“…the photograph is the advent of myself as other…”
Roland Barthes Camera Lucida
Wildfang.
Gender is fiction. Which is not to say it doesn’t have deep effects. It restricts our desires for those things we are drawn to without knowing why: often that which is prohibited, kept from us in an attempt to erase and control difference; all those cultural forms that speak to us across age, and gender, and sexuality. Forms that demonstrate the ways gender is constructed and imposed.
Many of us, through these desires and recognitions, resist. We cross lines; refuse the parody of gender that gender represents. And what we resist is both the aesthetic and its signification. This isn’t just swapping out one form for another, but a resistance to the opposition; to the power play. And we are either rewarded for our conformity or punished for our resistance.
The names we choose for ourselves – like tomboy – and how we inhabit those words become visible over time. The recognition of ourselves may not match our appearance: and the surface, the clothing, the style doesn’t really matter. What we resist is the imposition of codes and signs for gender and sexuality as they are constructed for us. Instead, we inhabit the ambiguity. We rework the visual language.
As young girls, even before adolescence, there is so much we are expected and unwilling to give up: freedom, strength, adventure. It is demanded of us that we instead submit to control, objectification, and a narrow and limited sexualisation.
And so, because we must, we refuse. We stay wild. We look you in the eye.
As mature women, that coltishness long passed, you can see written on our faces and inscribed in our bodies the experience of all that strength, freedom and all those adventures: it emanates from us and holds your gaze.
But it is a mistake to interpret the image, or the body, too quickly. To jump to a single reading, to limit meaning, is to fall into the trap that these tomboys – these images – resist.
Liz Bradshaw