Queer and Transfeminist Theory
This project explores my gender identity and sexuality through queer theory and transfeminism, using Judith Butler’s concept of gender as performance. Rather than understanding gender as something I am, this collage approaches it as something I have done, negotiated, and sometimes resisted across different contexts and moments in my life.
The collage is divided into three layers: what was expected of me, what I performed, and what I desire. These layers they overlap, contradict each other, and remain in tension.
WHAT WAS EXPECTED
From early on, gender appeared not as a choice but as an assignment. Expectations about how to behave, dress, move, desire, and relate to others were attached to the category I was placed in. These expectations were reinforced through repetition: clothing norms, body language, emotional expressions, and assumptions about sexuality.
As Judith Butler argues, there is no self that exists prior to gender. Gender is not an expression of an inner truth, but a regulatory framework that produces intelligible subjects. In this sense, what was expected of me functioned as a script: not always explicitly enforced, but constantly present.
Sara Ahmed’s reflections on recognisability help explain this pressure. To be legible as a “proper” gendered subject often meant aligning myself with norms that promised social comfort and safety. Deviating from these norms risked confusion, correction, or exclusion.
To be recognized is not neutral; it is to survive within a system that decides whose bodies make sense.
WHAT I PERFORMED
Much of my gender identity has been shaped through performance, not as conscious imitation, but as a series of repeated acts that gradually felt natural. Choices about appearance, gestures, tone of voice, and even desire were adjusted depending on context: family, school, public space, intimacy.
This resonates with Butler’s idea of performativity as a “stylized repetition of acts.” What I performed was not false, but neither was it original. It was learned, rehearsed, and sustained through repetition.
At times, I internalised dominant categories such as “woman,” “feminine,” or “heterosexual” because they offered legibility. At other times, these categories felt constraining or incomplete. Queer theory helps make sense of this ambivalence: identity categories do not simply describe us, they discipline us.
Paul B. Preciado’s analysis of public toilets is especially useful here. Spaces, institutions, and everyday practices, bathrooms, schools, medical forms, dress codes, do not merely reflect gender. They actively produce it. My performances were often shaped less by desire than by the architecture of social life.
WHAT I DESIRE
What I desire does not always align with what was expected or what I performed. Moments of discomfort, feeling “out of place” in my gender or sexuality, have often been moments of political possibility.
Butler’s claim that gender is “an imitation without an origin” was transformative for how I understand myself. If there is no original gender to imitate, then deviation is not failure, it is inherent to the system. This opens space for resignification, play, and refusal.
Transfeminism, particularly its emphasis on bodily autonomy and self-determination, allows me to imagine gender beyond fixed binaries and compulsory narratives. Rather than asking what I am, this framework encourages me to ask how I want to live in my body, and under what conditions.
Desire, in this sense, is not only sexual or romantic; it is also about the desire for freedom, safety, and the ability to exist without constant self-surveillance.
This collage does not aim to stabilize my identity, but to document its instability. Gender, as I understand it through queer theory and transfeminism, is not something to resolve, but something to live with critically.
By placing expectation, performance, and desire side by side, this project reflects gender as a continuous negotiation shaped by power, repetition, resistance, and imagination. Rather than revealing who I “really” am, the collage shows how gender is made, and how it can be unmade.