BECOMING MY NONBINARY BODY
The first years students of the Master of Performance Practices at ArtEZ present their first draft of their performance for the module Bodies in Dissent. Feedback is offered by the lecturers. I present the work Becoming my nonbinary body. A long durational performance around my body and my nonbinary gender identity. In an exercise we did a few days before I found some very slow movements which I thought were interesting because they create extra space to observe the movements, and in that the body, more closely than one normally might. The movements I used were mundane actions of getting dressed and undressed in different styles of clothing related to the expression of my gender; a constant slow transformation through different states of gender expression, in search of my identity. One of the lecturers asked me: ‘and how will you be performing your nonbinary identity? I am not seeing it yet.’
In this essay I will explore how I came to the performative elements I used to perform my gender and also how those operations work and might influence my future practice. Relating to the photographic works by Claude Cahun, the performative work by Cassils and the Judith Butlers theories on gender.
2003
I’m 8 years old, standing in front of a mirror, and I realize that my body doesn’t look the way I thought it did. My body is that of a girl, even though I don’t feel like that girl. I don’t know how to deal with this. Raised in a Dutch protestant christian household, I was taught that I should behave a certain way, and I knew that this was transgressing all set boundaries, so I decided to push down the feeling of discomfort and become that girl I saw in the mirror.
I started wearing exclusively pink to try and become the girl I felt expected to be. This is the start of the creation of an image, something that was a big part of the performance Becoming my nonbinary body. An operation I used both in art and in life; the creation of a mask, an image, to be seen by others. Created by Claude Cahun in their photographs, created by Cassils in their physique, and created by me in the posing and live projections of my body. As a child I started posing myself as a girl in pink. This brought me to the choice of pink lighting, of live video projections and the active creation of an image from my appearance. Working on how the audience perceives my body and identity through the visuals. Using the fact that my body, as it is, does fit the beauty norms of western society. I’m a skinny, white, ‘girl’ the way I’m perceived. Through the imagery created in the performance I try to break away from the idea of ‘girl’ by changing my appearance, taping flat my breasts, drawing on a moustache and shading my face more squared and changing clothes. Knowing that this creates a form of abjection for the observer because I ‘mutilate’ a healthy and beautiful body, aiming to show the audience the possible beauty in non-conformity.
In this essay I will explore how I came to the performative elements I used to perform my gender and also how those operations work and might influence my future practice. Relating to the photographic works by Claude Cahun, the performative work by Cassils and the Judith Butlers theories on gender.
2007
I’m 12 years old, hearing the word ‘transgender’ for the first time. A child from another group in my primary school would undergo transition and this was the talk of the town. Being transgender was explained to me by my teacher as ‘a boy in a girls body, or a girl wanting to be a boy’. I did not understand these notions, but something in the term struck me. When asking my peers how they knew they were boys or girls, they all said they just knew. I felt lost with the feeling of not knowing at all, I didn’t feel like I belonged in either category, but that didn’t seem to be an option. I came to the conclusion: ‘I don’t think I am a boy, so I must be just kind of bad at being a girl’. I still am kind of bad at being a girl, because I am not a girl. In the performance this is translated to the rejections of markers of ‘girl’ that are most hurtful to me personally (breasts - so I tape them flat, prettiness - so I distort my face with make-up, conformity - so I break with the tempo of everyday life and I break with the expectations of hiding my desire to look a certain way) while at the same time embracing the elements that help express my identity the way I experience it. Breaking with the idea of what to be to be a girl, to then break out of ‘girl'. Not to get into the area of ‘boy’, but to explore the possibilities of something else, something undefined, unclassified and alien.
