She stressed, however, that individuals do not exist prior to or independently of the genders they "perform": "gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed".
Not long after the show, Artforum published an interview with the queer theorist Judith Butler, who argued that gender is always a performance, and used Opie's photographs as a kind of illustration of the idea.
So a primer: some contemporary feminist theory's primary orthodoxy asserts that gender is always, everywhere, entirely "socially constructed" – that is, only real in the mind or in social attitudes.
She is also part of the Femme Den, a kind of in-house collective focused on making sure that conversations about gender are always part of Smart Design's process, as much as, say, sustainability and ergonomics.
And while two-thirds of those surveyed in 1987 thought the idea of sex between two adults of the same gender was always or mostly wrong, in 2007, this figure had dropped by almost two-thirds.
Barack Obama delivers stinging critique of FBI: 'We don't operate on leaks' Gender was always going to play a pivotal role in a campaign that could culminate in the election of the first female president in America's 240-year history and seems likely to a see a historically large gender gap at the polls.
Gender was always going to play a pivotal role in a campaign that could culminate in the election of the first female president in America's 240-year history and seems likely to a see a historically large gender gap at the polls.
As Joyce Macmillan observed at the first round of this year's Fringe First awards: "Gender is always a theme, but the mood this year is very much one of anger from women writers and performers in a time when some people are arguing the feminist revolution is over, but in some ways things are getting worse".
