Prelude

The effect Art and Culture have on the Selfhood of an Individual: How a Self is formed through their Contextual Society.

When a child is told they are good, they identify as good. When a child is told they are bad, that child identifies as a bad child.

Since the first words often said about a baby are the announcement of their gender, from an observation of the sex, this prolific ceremony ignites how a person is represented within the small context of their family, parents or carers. What this essentially does is tell the parents how to treat this child based on a binary set of social rules, giving them an idea of how this baby will grow up, and who they will be. The theory that “the child’s mind, when born, is, in the words of Locke, a tabula rasa, a blank slate”(Brill, A., 1949), ignites discourse that binary categorisation is utterly projected upon a pure and unshaped mind. Gender, being the first categorisation of our beings, is too the first issue we have to deal with in life. The main focus of the regarding dissertation is to analyse how gender presentation has affected contemporary life, art, and culture by diving into mid 20th century examples as case studies of individuals cultivating a selfhood in relation to their representation. I explore how many outdated perceptions of the world have been retained in the membrane of our culture, delivering us to our modern day relationship with media.