This piece was inspired by a combination of bodily feeling and the philosophy in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990).
In this text, she seeks to demonstrate multiple ideas related to gender. The ones that grabbed my attention the most were ones that espoused the idea that gender is just a set of repeated behaviors in an attempt to approximate oneself to a socially constructed category. However, these behaviors cannot be performed perfectly at all times, and “in their occasional discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this “ground”.”
I hopped into the shower today after a round of ‘divine feminine’ yoga (the whole time thinking, yep, I am definitely not a woman, this is ridiculous, I could not picture the ‘pink swirling energy orb’ that was meant to come out of my womb at the pinnacle of the Youtube video, is it even worth telling people how crazy this is, is everyone too far gone) and put on ‘what makes you beautiful’ by One Direction.
I imagined what this specific moment would look like and feel like, what sensation would replace that of gendered feeling, the moment where one loses the social category and ‘point’ of performance and just is. I wanted to depict this visually. There is a sense that this moment is joyful, liberating, even. Butler states that “the loss of the sense of ‘the normal’, however, can be its own occasion for laughter, especially when ‘the normal’, ‘the original’ is revealed to be a copy, and an inevitably failed one, an ideal that no one can embody. In this sense, laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived.”
Taking the perspective that all along, the categories that never seemed to be a perfect fit aren’t a perfect fit for anybody at all (because they were kind of arbitrarily determined by economics & marketing & other such flawed manmade constructions), makes it a lot easier to express yourself as you really would like to be.
What a phenomenal shower. I turned the lights off at the end, song bouncing off the walls, flipping this way and that, letting the sensory experience engulf me, then pour life back into me in streaming dizzyingly dazzling amounts. YOU ARE HUMAN. YOU ARE HUMAN. YOU ARE HUMAN!!!
My takeaway, and reestablished re-patterned experience of gender identity morphed into something of curious joy, what lies beyond the binary is foreign, bizarre, and full of excitement, in the words of Butler yet again, “Genders can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived. As credible bearers of those attributes, however, genders can also be rendered thoroughly and radically incredible.”
