presentation of gender

As a painter, I am constantly questioning the right away to go about visually representing people.  Not only do I question what style to use (realism, abstraction, etc), but how color and application of paint can make suggestions about race, gender, and class.  I am currently working on paintings that attempt to address black and white as systems of color and value, as well as racial indicators with a history that dates back thousands of years.  Reading the Judith Butler essay has really helped me relate my thoughts about the theatre and presentation of race and gender as performances.  Not only have I been able to expand my vocabulary in sense of representing race, but I realize the inherent connections in representing gender as just another performance and how I can use these performative roles in dialogue with each other in my paintings.  Using painting as an alternative means to suggest that these roles are simply performed is the place that I have come to, but I still have questions about how to do it.  Keeping in mind what Oyewumi pointed out about Western societal expectations being arrived at primarily through vision begins to complicate my goal as a painter.  In a sense I am simply playing into our norms of perception by making two dimensional images.  But, then this goes back to Professor Hansen said about Butler, in that we cannot completely deconstruct those expectations, but we can disturb them.  We can create a temporary pause, a disruption; and I feel I have a good opportunity as a painter to do so.  So, now I just have to figure out how.  This is mostly just working through my own confusion, but perhaps there are some other thoughts on this dilemma.