#intersectional identity

At the end of this road I realised that I'm happy to reject the gender binary as a whole. Suddenly, I felt comfortable and happy doing my make-up, for the first time in my life. Because when I do it now I'm not performing femininity - I'm just putting colours on my face, making myself look the way I want and it makes me happy.

Suddenly I realised that the rush I felt whenever I put on my boots, on a heel tiny enough so that it wouldn't fuck up my spine any further, but big enough for me to deem them high heels, that rush didn't have anything to do with femininity - wearing boots just makes me feel powerful in general, that's all.

I realised that I can use certain markings of femininity and mould them to my identity, and it won't make me a woman any more than I feel like one. Which, I don't. I simply don't. But now, whether you'd think it to be a paradox or not, now that I have fully embraced my nonbinary identity, I feel more comfortable than ever picking up pieces from either point of the gender spectrum, and mixing and matching as I see fit.

All that is to say, I had to move a mountain to get where I am right now with my identity. Not only did I have to combat my internalised ableism, but my internalised transphobia as well. Living in a society that doesn't see people like me, no matter which part of my identity we're talking about, I had to do an incredible amount of work to get where I am with the acceptance of my identity. And I didn't have anyone to inspire me. Nobody who looks like me and fully understands my struggles, at least. I had to do all of it on my own.

Understanding Kamala Harris: A Complex Background During Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention this past summer in Chicago, she aimed to present herself in a manner that resonated with the everyday American. “The middle class is where I come from,” she stated emphatically, repeating the phrase “middle class” eight additional times, as if to firmly anchor her…

Free People is targeting a limited audience.  The company focuses on wealthy white females in their early 20’s that are tall and skinny.  The front page gives an illusion that it aims to attract an assortment of races but the clothing section, ranging in price from $1,420 to $30.00, is exclusively white women with a few light skinned non-Caucasian models to represent racial diversity.

The lead page of freepeople.com advertises what they call FP Movement.  A video ad illustrates young women waking up at the crack of dawn, 4:59 to be exact, to exercise prior to meeting for breakfast.  The ad is exemplifies FP ideal woman as being young, fit, motivated, and ambitious.  The camera lingers on all the girls’ abdomens revealing their flat stomachs.  The ad ends by showing the women congregating around a table.  Two are white with blonde hair, one is white with brunette hair and the other is black. 

  There is little to no evidence of intersectional identity.  Free Peoples bohemian style is the only thing that gives the women any unique variety but such a concept lacks in luster compared to the overwhelming displacement of such a single focused audience. 

Even more ironic is the company’s strict adherence to the bohemian style.  Wikipedia, a source that is pseudo peer reviewed, defines Bohemian as “unconventional, usually artistic”.   The Sunday Times Style quotes on June 19 2005 that Bohemian girls are “sexy and delightful precisely because they do not give a whoot for fashion”, an interesting paradox that Free People, a business that sells bohemian fashion to young women, emulates. 

from Gail Bederman's "Remaking Manhood":

a set of ideas and practices, which, taken together, organize both the way a society defines certain traits about itself and the way it deploys social power (24)