Gender blending — melding what is traditionally male and female — is the new creative force for the summer 2010 season.
For "gender bending" — a vestige of feminism and gay pride — substitute "gender blending," as designers unite drape and straight and meld a womanly softness with masculine confidence.
Chitra Ganesh's "Amnesia Remembers" gives South Asian comics a Sapphic spin, while Edwin González-Ojeda, Derek Jackson and Ethan Shoshan -- working on his own and with Carlo Quispe-Saleave -- leave few variations on gender blending unexplored.
If we can have surf and turf on our plates and Asian-American choices on our menus, why not a fashion fusion of tough and tender — not mainly separate items in the closet to suit different moods, but gender blending in a single outfit?
And while she is certainly right that not all gender blending is subversive, it isn't clear why none is.
Some of the ideas expressed: transition, personal loss, being lost, sadness, illness, despair, transformation, healing, melancholy, strength, confinement, misunderstanding, silence, starkness, gender blending, and survival.
In Elizabeth Woledge's article for Extrapolation, entitled "From Slash to the Mainstream: Female Writers and Gender Blending Men", she describes Killing Time as "erotic but not sexual" and said that Spock and Kirk both "combine masculine and feminine imagery".
It was a kind of gender-blend -- and a countercultural one.
Faiza Butt's confectionary, gender-blend painting of turbaned men surrounded by hair dryers, pistols and ice cream cones takes some of the edge off of this paranoiac view and is one of the more interesting of the show's several exercises in issue-driven whimsy.
