Genderbending: JJ Levine, Hana Pesut, and Ali Mahdavi

JJ Levine: Alone Time 7

Lately I've come across quite a few projects that interestingly play with gender and the performance of it. Performance in connection to gender is, in a way, a pet subject of mine, because I believe that traditional gender roles can be easily challenged by body posture, clothing, make-up. We can be what we want to be, and many people actually choose not to confirm to social expectations but express their gender identity in complex ways - legible from their appearance and their performance.

JJ Levine's Alone Time features one model performing both male and female in the same frame. According to Levine, a queer and trans artist, the work is immensely personal and draws from own experience as much as from the queer community in Montreal. In an interview with the Huffington Post, Levine said: "I want to convince the viewer of the many possibilities that may exist within a single surface perception or presentation. Ultimately, I aim to destabilise the notion of gender as singular and predestined by the sex we are assigned at birth." The project is effectively breaking up the notion of the binary gender, the boxes we are often assigned to  - it acknowledges the fact that there is a wide spectrum between male and female for every individual to explore, and it makes you stop, look closer, and think.

Less political, but nevertheless interesting is the Switcharoo project by Levine's fellow Canadian Hana Pesut. She made couples swap their clothes, and photographed them in each outfit.

Hana Pesut: Switcharoo

It is a easy going, fun project and very successful in its simplicity. In an online interview Pesut stated:"Now it seems that almost anything goes. And in fashion now there are men modeling women's clothes and women modeling men's clothes." It shows that gender is not a dead-serious subject - you're welcome to play, to express yourself.

She's right about the development in fashion. My last example is a picture from Ali Mahdavi's editorial Body Double series in which he worked with the androgynous model Andrej Pejic. It works on the same principles as Levine's pictures, although it is much more stylised. Fashion is arguably one of the biggest influences of our time. So, maybe, if fashion has realised by now how easy it is to be whatever you want, if fashion enables us to perform... why don't we just go for it? 

Ali Mahdavi: Body Double