Tag: pink

Done in november.

This drawing is my own reminder that the fight against prejudice is an inner fight, before anything else.

I’m really into drawing skulls. I really like them. I collect them, I think they are beautiful, sometimes funny, sometimes creepy. Well. They are good art materials. Moreover, they don’t have sex nor gender. They appear to be just bones. Free to be whatever you want (or not), what you see them as. Dead human beings they are ; the core of a human being. No sex, no gender, those are just shallow. Well, you can sure figure out something about its bio sex if you’re into medicine/anthropology/archeology – I’m not — and knows how to recognize a skeleton from another — I don’t.

So I drew this — reality is the only limit — as a kind of geeky/black & pink joke for friends (if you’re a little geek, incidentally, or if you’re just a big Star wars fan, you may have recognized the two suns of Tatooine!). I drew a person in flesh and bones, who looks like what people commonly call a girl, a woman, a wom!N, etc., together with a skull wearing pink shoes. In addition to that, I drew elements that I find empowering: horns, which are amongst the best magical defensive devices coming from your body (aren’t they?), and Doc Martens, which are, in my opinion, the best shoes ever. Both are empowering, because they allow to struggle against the world’s inertia while knowing the only limit to one’s fight is reality. Or death. Fighting for what you believe in, without censoring youself.

Then, here was I thinking: well, “you _could_ think that SHE is caring for a late friend” — understand, BOY friend. Then came: “Uh? BOY? I _don’t_ know if it’s a BOY, a GUY, a GIRL, a BOI, TRANS or whatever. What I know, is that it was a human being. I realized that after a great deal of effort, while everyday is made of social deconstruction to consider, live, create or build in a different way than the normative one, than the flock path, than the blinkered attitude… I realized I was still, sometimes, even for a few seconds, deeply marked by conventions and socialization.

I get the gender issue. I suffer from those social conventions when friends look at me oddly because my legs or armpits aren’t shaved. They ask me how I’ll breast-feed my kids ’cause my nipples are pierced. For as a bio girl, I’m expected to be pretty, you know, (I think manicured, nice and caring would be a must), and ready for the father of my future kid. Or not! Those are just stupid and daily examples. Being what people commonly call a woman, I suffer from the little boxes that parents, school, society, and the state have put me in since I was a little child. Not just as a kid, for this goes on all life long. Sometimes, I do feel like a girl. Sometimes, I feel like a boy. Sometimes I feel gay, hetero, or lesbian… But most of the time, I’d rather not care about the box I can fit in. Identity — both mine and others — cannot fit in pigeonholes such as those categories : “woman”, or “man”. I believe that one of the main divisions that lie between us is about people trying to break free from many norms, in many different ways, and people keeping their own chains, enforcing others’ in the process. The dominant class, the dominant sex, dominants in general may lock themselves into gendered patterns and habitus they feel obliged to apply, and suffer from it as a result. However, this violence is incomparable to what the “dominated” go through. This is not Charybdis and Scylla, the rock and the hard place, the devil and the deep blue sea.

However that may be, I found myself a bit ashamed, facing my own mind steeped in prejudice. ‘Cause in spite of everything, after all the deconstruction efforts I’ve been carrying, my own stuborn mind remains dipped in heterosexism! For a second or two, I did see those two “persons” together — one looking like a girl, the other being a skeleton — as an archetype of heterosexual pairing. I saw male and female, where there was just flesh and bones, really. It makes me feel how hard it is to leave every bit of our heterosexist education behind. After all, it’s been carefully crafted by religion, backed by science even (when it came to demonstrate the alleged complementarity of both sexes) and enforced by the state. No wonder male domination and patriarchy are so strong, not to forget the myths of heteronormality.

So yes, this drawing is a reminder. It reminds me that I have to constantly struggle with my own prejudice, and that the inner fight (let alone the social and political fight!) isn’t quite close to coming to an end.

(thanks V!)