One is not born a woman

In Feminist scholar Monique Wittig's seminal text "One is not born a woman" (1981), she departs from a materialist feminist reading of masculinity and femininity. The title of the text—and this exhibition—takes from The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. For Wittig, the theoretical possibility of a lesbian society (notedly, she does not advocate for a matriarchy) reveals the artifice of the category of "woman." In initiating an analysis of the production of the category of woman, as one would do with understandings of master/slave, coloniser/colonised, bourgeois/proletariat, the idea of woman no longer becomes a natural category, but an ideological one.

Through works by Anabelle Lau, Hou Lam Tsui, Tekla Tamoria, and IV Chan, the exhibition seeks to think about Wittig's text today and to revisit a fundamental question: How does one go from being a girl to a woman? What might it mean to read against the grain of the Bildungsroman?