Image: Fenia Kotsopoulou
Image: Fenia Kotsopoulou
2009
I’m 14 years old, falling in love for the first time. Being shocked that my crush was directed at a woman. Ashamed, the heterosexual matrix already internalized, I hid myself. “The Heterosexual Matrix” is a term from Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble” (2007). Describing an societal norm which appears to be “natural” – defining everyone and everything as heterosexual until proven otherwise. The norm indicates not cis/straight ways of living as unnatural, deviant or invisible. In stating that heterosexuality is the norm, it also implies that gender is binary and fixed in biological grounds. I spend, nights, watching YouTube video’s of fashion models, copying their every move, scared that others might be able to see my queerness in my gestures. Practicing how to flip my hair, hold a cup, water bottle or pencil. Any minute movement. Feeling that my hands and gestures were most telling of my queerness; not feminine enough. If only I was feminine enough, no one would suspect a thing, and maybe I could even trick myself. Segade (2019, p. 56) argues:
‘Communities always identify through similarities of movement rather than the sameness of bodies. (…) Poses on the other hand, dismantle the language of appropriate gestures: a pose is not simply a gesture, but a radical gesture. To strike a pose is to draw on the existing code as a set of samples available to bodies, which embody them as events on each occasion, taking apart and reassembling the relationships forged by history. To strike a pose is to become aware of how a body makes history.’
This creates a power in posing I implemented in the performance. Creating a new trans* history to be visible, by combining different existing (gendered) codes and reassembling them in queer ways.
Aside from gestures, the gaze started to play a big part in my life. I took notice of how other people started looking at me, and how I looked at other people. I started to govern my own gaze, not looking at women too much, not looking other people in the eye too much, afraid of what someone might see in mine. Redirecting the gaze when danger rose.
In this performance I used the gaze, re-redirected. Maintaining eye contact for longer than socially accepted in an interaction. I communicated softness, strength and an invitation to look at me through the gaze. An operation also commonly used by Claude Cahun in their photographic works. The operation of looking back at the audience without shame or fear. In The Impudence of Claude Cahun (2013 p.109) Christy Wampole describes it as:
Cahun’s unfaltering gaze offers no solace, no apology, no justification, which forces certain viewers to ask themselves, ”Is the problem with her? Or is it with me?” Some find it difficult to look upon a person who is unsatisfied with their biologically assigned sex and who makes adjustments palpable to others.
Wampole goes on to argue that there is a safety created in the fact that the audience is looking at a photograph. There is the possibility to observe the gaze without it actually being returned, although still unsettling, this creates the opportunity to freely look at the alien.
In my work, I do actively look back at the audience, the gaze is returned, but the effect is similar as in Cahun’s photography. In the creation of a clear devision between the space of the performer and the space of the observer/voyeur/audience, a safety is established for both parties. An understanding that the performative space is not to be entered, and the performer will not intrude in the space of the audience. Creating space for those same questions “is the problem with their gender expression? Or is it in my understanding of the gender binary?”
2016
People start telling me I am too feminine to be a lesbian. The mask, of girl, I had created took over how I was perceived by my surroundings, not only hiding my identity, but erasing it. According to Butler (2007); Gender constitutes of a repetition of actions that build a coherent understanding of the performed. I had performed my gender so well that it could not be read in any other way. I question if it was ‘my’ gender I was performing, or the gender I was named. Butler (2007) speaks of interpellation, becoming something because you are named as such. I was called a girl so many times, and I adapted my behaviour to become that, but did I truly become a girl? In The Second Sex (1949) Simone de Beauvoir states: 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’ I tried to become one, but didn’t manage. Finlay (2017, p. 65) disseminates Butlers works and states:
Without an ontologically real gender that is epistemologically knowable to the subject, trans and non-binary people’s capacity for self-identification with a gender category different from that which we were assigned at birth, and with which we are traditionally interpellated, is compromised.
So if it is true that gender is entirely constructed by the performance of it, why did I not become the girl I so tried to be? After all these years and attempts to fit inside that heterosexual matrix there still was this feeling of discomfort and not belonging. In Becoming my nonbinary body I attempted to find personal comfort and belonging. To create a sub-space, temporal and small, of safety and personal exploration for the audience to witness. Transforming the discomfort into softness and sharing, under my agency, my authorship, over how to express and be perceived.
Finlay (2017, p. 66) continues:
In “Giving an Account of Oneself,” for example, Butler conceptualizes an unconscious that cannot be narratively accounted for but that resides within us as an unintelligible psyche. Perhaps, as I previously argued, the concept of gender identity is an attempt for individuals to make sense of this unconscious and render it recognizable within Enlightenment-based liberal-humanist discourses.
