Man for a day, woman for a day. | Diane Torr | TEDxStGeorg

hi everybody it's great to be here and to be part of this and I have a question for you all for the women in the room have you ever thought about who you would become if you'd been born male has ever been a consideration yeah and then men in the room have you ever thought who you might be if you'd been born female sunny the man ever thought about that okay my idea is to turn all the women into men and all the men into women are not forever of course but just so you could have the experience of somebody else somebody of another gender if you like I'm not talking about drag or cross-dressing what I'm doing is really confronting the gender binary and I've thought a lot about gender I'm a person who happens to be a woman and I'm also a performance artist who since the early 80s I've specialized in male impersonation that is performing as a man and in those early years performing in theaters and galleries in New York I was not aware of the possibilities of the revolutionary possibilities of this work of its possibility to create something new and it really wasn't until I went out publicly into the world as a man that I had a real head realization that it could be quite useful and that is in April 1989 and I went to an opening at the Whitney Museum and I went as this character and I thought you know all my friends they would just think it was a laugh but actually I waved to some friends across the room it's very very crowded and they just gave me blank stares and ignored me and then I saw some other friends of mine so I came up to them started talking to them and they just looked at me like who are you you know and act as if I was intruding on their conversation so then I thought oh well I felt very alone because nobody recognized me and I was incognito so I thought I'd get myself a beer and a wall to lean against just like men do right and so I would just stand there for a while and observe the crowd well I hadn't been there very long I've just been looking everybody and I noticed a woman who was looking at me so I looked right back at her and she kept staring at me and I thought oh this woman is sort of interested in me and I didn't really know what to do because I had expected her to drop her gaze and to look elsewhere which is what women generally do whereas I was not I was just trying on this male role I was just trying on this behavior as interested observer and so she was very determined to engage with me and she walked towards me oh my god I'm gonna deal with this and there was no escape really um so she walked up to me and she had this big smile very open face she said hi how are you doing do you know any of the artists and I sort of smiled very weakly weak grin like and then grunted yeah because I was terrified that she would hear my female voice and just go nuts so I thought okay maybe she's going to go away if I just show disinterest but no she carried on talking and I thought well she must know I'm a woman but she didn't she was talking away and seemed very determined to impress me with her knowledge of the contemporary art scene in New York and she said well you know the Whitney Museum has never had a biennial with so many artists of color and gay artists and this is the first biennial of this time and so on and so on meanwhile I was sweating under my jacket and I heart was beating really fast how am I going to deal with this so I got down my beer so jeez can't you see that I'm not really interested in her so I tried grunting again and then mm-hmm and sort of turned around and then she followed me and then she was in my face and talking to me as if you know we were together or something and I I thought how am I going to escape so much against what I would have done as a woman which this would have seemed extremely rude I just walked away from the situation and I went to the second floor of the Whitney Museum and I was looking at a painting and had been there for a couple of minutes and I felt this tap on my shoulder and it was this woman and there she was acting like we were a couple and I just kept looking at her with disbelief and by this time my shirt was soaking with perspiration my face was flushed red and I was sure that half of my mustache had fallen off but she didn't seem to notice at all she seemed completely nonplussed and just delighted that we were together and I thought wow this is so interesting without really knowing me hearing me talk or anything this woman has just made herself available she's decided I'm the one for her and I thought well you know this is really interesting if she could see herself so I beat a retreat to the men's toilet and I hung out there until enough time it passed and I felt it was safe to leave so I never saw this woman again but in the days that follow to this experience I really thought about the implications of this encounter and I thought you know if women had this possibility to go out as men and publicly interact as men they would find out a lot about themselves as women in the process being perceived as male and they might learn new behaviors and other responses than constantly smiling all the time and apologizing just what a lot of women do and so for the past to more than 25 years I have been teaching workshops where women become men for a weekend these are workshops where women take on the persona of man and they create them they research them themselves the process the technique if you like is similar to what an actor would do you know you develop a persona and then they become these characters so and then they go out publicly as these men and interact in the world as men and they find out a lot of things about themselves in the process probably