Identity

This weekend, I watched two very different movies. When seen in tandem, they explored some basic questions of identity (one more overtly than the other). How does a person construct their identity from what is innately given and from what is externally imposed through their environment?

The first movie was TOUCH THE SOUND. A documentary film by Thomas Riedelsheimer about the percussionist Evelyn Glennie. Glennie has constructed her life and her main identity around music and sound. It is the medium through which she perceives the world and through which she communicates to the world. She is, however, deaf. Although her virtuosic musicianship is undeniable, so too is the world’s fascination that Glennie has constructed this identity without the ability to ‘hear’ through the ‘normal’ mechanisms that ‘hearing’ people consider an essential component of being a musician. Glennie’s website includes a concise essay on why it is important that biographical notes (for concert programmes and media stories) not discuss or mention her deafness.

The second movie was BEAUTIFUL BOXER. The film is based on the true story of a kickboxer in Thailand. Raised in an agrarian province of Thailand, Nong Toom realized early in his childhood that he wanted to be in a woman’s body. Through serendipity, Nong Toom acquired fame and notoriety in the kickboxing world through his winning record and wearing makeup in the kickboxing ring. The primary narrative tension within the film focuses on Nong Toom’s identity as a kickboxer in an exclusively male sport and his desire to become a woman and have a sex-change operation. Nong Toom’s professional accomplishments in the exclusively male sport of kickboxing complicated (yet enabled) the development of his identity as a woman. Much of Nong Toom's crisis is depicted in scenes where his fans in the public realm did not see his use of makeup in the ring (and out of the ring) as an authentic expression of himself.

I'll stop here before this becomes a bad freshman English essay on identity formation and the external politics that imprint and complicate the individual realization/actualization of an identity. Both movies were interesting and fascinating to watch for different reasons beyond the theme of 'identity politics.' Part of me is just happy to engage my brain with this line of thinking as my brain rarely has an opportunity to be so engaged. And of course, since the world revolves around moi, I wonder if I'm currently actualizing my most authentic self. It seems more difficult to gauge since I'm not pursuing what would be seen as extreme in socially conventional terms.