The faces of different women succeed each other blended one into the next. Soy un hombre reflects on the concept of the human, defined historically, educationally and institutionally, as exclusively masculine. The nominal participation in the world of the female gender, manipulated by male cultural hegemony, is the claim that Sábada makes in this piece.

Woman’s face is presented in this video as an amalgam that plurally identifies with the opposite of the male model that represents humanity. The images, an infinite sequence of women’s photographs, are all different versions of one same social being, which has been hidden behind the universal definition of man and which from that position demands a space of sociocultural identity. Soy un hombre suggests questioning the ways in which different cultures promote a generic man who includes both sexes by discriminating woman as an invisible adjunct.

This piece is part of a series in which Sábada adapts key texts of feminism. In this video she works on a piece of writing by Joanna Russ, in which she denounces the way in which the image of gender and female sexual identity is thought, presented and developed from a perspective of accessoriness. Russ, a scientist, novelist and important feminist critic, devoted her work to recovering the role of woman from the masculine homogenisation of knowledge. She started off writing science fiction, a literary genre which until the 1970s was written by and for men only. Her most important work, The Female Man of 1975, provides the framework for this video.

In a certain way Soy un hombre contains similar premises to Nadie esperaba que yo tuviera talento (2006). The point of view is nevertheless different: the loss of identity, of social space, the need for respect from the position of difference, and the rejection of administrative invisibility. The video reviews cultural concepts for which feminine identity doesn’t exist, given that it is included in a definition of man which ignores the equality of rights and its differences.