Someone said it’s just sex
Package of the year
Despite the fact that the lines of defence of feminism harshly criticize the discipline of gender and its discrimination and that transgender people are public victims of the above on a daily basis in such an intense way, feminism and trans liberation have often been considered opposite movements.
Nowadays, recent feminist movements have diversified by reasons of gender understood as something culturally specific. Different feminist movements worldwide have acknowledged that the concern of Western feminism is not always a global one because it’s focused on the rights of a white middle class cis women instead of being focused on the most discriminated groups within feminism.
Every feminist wave has had its own debate. Currently, prostitution, surrogacy and the inclusion of transgender women are the backbone of the debate. Although most of the feminist movement acknowledges all women as participants, there is a segment known as Radical Feminists (colloquially TERFs, Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) who argues transsexual women cannot truly identify as such due to their male upbringing’s inherent privileges. The debate of transgender women in feminism is not new, but with the use of internet and specifically, social media, the discrimination and violence has become more visible and the topic has risen to a new level of impact increasing the number of voices that share hate speech against trans people.
This project will be guided by feminist theories such as “Xenofeminism” from Helen Hester, “Is gender Fluid?” from Sally Hines or “Un apartamento en Urano” and “Testo Yonqui” from Preciado among others, and the vandalisation of statues as a public statement in reference to the Black Live Matters protests as a consequence of colonialism and its oppressions that lead not only to a hierarchy of race, but also of gender, silencing other ways of understanding gender and sexuality.
Statues in public spaces are considered symbols that represent different values depending on those who erected them, i.e. white, hetero, cis and male individuals with the only purpose of perpetuate their hegemony. Not only colonialism represents race oppression, but also creates an established organization of gender, whipping off any other way of understanding gender within society out of binarism.
After studying the vandalisation of statues within the BLM movement, I created a digital statue for this project, a statue that represents the oppression within feminism towards trans women and the goal is to destroy it on the final stage. This destruction constitutes a metaphor of breaking with the inherited colonialist oppressions of gender within the system.
While for the BLM movement these statues represent the white oppression towards the black community, my statue represents the TERF oppression towards trans women.
Using the digital sculpture and the video as a medium, I aim to raise a question in the viewer’s mind about our inherited believes, using the sculpture as a political statement and its destruction as a break with that historical oppression.
In “Someone Said it’s just Sex” I aim to generate and spread the thinking of inclusive feminism and challenge the perspective about feminism for current and next generations, supporting trans issues as a part of feminism and creating a more equal movement within itself. I believe cis feminists have a responsibility within the movement to consider trans issues in light of these social realities, which hit particularly hard for those who live along their fault lines.
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