Blurring the gender line: When the frock just won't fit
By LaJohn Joseph
Monday, 20 February 2012 at 12:00 am
http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/02/20/blurring-the-gender-line-when-the-frock-just-won%E2%80%99t-fit/Blurring the gender line: When the frock just won't fit The idea that we should have but two options when it comes to our gender presentation, male or female, has always felt ludicrous to me. We are told from a young age what is appropriate to say, wear, think and act out, depending on the physical mapping of the tissues which flesh out our underwear. We are told that the road is forked and, if we choose not to follow the path we were spat out onto, the only possible alternative to our pre-assigned gender is radical surgery which realigns our bodies wholesale so that they fit the opposing prefabricated mould. It seems to me to be a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea.
Gender is a performance, a role we can play any way we chose, so it stands to reason that new genders are often fashioned in a theatrical context, test driven in the spotlight. But sometime the frock just won't fit. Sometimes the body beneath will not meet its obligations to play the part it has been assigned, or its apparent opposite. This refusal to pick a side of the fence, this rejection of the either/or mentality which plagues human thought is the third gender, and it has a long history in performance.
