“Cloths and Gender Expression”

  • Project title

Cloths and Gender Expression

  • Project Description

Gender identity is “a person’s perception of having a particular gender, which may or may not correspond with their birth sex.”

Gender expression is “the way in which a person expresses their gender identity, typically through their appearance, dress, and behavior.”

My artwork is how people express their gender by wearing cloth.

There is a story behind this artwork. I didn’t have a clear gender cognition in my high school and middle school. This is because, in China, our school uniforms are too loose to show our personal identity. People even couldn’t realize whether the student is a girl or boy. That situation happened to me. When I was in high school, I was hugging a girl in the classroom. A teacher came and she patted my shoulder, then I looked back at her. “Oops!” she said, “I thought you are a boy because of your short hair!” Why she distinguished my gender by using my hairstyle? This is because students all wearing the same cloth in the school. At that time, I was confused that should I be a girl? Then, I realized the importance of allowing students to wear different clothes because this can help students to define their gender and to answer the question “who am I?”. 

I think that cloth is a good way to show one’s gender identity, and it could show who they are. I want to use photos to document that. I want to talk about people’s identities without communicating with them. Also, I don’t want audiences to focus on their faces or background in the photos.

  • Outcomes

First of all, my object will be strange people’s cloth, because I don’t want to know their identity by using other methods such as communicate with them. So, the best way is taking the photo of people on the street. I will use one day to take photos of people who walked around me.

Secondly, my artwork is about “people’s gender expression”, so I should take a lot of photos(at least 50 photos) to eliminate exceptional cases. 

After I finish to take all the photos, I’m going to use Photoshop to categorize them together. For the first time, I decided to categorize the photos by characters’ gender. Then I changed my maid because I don’t want to classify the gender for the audiences. So, I categorize photos by color: Black, Red, Light, and Color.

  • Methods and Materials

My camera is Sony α6000. 

My photographs are 3:2, then I cut it to different sizes which just included the people’s cloth.

I put my photos into Photoshop to edit it, and the final product is going to be 8×12”.

  • References

My project is about the outdoor portrait, and it’s about culture documenting. I’m interested in identity. When people mention “IDENTITY”, the first thing comes to my mind is clothes. However, is the cloth has the biggest influence of one’s identity? My aim is answering this question. I’m going to go to New York City to take the photo to a lot of radome people. The photos will not include their hade and just show their bodies. I’ll use SONY α6000 to take all the photos. Then I may use Photoshop to edit it.

First artist Claude Cahun: https://you.stonybrook.edu/jingzhu/2019/11/20/artist-1-claude-cahun/

Second artist Yayoi Kusama: https://you.stonybrook.edu/jingzhu/2019/11/25/artist-2-yayoi-kusama/

Third artist Cindy Sherman: https://you.stonybrook.edu/jingzhu/2019/11/25/artist-3-cindy-sherman/

One photographer Bill Cunningham: https://you.stonybrook.edu/jingzhu/2019/12/02/photographer-bill-cunningham/