Understanding My Feminine Self
2015 - Ongoing
"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."
- Simone de Beauvoir
- Simone de Beauvoir
When I began Understanding My Feminine Self in 2015, it wasn’t a formal project but a way to intimately gaze upon myself and hold space for what I was experiencing. As a young woman, struggling with severe anxiety and depression, I began to recognize that I was both the object and the architect of my own objectification through a daily performance of gender. I longed for male desire and pleasure, yet simultaneously felt reduced to a sexualized body. Photography entered my life at the same time, becoming a tool to examine the tensions and paradoxes of my cisgender identity.
Using myself as a subject — alongside my mother, sister, and intimate partners — I trace connections from my past to my present, unraveling my relationship to gender, sexuality, and performance. Through self-portraiture, memory recreations, and documentary photographs, I witness my internal psyche, holding space for vulnerability, shame, eroticism, desire, power, and resistance. By critically examining patriarchal norms of femininity within my own experience, I explore how identity is learned, performed, and negotiated through both conscious and unconscious acts.
Evolving alongside me, this project illuminates the contours of my female experience and the unfolding of my identity and self-understanding.
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