Beyond The Binary

About

‘In what senses, then, is gender an act? As in other ritual social dramas, the action of gender requires a performance that is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established…’ Butler 1990: 191

To explore social and political concerns regarding gender identity and the idea of gender as inherently performic. To transgress from the prescribed patriarchal femininity and masculinity and challenge societal gender norms; to be liberated from the narrow framework of patriarchal governance and free our thinking from the confines of binarism and categorisation. Judith Butler describes the reality of gender as, ‘created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex, a true or abiding masculinity or femininity, are also constituted as part of the strategy by which the performative aspect of gender is concealed’ Butler 1988: 528. The idea that the body can be acted upon and coerced by external forces must be disrupted to reframe the body as active and autonomous. ‘In so far as the male/female dichotomy has become the prototype of western individualism, the process of decolonising the subject from this dualistic grip requires as its starting point the dissolution of all sexed identities based on the gendered opposition.’ Braidotti 2003: 50. My body as alienated, as belonging to the other. ‘If the body is not a “being”, but a variable boundary, a surface whose permeability is politically regulated, a signifying practice within a cultural field of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality, then what language is left for understanding this corporeal enactment, gender, that constitutes its “interior” signification on its surface?’ Butler 1990: 189. How can a failure to repeat these social performances expose and reveal gender identity as a fragile construction? How can the repeated acts of masculinity and femininity be disrupted to reveal the artifice within those actions? By what methods is a non-dichotomous understanding of the body possible?

Featured artists - Gabrielle Brooks, Silvia Marcantoni Taddei/Massimo Sannelli (AnimaeNoctis), Lilian Robl and Eleanor Sanghara.