UnionDocs

A few months ago, I interviewed a woman who was newly a woman. Physically a man her whole life, she had just come through several years of transition to become the woman she’d always felt herself to be. She’d also been a poet her whole life, and, upon assuming her new female identity, she was confronted with an unusual problem: she needed a female “voice,” instead of a male one. Her poetry had to change, to represent her new female self. Her understanding of language—which is seemingly genderless—was remade by her transition. In order to teach herself more “feminine” ways of speaking, she conducted writing experiments, cutting up bits of girls fashion magazines to assist in the acquisition of “female” words, and organizing them into poems. In this piece, my interview with her about all of this would serve as a starting place for exploring the ways in which men and women speak differently… Maybe this could even delve into the physicality of speech, how tone changes meaning in different voices. How do girls learn to speak like women, and boys like men? Are there words that men never use? Rarely? Does language have a gender?

Posted in: Collaborative Projects Blog.