I found this picture on Flickr and was fascinated. How does it make you feel to look at this? Can you stare at the bottom right one long enough to convince yourself you are looking at a man? Then look back to the top left. Staring at this picture offers a small way to help deconstruct our conceptions of gender.
June 6th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
I know women with facial hair, men with make up, you name it and I guess at a certain point you don’t think as much about gender in terms of black-white rigidity??
June 7th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
I can stare at the picture until I’m aware that all I’m looking at is a bunch of phosphorous cells being excited by an electron gun controlled by electric pulses from a microprocessor, doesn’t make it meaningful.
I can also repeat the phrase, “Visual deconstruction of gender binaries” until it sounds like a string of unconnected phonemes.
June 7th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Yes I saw the last picture as male immediately and realized that, that assumption is wrong. Even looking at the picture to try and determine gender is problematic as it turns the viewer into a gender voyeur and the person in the picture into an object rather than subject. We need to move beyond these gender binaries and come to recognize people as they choose to be identified. When we think in terms of male/female we encode the body with specific characteristics that are extremely limiting.
June 8th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Well, male and female are specific biological categories assigned based on fairly rigid criteria.
Man and woman, however, are social constructions. Not that there isn’t a likely correlation between hormone levels and certain dispositions, but all in all it is rather fluid.
June 9th, 2008 at 10:06 am
It’s almost like that scene in X-men when Cyclops is staring at things with his glasses off. It helps him deconstruct that train station, in a small way.