Rain Dove's "Gender Capitalism"
- Jessie Strongitharm
- Apr 2, 2020
- 2 min read
When I'm a gender capitalist in the fashion world, I basically can go to any casting I want to as long as somebody likes my face....A gender capitalist is someone who takes advantage of opportunities given to people based on their perceived sex or gender...If [your gender] wasn't an obstacle … if everybody got the respect of a man, but everybody got the delicacy and the patience and the courtesy given to a woman … If we just had all of the best of both worlds … we would see a lot more growth in the human spirit. But we have this amazing divide. And you grow up and you live not experiencing a whole half of human experience
Rain Dove is a 30 year-old American fashion model who's style purposely crosses dominant gender scripts and pushes the boundaries for how the world sees gender written on the body. This mini documentary is a fascinating look into the life of someone who can bend the dominant optics of binary gender in order to establish themselves as a defining force within the already androgynous world of fashion. Dove is a woman, but does not particularly care to define herself as such and has no preferred pronouns. They note how dropping gendered labels was liberating for themselves, but recognizes and respects that other people find the same kind of liberatory potentials in using them. Dove's Instagram is a testament to their will to enact the mantra #educatedonthate in their everyday life, and often posts conversations they've had with ignorant and hateful people in which they have instead chosen to approach the situation with kindness and compassion–often yielding powerful and profound results with people who have even gone so far as to use pepper spray against Dove. Dove is a formidable force within both the gendered and genderless community, and has down powerful and transformative work in pushing forward the idea that these expressions of self should be up to everybody's own personal interpretation of themselves within the world.
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