I position my work at the intersections of identity and form. More specifically, I’m interested in how and why an individual’s physical appearance and demeanor become communicative and are then interpreted. Socially, it seems that we still often operate in ways that honor categorical distinctions between people, meaning for instance, that a man is something and a woman is something different from a man. Well, what if a woman can become a man or be read as a man simply by a change of clothes or through the addition of simple hormone injections? If this is possible, what does it mean for the terms that were previously understood to be fairly stable? Why does my body mean something or have to mean something, and if it doesn’t have meaning, what is it that it conveys? I live in a body that has shifted from something that was labeled female at birth to something that is now read as male. This adjustment has radically undermined my relationship to the blunt categorical expectations that partition the social face of our psychic lives. I’m unconvinced that the interpretation of my self is generally concurrent with the interpretation of my form. Too often, I believe the latter restricts the potential of the former. This is particularly evident in my unique position as a practically unreadable gender. My physical cues point to a familiar position within the gender binary that I don’t identify with. This limits my ability to engage with even members of my own queer community without resorting to the act of disclosure. I’m also curious about the flip side of this problem when, upon disclosure, the binary’s seam opens to be revealed as faceted, possessing multiple, unnamable spaces that reflect uncertainty back into the ideas of man and woman and render gender into a flexible field of characteristics that individuals use for many things, as opposed to simply inhabit. My work addresses this potential break between font and legibility, gesture and etiquette, the familiar and the possible. My portrait of the body and gender is incidental not substantive. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/ETD-UT-2012-05-5521 |
| Date | 29 November 2012 |
| Creators | Maddux, Kathryn Marie |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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