Look past gender identity and see the humanity

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Last year, professor Geron was offered a sabbatical to finish a project she had been passionate about for years.

A sabbatical is a year of paid vacation given upon the acceptance of a request letter. Though multiple professors may submit sabbatical requests, only one is awarded.

Her art exhibit, “STARE!”, went up in the Fine Arts Gallery on April 1, and will remain up until May 5. On April 13, the college had a reception and Questions and Answers session at the end.

Geron wanted the project to be about obscuring gender and how that affects people’s view of others, Geron is a psychology professor and the department coordinator in the social science division, “I felt very familiar with this issue because of my work,” Geron said.

She began this project in 2014, after Israel attacked Benghazi. “I’m Israeli, so this was constantly on my mind, and it really did influence my work.”

Geron said she first ran into a multitude of problems when starting the project, with at first wanting to use the photos of the real transgender people who were murdered for her art, but she would have had to contact their families, and learned that many of them were not in contact with their families anymore.

Before she began her drawing, Geron learned that in 2012, 12 people were murdered because of their transgender Identity in the U.S.. Geron said she began this project in honor of people who have been murdered because of their transgender expression, saying it started as a pure social justice piece.

In the beginning, one of her concerns was using the victims’ photos as inspiration. But with the amount of time Geron would have to spend with the photos of these people who were no longer alive, she said she wasn’t eager to spend a year with that.

She then began a whole new approach, and hired some models and used custom made head coverings to obscure the model’s genders.

During the Q&A session,  a student asked when Geron knew she was done with the project, Geron jokingly remarked, “I never know when I’m done,” and talked about how she would often need her husband, professor Tom Link, or her son, Gabe Symer to tell her when she is finished with her work.

The illustrations presented featured subjects with multiple gender identifiers represented onto each person: someone with breasts and a moustache, masculine arms but a feminine face, still partially covered by cloth wrappings.

Geron had cardboard squares with a small opening to look through around the exhibit. These “viewfinders” were used so that people could look through them, and only see small parts of the subjects in the paintings, but at the same time being unable to identify which gender the person was– being that they could not see the whole picture.

“I wanted to represent both feminine and masculine ways of being in the world,” Geron stated, “As oppose to specific male and female personal presentation.”

Geron wanted the subjects to have more of a representation of “expression, posture, tenderness, and dignity,” honing in on more of the individuality and universal humanity these people shared with others.

Students remarked on how she utilized certain angles and clothing that more and more obscured the lines between man and woman.

Another one of Geron’s intentions with the gallery was to acknowledge how some people feel uncomfortable with gender ambiguity, and illustrate the humanity transgendered people still share with people who have a more binary belief on gender.

At the end of the Q&A session, Beth Norman, a member of the college board, was very proud of Geron’s work, saying, “In all our years, this is one of the best sabbaticals we’ve ever offered.”