I'm never loved the way I do/You're like me too.

Photographic project combining self-portraiture and images of my sister and exploring the politics of looking which shapes and control both trans and cis feminine identities.

‘…never loved…’ combines self-portraiture with photographs of my sister to facilitate a reflection on the gendered politics of looking and the eroticised nature of its aesthetic conventions.

I have always desperately wanted to be loved as a girl. Often, when the prospect was in sight, I found myself internalising sexual objectification while inventing my image in that of my sister’s, in fear that I couldn’t pass. And when I became embittered as love failed, it felt as if I had enough resentment for two. My image-story then emerged as a way to work through the feeling of spite that had welled up over time. 

This feeling, on one hand, was fuelled by an internal frustration that I had fed the oppressive gaze of sexualisation. On the other hand, it was informed by a hatred of the norm that refuses gender affirmation for girls like me, whilst denying self-actualisation for women at large. Through the creative process, a part of my trans-feminine perspective was shaped, marked by an awareness of the skewed expectations forced upon all women: those of social, sexual, and romantic natures.

Then, when I found comfort in my sister's confidence, the project became a bid for agency, empathy and connection when all felt loveless. 

A photographic exercise in overcoming artificial gender classifications, ‘…never loved…’ invites an acknowledgement of unequal power dynamics, inscribed in the appearances of recognised femininity and the nothingness of the girlishly mundane. Through pictorial explorations with images of myself and those of my sister’s, this collection of pictures heeds an understanding born of mutual embodied experiences of diminished mobility, of repression, and of sucking up both the gratification and the displeasures of sex and desire. 

In this sense, my work is a statement of solidarity which both embraces the magic of sisterhood and feminine sexuality while shedding light on the quiet cruelty of what it takes to be loved as a girl.