reflections on gender

In relation to gender in my work it is something that I reflect on a lot. My earlier fascinations with figures like the sphinx (or oracle) and the fairy represent my thoughts on femininity as an identity. I think of this as "feminine mystique," where the presentation of visual cues to femininity do not mean what are taught they mean.

I grew up thinking of the female form as the superior sex. There are many reasons I believed this: its cultural deification, its control over life, and the greater social acceptability of fluid gender presentation by female bodies. Women, when they are allowed to wear pants, adopt the traits of masculinity within themselves. Women who are generally more aware of emotions, see them, express them, de-escalate them. Womanhood possesses the powerful archetype of the capable spiritual and biological caretaker, a power that has been warped into a demoralizing task of servitude for all people born female.

In contrast with my high opinion of woman as a cultural archetype however, is my own experience as a person born female. In my own body I feel no obligation to perform. I feel no desire to meet the goals of womanly obligaton. I felt like I was born an alien into a world that wanted to paint me with a particular brush. This cognitivr dissonance forced me to reckon with the concept of propaganda as a mechanism of control, and to what end? I knew instrinsically that gender was a social construct foisted on me, a person who could have easily been born a man, feeling the same way I do now and with an entirely different set of gender burdens.

In the book and the film, the Neverending Story, the Southern Oracles are two sphinxes who face one another, creating a gate somewhere in a desolate sandy wasteland. They hold the answers to everything and Nothing. They have the upper body of a woman (denoted by their naked breasts) and the lower body of a lion. They have dramatic outstretched wings, frozen in place for ever. The oracles are the idea of gender that I aim to channel in my work. This idea of gender trancendence within the framework of your own body. The deification of the all-knowing potential of the human soul, stuck in a temporary corporeal form.

None of my work and its signs and symbols which would traditionally denote femininity, masculinity, religiosity, innocence, etc, are meant to represent these ideas in seriousness or sincerity. Identities are entirely up to the individual to decide. I cannot suggest that the social shorthand for what these symbols mean doesn't exist, but I can say that they don't matter. The meaninf of a cultural symbol may be agreed upon en masse for a time, but they frequently change, and I would like them as denotations of gender in particular to be unpredictable.