In ‘Becoming ’ I take myself as the subject in an auto-ethnographic visual investigation that expands from my own understanding of my gendered identity and sexuality.
I am becoming my brother’s brother and my sister’s brother, I am becoming my own twin, a brother to myself. I am becoming my mother’s son and my father’s son.
I am reimagining my sense of self around the premise of “what if 26 years ago they had said ‘it’s a boy’, how would I be living differently? How would I interact with the world? How would the world validate me?”
In the assumption of a male identity I am not only questioning how I would fulfil life as a boy, but also how the reality of living as a male influences how I feel in the here and now.
In ‘Becoming Boy’ I can never really become male: I am always in state of becoming.
What does it mean as a designated, biological female to ‘become a man’? To appropriate the identity of another gender whilst remaining physically of female delineation? What is it to be gendered? And to what capacity can I create my own gendered reality?
Words and visuals by A. Liparoto