This would argue that there might be an unconscious ‘core’ element of identity that is placed into this system of society. Something that we dress up in femininity or masculinity to make sense of this unconscious and express it to the people around us. In Dragging (2022, p. 41) - Shaka mcGlotten states: ‘This is the paradox of a mask, right? The mask hides you, but it also allows you to express who you really are’. In Becoming my nonbinary body I unmask this unconscious to show the parts that do not fit into the set standards of society, to then create a new mask that expresses who I am and make my identity intelligible for the audience. Not neccesarily dealing with the truth of that expression, but with the questions and the joy it brings.
2019
At 23 years old I found language for how I felt, and started coming out as nonbinary, dropping the mask of cis-normativity. This meant a journey of re-ritualizing and re-signifying my gender through re-repetition. In Becoming my nonbinary body I dealt with this by slowing down the movements to provide them new meaning. Space in between is created for the audience and me to observe the action and re-evaluate them. To question what I am showing and what mask is being dropped or created.
Activist and artist Alok Vaid-Menon stated: 'My world is already beyond the binary, and every day I’m living it.’ (Getting curious with Jonathan van Ness, 2022). In my experience this is not the case. I live inside a world dominated by the gender binary and have to confront it every day. Through the repetition and signification of my own actions and expression and through the responses to those by society. (Getting harassed on the street or by family) To be seen as something you have to be able to be seen and identified. Where my identity is often still illegible to society because it’s not ingrained in the vocabulary. In the performance I attempt to make my identity visible.
Performance artist Cassils also deals with the visibility of identity in their performance Becoming an image (2012-present). Both performances use a mechanism of transforming the body into an image to be looked at, to be perceived by the audience and to draw their own conclusions on. Both performance work around gender identity and the aspect of not being able to fit the body into a binary gender mold. Although the performances are very different in their execution, through some operations and actions, there is a similar effect.
First the duration of the act of looking. In Becoming my nonbinary body this is expanded, through slow-motion and a duration of 2,5 hours, into extraordinary length, where the audience experience a mode of reflection through the slowness and extended in-betweenness of the motions. In Becoming an image the time to look at the body is diminished to the bare minimum of just the flash of a camera. The darkness in between the flashes is what gives the audience the time to reflect on what they saw and their own ideas on gender.
Secondly intention of the act itself. The acts in Becoming my nonbinary body are simple, everyday acts of creating my gender-expression. The act of putting on make-up, getting dressed, caressing the body and presenting myself to the world. While the acts in Becoming an image are much more aggressive, the punching of a block of clay, the fighting itself. Entering the performance from a stance of softness and vulnerability or hardness and strength. While the effect of the acts remain the same in both performances. To present the nonbinary body to the audience and open up their ideas on the gender binary.
The transgender identity is often related to violence in discourse (Finlay, 2017). Cassils and I have two different approaches to relate to this violence that does occur when someone doesn’t portray their gender correctly. Cassils works with the operation of violence but not with the trans body on the receiving side but on the violent side. Whereas I take away the physical violence and aim to have the audience relate themselves to the violence the gender binary does to all.
The term Becoming is an important concept in the nonbinary identity. The acknowledgement of fluidity in identity. Always becoming, because there is no place to arrive to. I can (and will in the future) transition parts of my body and expression, but I will never be fully acknowledged as nonbinary by society because there is no such category. There is no checklist or marker when, if all steps have been taken, I have ‘done it all’ to become fully nonbinary, as there is in a binary gender transition. Becoming (as well as transitioning) creates the illusion that you are becoming something, but this something is undefined, and not (yet) to be caught in words.
2021
I notice the publishing of anti-trans* rhetoric that continues far into 2022 building social abjection to trans* individuals and bodies. Kristeva (1982) defines abjection as the ambiguous, the in-between and that what does not respect the rules. My nonbinary gender identity and body don’t conform to the rules of binary gender expression. Every week Dutch newspaper articles appear spreading fear and misinformation about trans* identities. Robert Phillips (2014) describes it as:
‘Abjection, as Kristeva describes it, “disturbs identity, system, order” (ibid.) and encompasses a kind of borderline uncertainty — ambiguous, horrifying, and polluting. Transgendered bodies, then, especially when viewed as physical bodies in transition, defy the borders of systemic order by refusing to adhere to clear definitions of sex and gender. The abject can thus serve as a cleaving point of abstruseness and unease — separating, pathologizing, and psychologizing trans subjectivity.’
