With this intimate series of images and interviews, Rebecca Swan has brought the traditional concept of gender under the microscope, launching an inquiry into the understanding of gender across cultures, nations, and generations. Assume Nothing features frank and arresting images of twenty-five participants, along with their candid—and sometimes heartrending—comments about what it has meant to exist outside of traditional gender identities.

The participants range in age from twenty to sixty. They are Haitian American, Samoan New Zealander, Maori, European Australian, Aboriginal, and African English. They are gay, lesbian, straight, bi-sexual, and pansexual. In terms of gender, they are transsexuals, gender queers, eunuchs, sister girls, drag kings and queens, and the alternative gender roles traditional to Maori and Samoan cultures.

In their blurring of boundaries, Swan’s images ask readers to examine their assumptions—and even, at moments, their own sexuality. They reveal the harm that results from forcing living bodies to conform to preexisting roles and capture a deeper reality of struggle, uncertainty, and process. Above all, they point the way to the creation of a new vocabulary of gender and a world of increased tolerance where, when it comes to gender, nothing is assumed.

Rebecca Swan is an artist working with photography and mixed media, exploring themes of cancer, sexuality, gender identity, and spirituality. Her work has been exhibited in major public galleries and museums internationally for more than twenty years and is held in many collections. Assume Nothing has been made into a feature film, directed by Kirsty MacDonald. Swan lives in New Zealand.

“I was born in 1953. The young nurse who first picked me up said, ‘Oh my god, it’s a hermaphrodite.’ I know this part of the story so well because it was the only time in my life that my mum talked to me about it. I was twenty-two . . . How do you pull that knowledge inside yourself?

". . . I was initially assigned male with a too-small penis . . . Just before my first birthday . . . It was discovered that I have a uterus . . . My parents were then living in this remote rural valley. The whole community had a meeting and they decided that the kindest thing to do was to pretend nothing had happened, to pretend that I’d always been a little girl. That set the scene for the rest of my life . . . The only person who didn’t know was me . . .

"The journey . . . has at times been extraordinary and often incredibly painful . . . I’ve reached this special place where I stand on the planet inside my own body in a way that feels like I own it; I understand it, I celebrate and love its ambiguity. Maybe from the outside people might describe aspects of it as feminine and masculine, but . . . I don’t see any kind of separateness. I experience this body now and my reality is one thing.” —Mani Bruce Mitchell, featured on pages 54-59