exposing my gender troubles
In my short film I hope to highlight that my gender is a construction. By showing the transformations, which I have gone through in my life so far, and the female gender identity construction placed on me, I hope to do this. Although Judith Butler’s views on performativity and gender construction are complex I have taken what she says in Gender Trouble as a partial explanation of what I am doing in my film. In the introduction to Gender Trouble she argues that, “gender is performative: no identity exists behind the acts that supposedly "express" gender, and these acts constitute—rather than express—the illusion of the stable gender identity. Furthermore, if the appearance of “being� a gender is thus an effect of culturally influenced acts, then there exists no solid, universal gender: constituted through the practice of performance, the gender "woman" (like the gender "man") remains contingent and open to interpretation and "resignification."
By showing the preparation of myself in different ways, I highlight the reality of how indoctrinated stereotypes and binaries of gender have been for me. Through visual transformation of myself and the exposure of constructing visual cues, which in hegemonic society identify bodies in a binary male or female manner, I break down the boundaries placed on me and show my individual examination of binary gender views.
Using digital storytelling I turn the camera on myself and address face on the way in which I perform and re-construct my gender. Nick Couldry argues that digital storytelling, “provides the means to distribute more widely the capacity to tell important stories about oneself – to represent oneself as a social, and therefore potentially political, agent – in a way that is registered in the public domain� (386). This is what I have tried to do.