puja
nyc tie
“Have you noticed her, Alice? A queer-looking girl, very tall—wears a collar and tie—you know, mannish. And she seems to just change her suit of an evening—puts on a dark one—never wears evening dress. The mother’s still a beautiful woman; but the girl—I dunno—there’s something about her—”
When English author Radclyffe Hall wrote her classic 1928 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, she might not have dreamed that eighty years later, the sight of a woman wearing a necktie, though no longer outlandish, would still have a hint of subversion about it. See a woman’s fingers guiding that knot home on her own tall neck, a woman’s hands taking hold of what was once another world entirely, and still it comes, that deep, pleasurable dissonance between the narrow band of what we expect—however unconsciously—and the wide, glorious sweep of what is. Gender, says the photographer, is not binary. The clothes do not, after all, make the (hu)man. There is power and beauty dancing in the spaces in between, where we are not simply one thing or the other, but both and neither at the same time—and, in any case, looking very, very sharp.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, meerasethi and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
