Alchemy: Performing Myselves and the Everyday Practices of Subjectification/Objectification (2016)

A significant number of the feminist artworks analyzed in my book project Erotic Resistance: The Struggle for the Soul of San Francisco are self-portraits. As part of my practice-based research, I developed this self-portrait in order to gain a more embodied understanding of the performativity and transformative potential of gender and sexuality, which are themes that are highly relevant to erotic performance. More broadly, themes of gender and transformation have been explored throughout the history of feminist and queer performance such as in works  by Eleanor Antin (Carving, completed in1972) and Cassils whose multimedia work CUTS (2011-2013) directly references Carving. Both of these works document the artists’ physical metamorphoses over a certain period of time, presented as individual photographs on a grid.

Though Alchemy takes the form of a slideshow and ends with images of my transformation presented in a similar grid-like formation, I departed from these two precedents. At first, I presented the genders sequentially, followed by a tryptic series in which all three genders appear in the same frame, performing the same gesture, albeit nuanced and inflected by their specific gender presentation—from boyish androgyny to voluptuous femininity. Though the slide show may appear to end with the femme persona, it leverages the format of the tryptic to intervene in the gender binary. The self-portrait emphasizes an alchemical process that does not necessarily culminate in one version of idealized femininity. My performance of different degrees of femininity in relation to my masculinity was an attempt to investigate and reconcile my multiple genders into a more harmonious whole, by way of an ongoing metamorphosis, in which there was a more fluid, forward and backward movement between genders.

In the context of the book project, Alchemy functions as another object of analysis and example of the feminist praxis of self-portraiture that calls into question the gaze, like the works analyzed in the final two chapters of the book. The book’s interlude functions as autotheory (a mode of critical artistic practice informed by feminist writing and activism) in which I intertwine a theoretical engagement with and personal account of this creative process.