In everyday language, ‘identity’ has been a term describing awareness of our self across time. This self was regarded as inside us, ‘enclosed’ by a body. The self was deemed ‘unchanging’; remaining constant even through the changes of personal life. By the 19th and 20th centuries this idea was challenged. Firstly, the social dimensions of selfhood were revealed. We are never a self on our own, but become selves through our language/cultural communities and transient contexts. Secondly, the idea of an unchanging, ‘inside’ self behind and accompanying all my bodily changes across a life-span became regarded as wrong. By the later 20th century, the ‘gendered body’ itself was not held to be necessarily anchored ‘by nature’ and ‘constant’.
The consequence of the above is that our birth assigned gender is not necessarily fixed and given across a life course. The idea of transgender and pangender identity challenges the very notion of a fixed, unchanging ‘bodily’ self.
According to the social theorist Zygmunt Bauman, ours is the era of ‘liquid modernity’, characterized by fluidity. This gallery, entitled ‘Fluidity: Transgender and Pangender’ deploys the motif of fluidity to explore the negative and positive experiences of transgender and pangender subjects. It examines the way in which society has attempted to fix individuals through a strict gender binary of male/ female. Fluidity can trigger personal uncertainty and disorientation, but it is also liberating if it moves in tandem with the contemporary values of openness, inclusivity, diversity and tolerance to empower subjects and engender understanding, empathy and insight into transgender and pangender identities and experiences. In the notes accompanying some of the paintings, where relevant, the gendered pronouns of ‘she’ and ‘he’ have been replaced with the gender-neutral pronoun ‘ze’. ‘His’ and ‘her’ have been replaced by ‘hir’.