Alike represents a more stereotypical butch identity (4:51)

The film's protagonist Alike is a soft spoken, self conscious young woman portrayed as easily swayed by the opinions of more outspoken characters (her mother, her friend, her sister, her love interest, etc.). She adapts her style of dress depending on who she is around at any given time. Around Laura and her friends, she wears baggy pants, polos, and snapbacks. Around her mother, however, Alike switches from the comforts of more masculine clothing to the more feminine attributed clothing her mother has forced on her, including pink sweaters, metallic shirts, and tighter jeans.

In her research of gender and queer identity, psychologist Christine L. Henrichs-Beck states, "Lesbians undergo an experience of biculturality given that they are at once immersed in two cultural contexts, mainstream, heteronormative society and lesbian subculture, both of which have particular beauty ideologies and appearance norms." (Heinrichs-Beck, 1). As opposed to gay men, queer women have the added pressure of matching up to a societal ideal of sexual expression, but gender expression as well. 

In her study 'Patterned Fluidities: (Re)imagining the Relationship between Gender and Sexuality', sociologist Diane Richardson describes the difficulty in identifying the differences between sexual orientation and gender performance, stating, "One of the difficulties in theorizing the connections between gender and sexuality is that these terms are ambiguous and are oten used by different writers in different ways." (Richardson, )

Alike, the lead character of Pariah

Although the idea of gender fluidity and a potential third gender has been around for most of history, the idea hasn't assimilated into American culture into rather recently. Celebrities like Ruby Rose and Miley Cyrus have publicly come out as non-binary, but the understanding of that identity itself and what that entails for the individual identifying as such is still a mixed bag of reactions and responses. Pariah was ahead of its time in attempting to tackle some of these questions in a subtle, but thought provoking manner.