Shedding Shame: Terrifying Liberation
“I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes,
I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through.”-Ada Limón, Sharks in the Rivers
This project explored drag as a form of freeing oneself from deep-rooted shame, a simultaneously terrifying and liberating leap out of the bounds of one’s assigned gender performance.
I sought to portray how shame feels when it’s bottled up in the body, as well as how it feels to let go of it. I made portraits of Hannah, who goes by the pronouns she/they, a young college student who learned to free herself from shame through drag. In transforming herself and blurring the lines of gender, Hannah sheds the conventions of her Catholic upbringing. With makeup and medical tape she obscures a version of herself, yet in doing so she opens herself up to vulnerability and exploration of her own identity. In veiling what is visible, she reveals a truer self. Hannah describes this process as both empowering and terrifying. Ultimately, this body of work seeks to explore a journey into selfhood and discovering one’s identity through obscuring the readily visibly.
