Take Stock

The stock photo accompanies an article about Germany's legal recognition of intersex infants. Even though the photo has been chosen to embody the "third gender" mentioned in the headline, we have to begin by calling the figure in this photo a woman, for we cannot see a third gender until we define one of the primary two. The woman has porcelain perfect skin. Hair helmeted in a glossy pixie, she wears a stiff white shirt like a cross between a chef's uniform and a spacesuit. (All the great sci-fi writers have known that the future of gender is a space-age matter, and so does this woman.) With a finger white as the tracks left by the moon she traces a translucent box hovering in the air in front of her. Is the box gender itself? She is outside of it, but she also appears to be able to move it at her whim. She does not smile, nor does she frown. Instead she is intent, full of purpose about the task ahead of her: she has to embody the Future of Gender. Too bad for her that we can only speak of the future in the language of now.

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Lately I have become interested in stock images, specifically in stock photos supposed to represent gender neutrality. Even conventionally gendered stock photos are designed to remove specificity. A stock image is a photo of a conceptual container—"woman at work smiling"—instead of a particularity—"Linnea Jessup smiles at her computer at re/max Realty on 23rd Street." The stock image container is supposed to be able to convey the essence of its shell (woman, work) while avoiding the messy precision of time, context, and social location. Yet few stock photos attempt to remove gender, perhaps the most basic lens through which we see the world. The ones that do are illustrative in their failure. Experiment: type "androgynous" into the Corbis search engine and see if you can will yourself outside gender.

What happened? Did you change the way you see? Did categories other than gender assert their primacy—categories of emotional valence or social class or aspects of embodiment so subtle they can't yet be named? Or did you see, maybe, a striking light-skinned African American man with a body as sensuous and coyly curled as a comma, naked except for a smudge of red on his lips? Or a white girl with arched eyebrows and a white V-neck T, scalp stubble short as a wheat field after harvest?

If you're hearing the edge in my tone you're right: I set you up for failure. Even the construction of our sentences—modifier followed by noun—demands that we make gender primary: a white man, an old woman. "Insofar as social existence requires an unambiguous gender affinity, it is not possible to exist in a socially meaningful sense outside of established gender norms." Judith Butler published that statement in a 1986 issue of Praxis International. This was before she'd written Gender Trouble or any other book, only two years after she received her PhD—so early, in fact, that it is almost ontologically prior to Judith Butler herself, if such a priority can be imagined. So why do we continue to think it possible to step outside gender?

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Because stock images are meant to represent and then recede, it is hard to think about them for what they are not. But let's try, with the Third Gender woman with whom we began. Remember her? She is not black. She is not old. She is not having fun. She is not adorned. She is not fat. She is not asymmetrical. She is not her own specificity. But is she ungendered? That, too, she is not.

Stock photos are like cops: they help enforce norms. It took millions of repetitions for us to associate women and salad, but now the deed is done and there's no going back. Unless we remove the stock from its context, bring it to the surface like whiteness and see it for what it...