Just Another Gender Theory

Description

We used to think about gender as a double reality, male from a side, female by the other.

Just before born, through clinic exams they determined our sex. We are classified as male or female.
At the same time they give us some specific and definite roles aspectatives.

The term “sex”, from latin sexum that mean divided/separated, in it original meaning counts, in a clear way, as a common sense of distinction, as a double trait: male from a side, female by the other.

Otherwise a lot of scientific studies shows as the gender is a continuum, something fluid with copious variants and without a strong distinction between masculine and feminine.

Cromosomic sex and phenotype sex can defer in many ways, in the 1% of the births.

But there are also people who feel that their biological gender cannot describe them, neither fully nor basically. There are people who cannot identify themselves with the typical hetero-normal condition of our society. They refuse rigid gender categorizations, because these
cannot properly express the multifaceted nature of human identity.

There are people who claim the right to self-determine their bodies and their desires.

My project goes out from these people with the aim to develop a discussion on the matter of gender, to start a reflection on how the concepts of masculine and feminine have been and are being created and how these consequently lead to power relations based on gender.

An analysis of gender identity in both its non-correspondence with biological sex and the resulting roles that society “prescribes”, referring not to a dichotomous reality, but far more to a fluid one, to a continuum of possible identities at whose extremes the concepts of “male” and “female” can be found.

The gender fluidity is been in some ways formalized by Facebook also through 58 possible options of gender in the dedicated section of personal web profile.

Otherwise our brain and society, that used to divided reality in parts and reorganized that into categories, had difficulties to accepts the ideas of gender as a continuum, as a fluid reality.

We think and we act by categories. And the dichotomous gender is one of the stronger categories.

Romanelli’s back cover, emblematically, shows the Necker’s cube modified by Carter in 1996 in “The Angel’s Dictionary” to link the way as the brain and the society think about gender.

This graphic sign symbolized the possibilities to see the gender as a fluid reality into a world that is set to see each person  only as one of the possible binary option. That invite to make discussion of what we see, or about what we are convinced to see, to catch the real imagine of what is in front of us.

The project deal about my thought of the theme of gender, radicate symbols, memories, dreams, cultural and religious references. The pictures and the texts became a sort of interior voice that, through her past, her culture, compare herself to the stories and the theme deepened between the contact and clash points.

In particularly I’ve ask to myself if the dual separation between blue and pink, as we used to be educated from our early days, can helps children (that are going to be adult) into relationships and in the respect of the genders, to understand, to appreciate the differences that exist between people, the shades that can not be forced in to strict opposed categories.