In L’Incertitude des Genres, I situate the body as a site of both fragility and defiance. These images, taken in the dim solitude of the forest, present figures that resist binary codification. These bodies are spectral—lean, vulnerable, unprotected—yet simultaneously uncompromising in their presence. The photographs resist being absorbed into the dominant art world’s economy of fetishized “gender fluidity,” choosing instead to perform an aesthetics of survival and self-assertion.
This strategy aligns with a long lineage of artists destabilizing fixed gender categories. Claude Cahun’s self-portraits of the 1920s anticipated the radical undoing of identity through masquerade and refusal (Downie, 2018). Nan Goldin’s photographic diaries insisted on the visibility of queer, trans, and HIV-positive communities in the face of systemic erasure (Meyer, 1993).
I extend this genealogy into the present by placing the uncertain body in a mythic landscape, where the forest becomes an allegory for liminality and transition.
The theoretical grounding resonates with Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity, which argues that gender is not a fixed essence but an iterative practice, continually enacted and destabilized (Gender Trouble, 1990). Jack Halberstam expands this framework in Female Masculinity (1998), exploring identities that exceed the heteronormative matrix. José Esteban Muñoz, in Disidentifications (1999), highlights how queer subjects negotiate mainstream culture through survival strategies of ambiguity.
My series makes visible the very “in-betweenness” these thinkers articulate, presenting uncertainty not as confusion but as a politics of becoming.
The photographs are haunted by corporeality itself. Emaciation recalls personal trauma and cultural histories of disciplining bodies—echoing Foucault’s insights into how power operates through the regulation of flesh (Discipline and Punish, 1975). Yet the stark vulnerability of these forms transforms into resistance. They stare back, walk forward, or confront the gaze head-on, asserting dignity without stability.
Cinema has long explored such uncertain thresholds. Based on Virginia Woolf’s novel, Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) presents a protagonist who changes sex across centuries, defying fixed identity. Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother(1999) foregrounds transgender lives with tenderness and complexity. Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990) documents the ball culture of New York, where queer and trans communities carved spaces of performance and survival. Lukas Dhont’s Girl (2018) portrays the struggles of a young trans dancer navigating both gender dysphoria and societal scrutiny.
These films echo my photographic ethos: gender is not to be “explained away,” but experienced, embodied, and respected in its multiplicity.
Ultimately, L’Incertitude des Genres calls for recognition—recognition that all identities, whether women, men, homosexuals, lesbians, transgender, or nonbinary, deserve dignity without assimilation. The forest becomes not a backdrop but a witness, its mist and shadows mirroring human identity’s fluid, unresolved, and open nature. Here, uncertainty is not weakness but possibility, an invitation to imagine futures beyond categorization.
