“I was sort of thrilled by it” – Kim Hunter in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).

Shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2010, Submission sees Fowler combine images selected from The Son of the Sheik (1926), Gone With The Wind (1939) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), three films known for their iconic and dominant leading men. Here, however, Fowler chooses to depict the films’ female leads — each at particular moments of submission that are steeped in an atmosphere of sexual violence. Although menaced with the threat of violation, all three women appear to take pleasure in these moments, so that intimidation gives body to a strange and fraught brand of intimacy. In this sense, Submission radiates the mixture of gender stereotype and violence that prevailed in Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Fowler’s vignette portraits are labelled not with the actresses’ own names, but those of their male co-stars. Smudging the women’s typecast identities into the men’s macho limelight, the tactic alludes to Hollywood’s patriarchy in another way, too: only the briefest of tags are necessary for the male stars, each of whom remain stars known by their public on first-name terms. In this way, Fowler’s interrogation of institutional misogyny extends to the audience’s own participation, raising the question of cinema-goers’ own submission to these male actors’ promiscuous personae. Questioning how far female submission is a primitive fantasy in which women themselves have been complicit, Fowler’s work tugs at Hollywood’s delicate ideological knots, asking if we too are coerced by the filmmakers’ casting of these iconic males into excusing the inexcusable.