In a time when the media are constructing rightwing images of fear and disgust around trans* identities and the debate around trans* rights is fiery and toxic, this performance is a rebellious act. To portray nonbinary joy, to force the audience to watch a transition and possibly see beauty in it, to create a safe space where these powerful institutions have no say about my body is an act of protest. A creation of my own utopia, because society makes it seem like I am unwanted here, but I claim my space. There have been other performances around this claiming of space and declaration of the trans* body, like Susan Stryker’s My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix (1994, p. 246), where she declares:
‘I will say this as bluntly as I know how: I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster. Just as the words “dyke,” “fag,” “queer,” “slut,” and “whore” have been reclaimed, respectively, by lesbians and gay men, by anti-assimilationist sexual minorities, by women who pursue erotic pleasure, and by sex industry workers, words like “creature,” “monster,” and “un- natural” need to be reclaimed by the transgendered. By embracing and accepting them, even piling one on top of another, we may dispel their ability to harm us. A creature, after all, in the dominant tradition of Western European culture, is nothing other than a created being, a made thing.’
I approached the operation of creation of a body in a different way, to put on display the (imagined but not yet there) transition of a nonbinary body in slowness and vulnerability. Opening up the possibilities to find beautiful moments in the alien body. Through ‘unnatural’ and seemingly uncomfortable combinations and dismembering of the body, gently dealt with and opened up to the spectator through the gaze, you see nothing to be afraid of in this monster.
2027
The possibility of a reproduction of Becoming my nonbinary body, 5 years after the first event. My body has changed, it’s aged five years, but also it’s made into a true ‘creature’ (Stryker, 1994). Two scarred lines decorate the now flat chest. How does this change the operations used in the performance, and it's effect on the audience? The performance now starts with the ‘mutilated’ body, broken away from the norms of gender and beauty, made into a ‘monster'. This would possibly create abjection in the observer, the transgressions so visible and inescapably there. There is no more possibility to ignore my identity and mold me to the idea of ‘girl’. The object of the performance is no longer a breaking out of norms, but a relating to and questioning the norms and ideas of the audience. The slowness and gaze still inviting them into the performance and the questioning, taking them on a journey from abjection to possible beauty outside of the conventional standards. The monstrous may be much more clear in this performance, through the already ‘mutilated’ body, which may lead to a stronger questioning of what the gender binary actually is and does, but one thing is clear: the monster means no harm, it’s the gender binary harming both the monster and you.
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References:
BEAUVOIR de, S. (1949). The Second Sex.
BUTLER, J. (2007). Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, Routledge.
CASSILS, H. (2012-present) Becoming an Image. [online]. Available at: https://www.cassils.net/cassils-artwork-becoming-an-image (Accessed 04 March 2022).
DENT, J. (2018). Release notes: the formal language of sexuality and gender identity [Online]. Available at: https://public.oed.com/blog/march-2018-update-release-notes-formal-language-sexuality-gender-identity/ (Accessed 04 March 2022).
FINLAY, T. (2017). ‘Non-Binary Performativity: A Trans-Positive Account of Judith Butler’s Queer Theory’, Laurier Undergraduate Journal of the Arts, 4, p 59-69.
KRISTEVA, J., & ROUDIEZ, L. S. (1982) Powers of horror: An essay on abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 1-18, 26-89.
MCGLOTTEN, S. (2022). Dragging; Or, In the Drag of a Queer Life. 1st edn. New York: Routledge.
MENON, A. ’Can we say bye-bye to the binary’ (2022) Getting curious with Jonathan van Ness, Series 1, Episode 3. Netflix
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SEGADE, M. (2019). ‘To strike a pose is to pose a threat’ in HAYWARD GALLERY. (eds.) (2019). Kiss my genders. London: Hayward Gallery Publishers, pp. 56-62.
STRYKER, S. (1994) ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.’, GLQ, 1(3), pp. 237-254.
WAMPOLE, C. (2013). The Impudence of Claude Cahun. L’Esprit Créateur, 53(1), pp. 101–113.
