COMBINE 2012: Annual Undergraduate Student Exhibition

Throwing Like a Girl is a powerful exploration and deconstruction of the various acts of self-identified “females” and gender embodiment. Each female participant narrates and performs a personal experience that has transformed her understanding of her gendered identity.

Inspired by Iris Marion Young’s essay “Throwing Like a Girl” and the aesthetics of tableaux vivants, each vignette is minimally sculpted and costumed while a female silently repeats a small gesture with her body. A voiceover narrates the event(s) during which the individual’s gendered-self was awakened as others reacted to their behaviours and bodies. Each female is contained within her respective vignette by the lens of the camera, similarly to how gender can be experienced as a frame in which to fit.

Voiceovers were recorded separately from the video and added over the visuals. These are reminders that gender is defined as a social construction, reflecting Judith Butler’s theory of gender as a performance that can be deconstructed into various acts such as speech, dress and behaviour.¹ In one vignette, a female narrates being raised in a conservative and religious family where expectations of her gender were defined by her family and church. Her internal desires conflicted with the societal and religious expectations of a “female.” She plays the piano and frequently glances at the viewer while her voice describes the role of a good wife: to be proper, beautiful, quiet, domestic and passive. This led her to a deep depression, as she was not comfortable in performing this traditional female role and those around her became disappointed in her inability to perform. It was not until she explored a broader definition of being “female” and embodied it that she became more comfortable with herself.

In another vignette, a self-identified female explains her interpretation of constructing and deconstructing gender expectations as she narrates a story of cutting her blond hair as a child. Creating her own reality has empowered her. Gender as a constructed performance is a repetitive act through dress and behaviour just as this female repeatedly braids her now long, red hair.

This series is projected on a wall, like oversized pages in a storybook broadening the intimate nature of personal experiences and understandings of gender identities to various universal “female” archetypes and themes. Body policing, beauty standards, institutional expectations, objectification, domesticity and passivity are discovered, performed, defied and transformed by Throwing Like a Girl.