Box: A Junior Self-Portrait Illustration by Sasha Sobol (2013)

My entire personal essay explores a box full of costumes. The costumes represent labels, specifically gender and gender roles. I try on two costumes and end up taking off both of them. In the end, I am better off in my regular clothes. The idea behind the essay is that when I wear costumes or submit to binary gender roles, I’m acting like something I’m not. The fact that the costumes are in a box helps me show that gender roles are confining.

In my illustration, I use this idea, but instead of representing gender roles with costumes, I use labels on the clothing to represent labels that apply to me. The physical labels help me show that social labels can be dehumanizing. They were carelessly put on me to classify me, to rob me of my natural complexity. The box in the illustration represents the restricting nature of costumes and how I feel that labelling myself is equivalent to being pinned down or boxed in.