Lorde opens up about her relationship with gender: ‘I never felt like a woman until I was 26’
Lorde says binding her chest helped her feel ‘pure’ (Joseph Okpako/Gettty)
Lorde says binding her chest helped her feel 'pure' (Joseph Okpako/Gettty)
Following the release of her fourth studio album, singer Lorde has been talking about gender.
Virgin, released in June, has served as an outlet for the New-Zealand-born singer to explore and reflect on her relationship with gender and her body, and she has been candid when it comes to sharing her thoughts on femininity.
On the video for “Man of the Year”, she binds her chest and on “Hammer” sings: “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man.” She has also talked about her gender identity “broadening” and about how androgyny has shaped her idea of feminine identity.
Speaking to Le Monde recently, the singer, whose real name is Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor, said: “I never felt like a woman until I was 26, I remember the day. My mother was sort of androgynous and showed me a lot of David Bowie, Grace Jones.
“I understood that was a source of power and I saw how dangerous it sometimes was to be a woman.
‘I want to be the kind of woman I need to be’
“So, I decided that if I’m going to be a woman, I want to be exactly the kind of woman that I need to be. Part of that is sometimes being a man.”
In recent months, Lorde has opened up about feeling “in the middle, gender wise”, telling Rolling Stone magazine: “I’m a woman except for the days when I’m a man.” And when fellow music star Chappell Roan asked her whether she was non-binary, she replied that she was “really resistant to boxing it up”.
And before working on Virgin, she read “a lot of queer authors” and books “about the body”.
Lorde begins a North American in Austin, Texas, on 17 September, before heading to the UK in November.
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