Three Identities

In conversation with Dennis, we talked about identities. Where I assumed there are two, Dennis and Deedee, there is actually a third: the abnormality.

Deedee experiences that some people feel they can (sexually) harass her because ‘she asks for it’ or because they consider her as ‘not being real’ based on the binary gender norms: think about things as fetishism or other offensive ideas. And this third identity fascinates me. It’s about how a certain group of people see her, but not what the camera will capture, how I see her or how she looks at herself.

When reading ‘Gender Trouble’ written by Judith Butler, the drag was mentioned as an example of an identity not considered to be real in the normative binary gender definitions. These definitions state that you can only be man or woman and therefore a drag is seen as not real (“a man in a dress”), as an object that cannot be hurt because it’s fake. We should turn it around, and see drag as the perfect example that shows that there is so much more to be than only two options.

2022