Genus/species
Genus/species explores the role that naming, labeling and language plays in our lives, cultures and identities.
When my daughters were young, I told them that we fall in love with people who feel special to us, irrespective of gender or anything else. This made intuitive sense to them as children. But outside our front door, almost all external forces push against this: Millenia of patriarchy, religion, misogyny, racism, sexism, homophobia, cis and heteronormativity, colonialism, capitalism, xenophobia - everything that surrounds us tries to control, to manage, to define and to divide us, in service to systems that seek to exploit, not to nurture.
There has always been a dark side to applying language and labels to people, assigning stigma and judgement, and even attempting to dehumanize individuals, groups and entire cultures. But language can also be empowering, as we see when people reclaim words once used against them, and as the freedom to proudly self-identify outside of cis-hetero expectations became more possible for some, while remaining dangerous or impossible for others.
For decades, I didn’t think much about outwardly labeling or defining myself. It was mostly done for me in relation to others, and with the assumption that I conformed to what was expected of me: daughter, mother, sister, for a time wife. People made assumptions, I didn’t deny them, unsure what I would even say if I chose to try. Until one day in my 40’s, when someone dismissed my ‘cis, straight, perspective’, and it landed like a slap. That was the day this project was born.
The images in this series are titled with the taxonomic names of the flowers the models hold, intentionally refusing to name or apply labels to the person in the frame. While this speaks to my struggle with using (defending, explaining, justifying) labels myself, I have also learned that if we refrain from speaking about who we are, that others will make assumptions for us. And that the assumed default is a rigid binary that I believe would fit very few of us, if we all had the opportunity to grown up being told only that we will fall in love with people that feel special to us.
