I photograph self-identified women, examining a category that, in reality, is not one. Instead, Wo/men is an ironic typology, one that undermines the very classification it purports to analyze. The common presumption, accepted by most implicitly, is that there is some set of shared criteria that neatly carves out a category of people classifiable as women. This belief often goes unquestioned by those who hold it. By accepting the same belief at face value as a photographic method, I draw out the contradictions and inconsistencies that make it untenable.
Taken together, my portraits reveal the fluidity and variation of gender, throwing into question the assumption that any one of us can say what makes one a woman or not. My work forms a record of gender identity as a performative that exists along a continuum, without definitive boundaries. As such, it substantiates a paradox: namely, that the category “women,” and by extension "men," needs to be abandoned altogether.
Taken together, my portraits reveal the fluidity and variation of gender, throwing into question the assumption that any one of us can say what makes one a woman or not. My work forms a record of gender identity as a performative that exists along a continuum, without definitive boundaries. As such, it substantiates a paradox: namely, that the category “women,” and by extension "men," needs to be abandoned altogether.