you're wondering who these women are who are they who's signing up for this and what are they looking for well I can tell you that women are of all ages all sizes all ethnicities lt's classes and they're all other reasons are equally varied so this is one woman who participated in the workshop in New Delhi and her desire was to go to rock concerts to watch bands and she developed a a male character so she could do this without getting hit on because as a woman doing this in New Delhi it might have been pretty difficult it would have been difficult so the male persona allowed her passage there was another woman a single mother from Leipzig who had this desire or such either desire to become a man permanently and the workshop was a way for her to was a catalyst if you like for her to work through this idea this feeling that she had and she also developed a confidence then to leave the workshop and meet her sixteen-year-old daughter and tell her come out to her daughter as the man that she had become there was a woman in Boston who did the workshop who wanted to buy a car and having had the experience that car dealers are under the mistaken assumption that women know nothing about cars she went in her male persona she told me later that she cut a deal that she felt she could never have done as a woman there a businesswoman that have done this workshop so they want to learn new behaviors in order to learn how to stand their ground when they're in a workplace with very dominant men there are many many reasons that women have done this and the behaviors they learn or what you might imagine very different behaviors from what women have one woman said that she was given so much more space in the world women always go out of her way and standing in line was faster getting her ticket was faster she got a beer easier as a man another woman was saying that she felt that she was really too nice too kind too polite sometimes and she said she had to ask yourself how would you do that as a man and then she said that gave her more confidence to think like that it freed her from the limited behavior that's expected of her as a woman and in the process she learned a lot about feminine behavior what it is and responses to it so uh before you man in the room began to get too comfortable I have a question for you which is what do you think you might gain by becoming a woman do you think that there's anything you might gain from that because um I also teach woman four-day workshops and in this particular workshop oh the man had a lot of hesitation I should let you know and and normally the woman four-day workshop takes longer because men need more time to choose their clothes and in this particular workshop there was a lot of discussion anxiety uncertainty beforehand these men were wondering why they had decided to do it you know what what was going to happen what kind of person were they going to become and they had a sense they were going to they assumed that they were going to lose power but they didn't really know what they would gain one of the man was a 55 year old technician working in a macho environment with other guys and he was married and he had been a gay magnet his whole life and he wanted to discover the female aspect of himself so another person was a mine student he wanted to learn new behaviors and new performance skills and another participant was an academic who felt very unprepared he said he was doing this for himself and it was also a chance for him to be outside of his normal routine he was very excited to have this opportunity but at the same time he had no idea who he would become and it was a surprise to him but he became a very attractive woman and then later he and another member of the workshop enjoyed the opportunity to go to a local bar and then be admired and given attention by the man in the bar now okay this is like very basic and I think this is what most men imagine what it's like to be women so I actually like that but for a lot of men who go into this area of cross-dressing or they get dressed up as women they think that everybody's going to join their fan club you know but that's not really what it's like to be a woman but that's the assumption and in fact what these men did discover was a new experience of their bodies all together they felt that they weren't so armored they could have more freedom in the way they use their bodies they also had this experience of a variety of emotions that they had never expressed before including the ability to giggle with pleasure which is something that they as men had never done before as Erving Goffman said in 1959 gender not religion is the opiate of masses and yet in 2016 we are still policing our gender behavior Jenny havior of each other and as the contemporary feminist philosopher Judith Butler said masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed so this being the case I would suggest that we have a lot to learn from our members of our society who are gender different or who are non conformist and their gender representation I actually have no idea how it feels to be a man I have no idea how it feels to be a woman all I know is how it feels to be me and what it means to be me however I have explored male behavior I've studied male behavior studied female behavior and know how to perform those things and what I would suggest what I offer is the possibility to be more thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 150,321

Rating: 4.7658019 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Germany, Life, Activism, Behavior, Body language, Exploration, Gender, Identity, Men, Women

Id: paBsyBY_-dA

Length: 16min 36sec (996 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 19 2016