchanging his
'traditional' thin, coiled, braid for a long feminine
highlighted blonde plait. However my informants enjoyed the
image aesthetically, they felt it was 'natural' rather than
'constructed'. Some sought to feminise the braid as 'the
prettiest braid in the bullfight', thus neutralising its
threat to the masculine bullfight by making it out of place.
It appealed both to those who wished to create a space for a
woman's body in a masculine bullfight and to the opponents
of women performers. Whatever its attraction, The
Bullfighter's Braid was popular and was implicated in how my
identity was constituted during fieldwork, as a
photographer. It was published locally in Cordoba, where I
lived, in the press and on television to advertise a
forthcoming Lecture, it won a regional journalistic
photography competition and I was interviewed on the radio
about my photography and my research. The Bullfighter's
Braid was part of my journey from student to 'expert', and
embodied my own ambiguous participation in local discourses
on gender and tradition. Through it I had started to produce
the very visual culture of the bullfight that I was
researching.
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