"Let me just put on my mascara and I'll be ready," says model Andreja Pejić in an interview back in 2010.
At the time of this interview, she identified as living between the genders and did not identify as a transwoman—as she now does—but what struck me from this quote is that she used the feminine adjective for "ready" here yet used masculine verbs for herself in the remainder of the interview. Interestingly enough, from the interviews I saw, this was the only moment that she used feminine words for herself. Was it because she was putting on makeup at that moment? What motivated her to say that word at this moment?
The mascara is part of her femme aesthetic that made her often read as a woman even while she identified as an androgynous man. Perhaps the gendered association of what she was doing was the reason for that particular linguistic choice. But in a language that forces gender not just on adjectives, but some tenses of verbs as well, I realized how difficult the language would be to navigate as a gender expansive or genderqueer individual—particularly if the language is not the one you primarily speak.
Andreja Pejić is a child, like me, of the Yugoslav diaspora, a fact made apparent in Serbian-language interviews where she stumbles over a desire to express certain words like "snob" that she does not know in Serbian. Our relationship to language is already fraught. I understand more than I can speak yet I still struggle with slang and I can hardly read the Cyrillic alphabet.
I would feel wildly uncomfortable conducting public interviews in this language, yet Pejić does just this despite some hostility from a culture less accommodating of queer issues.
In a different interview, she is asked two questions that appear to stump her: the first is about meeting up with another celebrity and the second is about someone who the reporter believes in her girlfriend. You can hear Andreja lean to the event organizer on her side and say "I didn't hear anything."
Now, whether Andreja was entirely unable to hear the question is debatable—perhaps she did not understand or wanted to avoid the question since it was a thinly-veiled attempt to get some information to help (mis)define her gender and sexuality. While Andreja is trying to understand the question, the reporter repeats the word girlfriend aggressively and can be heard slightly off-mike cursing and starts saying "it's like I asked..."
Throughout these interviews, there is an earnest attempt to speak in the language of her homeland and the audience present, despite invasive questions like the one above. The reporter speaks Serbian quickly and almost shouts the word "girlfriend" at her, ignoring the fact that this entire endeavor is already less comfortable for the model who grew up in Australia after leaving the Balkans in her childhood.
The hostility of Serbian during this interview made it all the more apparent that, when asked about gay rights all over the world, she spoke in English.
Perhaps this is because of fluency or the further reach a soundbite in English can have, but it also seemed fitting that she switched out of a language that does not accommodate her gender identity to express a message about the LGBTQ community.
There is substantial and far-reaching violence that this language inflicts on her and people that do not identify as cis-gender because with every adjective and every verb, we are forced to reiterate a gender that perhaps does not fit. For binary trans people this can be difficult because it changes not only pronouns but grammatical rules. But for those outside the binary, what terms are used? How does a language accommodate expanding definitions and understandings of gender when violence seeps beyond lexicon to syntax?
(image courtesy of CHRISTOPHER MACSURAK)