Exhibition IDENTITY "8 ROOMS 9 LIVES"

IDENTITY

“8 ROOMS 9 LIVES”

We all have a working idea of the self: we know “who we are”, or think we do. We understand that we possess an individual identity, that it matters greatly to us, and that it is one of the means by which we function in society.

This personal identity is complex. It is made up of traits that we are born with and views that we acquire as we go through life. Some aspects of our identity are essentially permanent, others are subject to change.

Identification for official purposes is often controversial because it has no need to acknowledge this complexity and variability. Authority’s challenge “Who are you?”is easily satisfied with a signature or a PIN number. The deeper question “Who, really, am I?”remains much harder to answer.

In these eight rooms, we present an array of historical and contemporary ideas about the self and personal identity. Each topic is introduced by a figurehead – a person whose ideas about, or experience of, issues of identity opens up important areas of debate. For, while identity is currently a controversial topic, it is always a human story.

MEMORY AND THE SELF

In 1985, Clive Wearing, a professional musician, contracted a virus which infected the brain. This has left him with a rare form of amnesia. He cannot recall most of what he has ever learnt or past events from his life. He is also unable to form new memories, which means in effect that he lives most of his life in a perpetual present. Without an inner autobiography, Clive might be thought to lack a meaningful personal identity. However, he is able to remember procedures, and this allows him to play music with unaltered skill and expression. He also has a functioning emotional memory and still loves the woman he married shortly before he became ill.

Dairy room excerpts

Big Brother, 2009

Endemol/Channel Four

Contestants in the reality show Big Brother use its “dairy room”as a confessional. Away from their housemates, they can unburden themselves and reveal how they really feel. However, they are also aware of the need to appeal to viewers, who can vote for them to stay in teh show or be evicted. These excerpts show a number of contestants from the most recent series. To what extent are they stating true feelings and displaying genuine emotions, and how much are they seeking to use this precious moment on air to manipulate the public.

Prison dairy from Holloway, Kate Gliddon, 8^th April 1912

“Mrs Thomas went in the early morning. She was the only woman sentenced to 6 weeks hard labour left in this wing as Dr Garrett Anderson was released last Thursday – I am feeling happier again and I am not so feeble as I have been lately – this is probably because I have had tongue one day for dinner and chicken next. If we were allowed proper food things would be very different with us. Miss Spenton is back I am glad to say in our wing as she talks so well and she has a fresh way of looking at things – we had a discussion on narrative poems and on Browning this afternoon which was cut short by the early arrival of supper and our subsequently being shoooed into our cells – But today we have supper at 4 o’clock for some unearthly reason then we are tidily shut in for the night – this is a new arrangement and we hope not a permanent one. Lately it has been 5.30 before we have been given our supper.

Tonight I hear two cleaners, - as the ordinairy prisoners who wait on us are called – discussing whether 2/11 had gruel at night or not – as the Doctor has only just ordered me that luxury they had not got accustomed to stopping at my door – It was a curious sensation to realise that people existed in whose mind I was 2/11 not a person, but just a number.”

APRIL ASHLEY

April Ashley was one of the first people in Britain to undergo a full sex-change operation. She was born a boy – George Jamieson – in Liverpool and grew up there in a large family during the Second World War. Älthough I was brought up a strict Roman Catholic boy, I knew from the age dot that I was a girl,’ Ashley wrote later.

George joined the merchant navy at fifteen, making his way via a succession of jobs to London and then to Paris and the stage of the Carrousel night club, famous for its male female impersonators, where he took the name Toni April. He began female hormone treatment and, in May 1960, aged 25, travelled to Morocco and underwent surgery.

April Ashley became famous largely because of her gender reassignment – she was long ago ‘outed’ by a Sunday newspaper. She has modelled vor Vogue, been photographed by David Bailey, and met film stars, Picasso, Dali, Elvis Presley and the Beatles. She has sailed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and worked as an agony aunt, a restaurateur, and a Greenpeace fundraiser. Although het chosen gender is important to her, it is far from the sum of her personal identity.

Gender Reassignment

April Ashley had been given male hormones in an attempt to ‘make’ her male, and had later taken female hormones to accentuate her femininity at Le Carrousel. But she believed only surgery would bring about the alignment between the sex she felt herself to be and the sex she appeared to be that would allow her to go on living. She travelled to Morocco and underwent the operation in May 1960. The first male-to-female sex-change operation to receive much publicity had taken place in Denmark in 1951, although occasional successful operations had been performed since the 1930s. The procedure, now usually called gender reassignment surgery, is now more widely available, including on the National Health Service. Surgery is typically preceded by counselling, psychological tests and a course of hormone therapy.

One consequence of Ashley’s operation was to make it hard to determine whether she had been born intersex. This term covers a wide range of chromosomal, gonad, genital and hormonal anomalies and may affect as much as two per cent of the population.

Corbett V. Corbett

Not long after the were married, Arthur Corbett filed for an annulment on the basis that April Ashley had been of the male sex at the time of the marriage. The case came to court in November 1969. Ashley endured physical and psychological sexual examinations by medical teams for both the prosecution and the defence. These tests showed Ashley to have normal male XY chromosomes, but she scored towards the female end of the sexual spectrum in a questionnaire.

In a controversial ruling in February 1970, Justice Ormrod found for Corbett and against Ashley. He declared that the ‘true sex of the respondent’ was that indicated by the chromosomal and original anatomical evidence, and disregarded Ashley’s psychological profile and her surgical alteration. The case provided legal precedent for deeming a person’s sex in law to be that at birth regardless of their subsequent gender history. The law was not liberalized until the Gender Recognition Act was passed in 2004.

Gender identity: Culture

Sexual identity determined by biology may be reinforced or overriden by cultural factors. Passports and public lavatories oblige us to assign ourselves to one sex or the other. In our bodies and minds, though, we may be – and also feel – only comparatively male or female. This feeling of genderedness is variable over a lifetime as well as form moment to moment, and is strongly influenced by the people and society around us.

Cultural influences take various forms. Our physical environment directly influences the release of hormones in the womb and in our bodies during puberty. And lifelong, we respond to those around us by ‘performing’ a gender identity in order to satisfy – or challenge – social expectations. These identities – gay or straight: bisexual or asexual: male, female or somewhere in between – that are accepted in one culture may be found problematic by another.

Sexual identity: Biology

The sex chromosomes and hormones play a mutually dependent role in controlling the development of the reproductive glands and genital organs that determine the sexual identity we are allocated – what is usually called our ‘sex’. Some aspects of our ‘sex’ are fixed in the growing embryo, but others take shape later, and are not neccessarily fixed for all time.

Sex is the term usually applied to biological aspects of being male or female. Gender is used to encompass the influence of the social and cultural worlds in which people grow up. Who and what we are – being male or female – is usually seen as a combination of the two.