Dissecting Image and Gender: The deceptive curation of identity through false visual realities

By: Anonymous

Evidence as a source of validity

At the very beginning of my gender interrogation, sometime in September 2019, I subconsciously shaped this journey as a quest to find evidence, to reach a conclusion, to come about a sense of decisiveness and absolute truth. This need to tangibly validate myself regarding something so intangible and slippery from grasp likely emerged from the heteronormative, analytical culture we live in that rejects fluidity and embraces rigidity and finality. Additionally,  at this point in time I was simply ill-equipped, without even a general understanding of the nuances of gender. I was not at all aware of the differences between gender expression (one’s behavior, mannerisms, interests, and appearance that society associates with gender in a particular cultural context, relying on stereotypes of gender) and gender identity (one’s innermost sense, conception, experience of their gender), and that the two do not necessarily have to correlate. Because I was so confused, I was led to believe that finding “evidence” in my gender expression and others’ perception of my gender would signal whether what I was feeling inside was even valid. As such, I immediately turned to the image I held of myself that I had curated over years — made up of photographs, mirror images, and my presumptions of how I appeared in the world. 

I concluded that my overwhelmingly normative, feminine presentation in the majority of my photographs must indicate that I appear female, which means others perceive me as female, and as such, I must be female. I believed that if photographs of myself did not represent androgyny or any indication of any other gender identity — if they did not capture my internal ruminations nor provide any evidence of their existence — then that which cannot be captured must not be real. The ethos of the camera as an objective tool and my subscription to the idea that photographs accurately depict reality ultimately derailed me from further becoming aware of my truth for one year.

One whole year from that starting point, I finally (for some reason that I am unaware of) began seeking out affirming resources. Just scrolling through r/nonbinary on Reddit (lol) brought me to tears. Something so simple as reading, “Your non-binary identity is valid whether or not you’re androgynous,” and internalizing the fact that a person’s gender identity is not based on their gender expression or external perceptions, but how they internally understand and see themselves, was so validating. These important affirmations pushed me to allow myself to question myself and critically analyze my relationship with gender.

The politics of photography and “evidence”

While grounding my experience and learning more about the complexities of gender and the process of questioning, I realized that my earlier, strongly-held assumption of how I appear and how others perceive was completely unreliable. The image of myself that I collected through photos heavily contributed to the assumption that I must appear female. Yet, while relying on photography, I did not acknowledge the way in which photographs are charged with politics, greatly influenced by heteronormative culture, and therefore create false realities that are not representative of the truth, specifically regarding the politics of representation. 

Representation, as Stuart Hall (a British-born Jamaican cultural theorist) writes, refers to the organization and categorization of concepts in order to understand the relationships between them.¹ The power dynamics involved in representation become apparent when examining who holds the power to organize and categorize, who is subject to being organized and categorized, and what the relationship between the photographer and the subject is. Upon realizing how these politics of representation often materializes into the issues of stereotyping and marginalization, I began analyzing how I have been represented in photographs. Rather than believing I must be a woman because the photographic evidence apparently says so, I questioned why the majority of photographs of myself portray me in an effeminate manner. Upon learning that photographs are not only signifiers of the subjects, but the broader culture as well, I began realizing the way in which “images circulating in a particular culture mold and set limits on how each of us see ourselves and others.” Almost unknowingly, the effect of the issue of politics in representation greatly affected my understanding of self.

Self-image via photography

As I began to unravel my fabricated image and realize that it was amiss and misconstrued, I realized that the discrepancy between how I appeared in photos and how I felt inwards was due to the fact that the curation of my self-image was heavily influenced by societal factors, as I only accepted photos that fit into gender norms and dismissed those that did not. Upon reflection, I realized that in most photos of myself that have been taken by others, I am dressed up and expressing stereotypical femininity. 

When it would come to taking photos of myself by myself, I recalled that when I would take a photo and realize that I did not appear feminine or good-looking (and I had begun to view those terms synonymously), I would immediately shun the camera lens from viewing myself in that form and delete the selfie. This indicates that, as a result of the influence of rigid societal structures and insecurities, I have shunned expressions of gender nonconformity. I often dress androgynously and/or appear gender nonconforming, yet tend to omit that from my memory due to the rejection of non-femininity; by only photographing and valuing images of myself when I aligned with gender norms, I have contributed to a lack of representation of my full self. As a result of my neglect of the diverse forms of my appearance and expressions, I never remember non-feminine images nor register them as evidence of myself. This neglect stems from the fear of seeing a version of my true self represented in concrete visualizations, and therefore validated and actualized. Ultimately, I subconsciously led myself to curate my self-image as obedient to hegemonic gender norms in order to protect who I thought I was supposed to be and the sense of security that accompanied it.

Mirrors and false realities

Upon digging deeper to analyze what led me to almost imperceptibly curate my image of self as deceptive to my truth, I found I was driven by the desire to hold onto the ideal self that I was always told to be and felt an obligation to work towards becoming even when it was no longer applicable. In his theory of the “mirror stage,” Jacques Lacan argues that when people are as young as two years old, they recognize themselves in a literal or symbolic mirror, which in turn creates a mental conceptualization of an ideal “I” that people thereafter strive towards throughout their lives. Additionally, Lacan describes the mirror stage as not only a point of identification and recognition of ourselves, but “a transformation that takes place in the subject when [they] assume an image.” All throughout my life, both society and my parents have served as figurative mirrors upon which they projected their dreams and expectations of me. These heteronormative standards, such as being told I was to become a woman before I was even born, have deceivingly driven my identity construction and shaped what I believed I ought to become for the past 20 years. 

As a result of these influences, I was led to curate my (false) self-image as one that was inextricably tied to womanhood. I recall searching for a woman in my reflection in the mirror and always striving to reach her. I clearly remember many periods of insecurity, notably in middle school, where I constantly worried that I looked nothing like a female, with my thick mustache and hairy body, which only further intensified my desire to do what I could to look the part and convince myself that I could become a woman who would be accepted in society. Whether I knew all along or not that that is not who I am after all, the societal pressures that once forced me to exert so much pain and energy into assimilating were the same forces that completely sabotaged my initial efforts to validate the realization of my authentic identity. A large part of me that had worked so hard to curate, perhaps even falsify, my self-image as a woman was attempting to obey the ideal “I” that I once saw in the mirror, and I became convinced that it was my responsibility to one day achieve that. 

The act of questioning my gender threatened this foundation of my self-image. I became so scared to let go of what I had been conditioned to believe was familiar that I did not even think about the possibility of life beyond the mirrors. Once I put more faith in liberation than comfort and allowed for the inevitable shattering, I realized that my true self, my true image had always been there, just waiting for me to see them.

References

1. Wells, Liz. “Image and Identity: Introduction.” The Photography Reader. 2003. 376-379.

2. Martin, Rosy, Spence, Jo. “Photo-therapy: Psychic realism as a healing art?” The Photography Reader. 402-409.

3. Johnston, Adrian, "Jacques Lacan", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/lacan/

4. Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. 1990.