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I was right in the middle of it all, and very serious about trying to figure out how to work through those ideas intellectually and emotionally. It was an important time in the US and Europe with regards to changing ideas around representation and identity politics. Laura Mulvey’s Visual and Other Pleasures had just been published, and everyone was talking about it. It was an interesting period when I took this photograph. Hopefully, my images are not like sledgehammers, but allow the viewer to get close to the subject and then find for themselves deeper and more complex meanings. It is both highly composed, but also comes across as documentary. There is a wonderful tension between the real and the fabricated moment in this image. There was something very important about using my own skin and body to work through these difficult issues around notions of family, monogamy, relationships, blackness, and how it could all be negotiated within a political and social context. I only came to understand later that I could be a kind of an interlocutor between the self, the constructed self, and the audience. I wasn’t interested in the act of performing before I made this series, I just thought of myself as the most convenient subject. Untitled (Eating Lobster), 1990, by Carrie Mae Weems Photograph: PR