Performing the Grotesque: Trans and Gender Nonconforming Artists and the Aesthetics of Bodily Excess
I just learned that I can mutate more than others. I can split myself apart, stretch in and out of my own skin, completely and irrevocably destroy my biome.
Now online, my essay: Performing the Grotesque: Trans and Gender Nonconforming Artists and the Aesthetics of Bodily Excess for Flash Art Magazine 351 Summer.
“I walk into the sacred with blood on my fingertips and shadow stitched into my skin. I am not writing, I’m mapping a wound. This isn’t a study. This is me clawing through the bark of language, trying to name the unspeakable things that live beneath. I am a manufactured woman; therefore, I am a grotesque body. The grotesque, as an aesthetic and conceptual category, has long occupied a space at the margins of beauty and horror, distortion and revelation.”
WRITTEN BY: P. ELDRIDGE
FOLLOW for more on Instagram: @sissyanarchy
Hi all. The realm of Sissy Anarchy helps me to question the nature of realities (plural), be they tangible, imaginary, metaphorical, or something hybrid, liminal, betwixt & between. Mortality often confuses me. I'm clumsy, eccentric and sometimes dysmorphic. Tonight, I'm reflecting on recent scientific discoveries (or rather, fresh uncertainties) about the origins of our universe. A new telescope has located galaxies far too old and developed to fit the timeline of the Big Bang theory, and there are even photos of galaxies merging! I think it happens over aeons. It got me wondering: what if our own world is overlapping with parallel ones, forming portals, slowly warping, crashing into dimensions that don't quite fit our timelines or patterns? Would this partially explain our sensations of disorientation? Life feels surreal at the best of times, but these thoughts are contorting my mind, heh! Anyway, enjoy your fund-raising event :-)