Euphoric Identity

"Queer humans find difficulty when it comes to having a safe space to express themselves in the world. This body of work explores genderqueer people in their most authentic space, the place they feel the most safe and secure to be themselves. When producing this work, I wanted to create a safe environment for the people who found that they did not have a personal safe space in their life at the time these photographs were taken. Each person photographed is styled by themselves in the way they feel the most gender euphoric. Gender euphoria is a term coined in the genderqueer community, it is a phenomenon where one experiences psychological bliss when their physical expression of themselves aligns with their identity. This is the opposite of gender dysphoria, which is experienced by genderqueer people, when they do not feel that their physical appearance aligns with their identity thus creating a dissonance in their psychological perception of themselves. This work is a collaboration between the people I photograph, as artists in our own right. Therefore, I provided the people prints of themselves allowing them the space to draw and write all over the prints. This allowed them the space to express their own vision of themselves, and why and when they feel more gender euphoric at certain stages in their life. Many of the people in this project have expressed to me that the introspection they underwent when decorating their prints helped them redefine themselves, and helped make them feel more empowered as who they are and how they identify. This project is meant to shed light on the community and show that many humans with a wide range of aesthetics exist outside the binary world and intentionally twist the ‘cultural’ idea of what a “female or male” should look like. " Dia Jade April 2022