Christian

Chunk.ie: Women can dress in men’s clothes and no one bats an eye, but a man in women’s clothing is still a taboo for a lot of people, why is that? Ivan Fahy: This is the perfect question for me. It’s because of gender. Gender conformity and the gender binary. A man must not transgress the gender binary. His gender expression, appearance and identity must all fit perfectly with his penis, basically. He must always be normatively and conformitively male. The intro to Madonna’s song ”What It Feels Like For A Girl” answers this question perfectly; ”Girls can wear jeans and cut their hair short, wear shirts and boots, because it’s okay to be a boy, but for a boy to look like a girl is degrading because you think that being a girl is degrading.” A man, being born male, has won the gender lotto. He is male, he has superiority and privilege. Why then should he bring difficulties upon himself and reject his privilege by acting/ dressing as female? It’s okay for women to dress like men because men are the standard, the successful gender to be modeled and strived for, apparently. What we forget is that gender is the most liberating and suffocating construct in the world. It can be used as a tool of oppression and shame or as a tool to enable creativity and individuality. All humans possess masculinity and femininity, but depending on your genitalia, you must suppress one and exaggerate the other. I refuse to. I accept and express the masculinity and femininity within myself. I will not glamourise one and shame the other. Both are natural. I am them, they are me. This acceptance is radical. It is revolutionary. It scares people, like a man in a dress would. Gender shouldn’t scare people, for it doesn’t even exist. If a man is in a dress, it is not an item of women’s clothing, it is simply an item of clothing he is wearing, it is his item of clothing. He bought the dress, the dress is his. Though certain items of clothing may be associated with a certain gender, it does not mean that that item of clothing belongs exclusively to that gender. Let’s remove labels from clothes and people. Clothes are clothes. People are people. Free gender! Read the full interview here: http://chunk.ie/article/19846/alt-model/androgyny-as-art/

Model: Ivan Fahy