Jeremy Deller's So Many Ways to Hurt You at Masculinities

So Many Ways to Hurt You charts the flamboyant life and times of the wrestler ‘Exotic’ Adrian Street, who was born in 1940 to a Welsh mining family in Brynmawr. Through Jeremy Deller’s (b. 1966, UK) candid film, Street’s persona, which seamlessly blends the hyper-camp attributes of post-war pop culture with the hard-edged attitude of his working-class background, shines through, revealing his unique capacity to disrupt gender and class stereotypes. Not only does Street’s story mirror the austerity of post-war Britain – tracing the demise of heavy industry and the rise of the service and entertainment industries – but, perhaps more significantly, the film reflects on the performativity of gender, highlighting its unfixed nature as Street moves surefootedly between his various identities: at once the muscled man, the cross-dresser and the working man.

Mural designed and produced by Imelda Cox

What does it mean to be a man today? The Barbican's Masculinities: Liberation through Photography considers how masculinity has been coded, performed, and socially constructed from the 1960s to the present day.