Out of Body

When I was very young, I used to spend hours alone playing with an imaginary friend, daydreaming, and generally pretending to be someone else. My play world was boundless, engaging and fun. No matter what form of play I chose to express, I typically imagined myself as a boy named Steve. This is the role that I always chose because doing anything as a girl made no sense to me, as the girls I knew did not play the way that I would play. I still experience a cognitive dissonance with who I know myself to be, and who I am expected to be, so I have learned to meander through the world with a dissonant filter of twisted cultural references, influences and identities.

Those daydreaming traits are still present in me. I often find myself drifting in and out of deep thought when I am reading (an unfortunate handicap to have as a graduate student). When I close my eyes and think about who I am and who I am perpetually becoming, I see the image that I found necessary to create; an alternative version of myself. A remix of the body and mind. A combination of my radical political expression, high culture, my alternative stance on blackness, and my gender (re)presentation. And when I play or perform my multiple selves, I feel out-of-body. I literally experience a shift in my body and mind. Perhaps it is an adrenalin rush that I feel when I am suddenly pressured to be male or female, or when I intercept the gaze of interest from a gay man or the gaze of suspicion intended for a black male. How I interact with these moments outside of my "magic circle" can be likened to a lucid dream; opportunities to actively participate in and manipulate "imaginary" experiences in the dream environment .

While I periodically feel an other-worldly disconnection between my mind and body (especially as I was in the throws of transition) my "alternate universe" is in fact very real. Playing within it requires improvisation, concentration, role-playing, tension and balance. Play is serious, and is considered to be the highest and holiest forms of expression, according to cultural historian Johan Huizinga.

Inside the play-ground an absolute and peculiar order reigns. Here we come across another, very positive feature of play: it creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection. Play demands order absolute and supreme. The least deviation from it “spoils the game”, robs it of its character and makes it worthless. The profound affinity between play and order is perhaps the reason why play, as we noted in passing, seems to lie to such a large extent in the field of aesthetics. Play has a tendency to be beautiful. It may be that this aesthetic factor is identical with the impulse to create orderly form, which animates play in all its aspects. The words we use to denote the elements of play belong for the most part to aesthetics, terms with which we try to describe the effects of beauty: tension, poise, balance, contrast, variation, solution, resolution, etc. Play casts a spell over us; it is “enchanting”, “captivating”. It is invested with the noblest qualities we are capable of perceiving in things: rhythm and harmony.

It is through play that I am able to recreate a rational, beautiful world. I can take potentially uncomfortable experiences and turn them into something new; a recontextualization of every unwanted moment of curiosity, confusion and exotification. There is indeed, a rhythm and harmony to this mode of existence that can be breathtaking and completely freeing. The rules are mine to create and break. I have more room to act out, experiment, and develop my navigation skills. The more time I spend time examining others as they enter my "magic circle", the more rules of engagement I learn that can be applied to specific spaces. In this play-world, a gender non-conforming, culturally alternative, person of color is provided the opportunity to practice moments of disidentification. Remixing as mode of physical performativity and existence.

Strategic Possibilities in (Dis)Identification

“To juxtapose, is to find the right fit” says Jeff Rice, author of The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media. In his chapter regarding the art of juxtaposition, Rice discusses this style of writing or composition, as being native to deejay (DJ) and digital visual culture. A DJ or video artist will create new compositions, by juxtaposing appropriated ideas, images, and music through a thematic filter. Within my exploration of intersectional identities, I am interested in exploring a concept of remixing as a process of identity construction and image appropriation as a mental and physical process. I am particularly interested in the specificities of intentional genderqueer “passing”; the ability to be recognized by society at-large as male, female or neither, and the opportunities for freedom created by such a fluid, irreverent stance. By image sampling, physical cutting & pasting, and mental cueing, queer and trans people remix their bodies, turning everyday interactions into a creative act. These everyday creative acts can be particularly pungent for gender non-conforming people of color, as the addition of race adds a layer of complexity and surveillence.

Certainly all people go through a process of identity construction as they age. We each have various influences that make up who we are as individuals which factor into who we ultimately become. But should an individual inhabit a “body of dissent”, then the act of juxtaposition will take on added meaning, responsibility, and power. Genderqueer people juxtapose their bodies as an act of “disidentification”, a term coined by performance studies theorist, Jose Esteban Munoz. Disidentification has many uses. For the queer person of color, it is a mode of existence, an act of rebellion, an alternative discourse, a survival method, and an artistic practice.

As a mode of existence and act of rebellion, Munoz tells us “Disidentification is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.” (4) As a genderqueer person of color, this concept is very relevant to my daily experiences as I slide in and out of various public spaces. My choice to remove my breasts and flaunt my facial hair is in direct conflict with what it means to be female. My choice to continue using female pronouns despite passing as male, ruffles the hair of some LGBT community members. Passing as a man sometimes means playing up hyper masculine traits to avoid being called a faggot. And passing as a black man occasionally means being monitored. Fluidity in embodiment, and in practice.

Invisible is an artful self-produced documentary video of FTM Youtube vlogger Laidbaqq. In it, he stands in front of the camera defiantly, covering his breasts with his hands as he addresses the audience about his frustration with the expectations put upon him by mainstream society regarding masculine identity and performance. While he doesn’t address the issue of race in this piece, putting his body on display and declaring a trans identity (as opposed to a male identity) on one of the most visible and dangerous websites in the world is an incredibly brave act of disidentification. Munoz references queer theorist David Halperin in his explanation of a mode of identity construction. “To practice a stylistics of the self ultimately means to cultivate that part of oneself that leads beyond oneself, that transcends oneself: it is to elaborate the strategic possibilities of what is the most impersonal dimension of personal life – namely, the capacity to ‘realize oneself’ by becoming other than what one is.” (178) This potentiality, this ability to transform oneself is a wonderful description of how it feels to… come of age, so to speak. To come out. Three times. First as a lesbian. Then as queer. Then, as trans. Every layer of guilt, embarrassment and fear begins to fall away as you allow yourself to be exactly where you are.

My final point of interest is Munoz’s reference to the use of objects within disidentificatory practices. He says, “Disidentification for the minority subject is a mode of recycling or re-forming an object that has already been invested with powerful energy.” (39) In remixing the body, disidentificatory actions take place. Viewing videos like Invisible on FTM Youtube communities, or attending an Original Plumbing Magazine party, provides a trans questioning person with many visual references of transness. These images are appropriated and sampled and are used to begin a reconstruction of the mind and body. If one chooses to enlist medical intervention, a cut and paste action occurs, with the removal of unwanted body parts and the addition of hormone replacement therapy to increase one’s ability to pass. Here, the body is the object that is being recycled and re-formed, or remixed; these juxtapositions form a new composition or a new body for the trans or genderqueer individual. The inherent fluidity of transitioning can be likened to the improvisational nature of a live DJ performance. The DJ might build a set list on the fly, based on the energy they are receiving from the crowd at any given moment, just as a gender variant person might react to a person in a public setting based on the threat level they feel in that moment. And like the DJ (“bag of tricks”), a gender variant person will have a toolbox available to help them navigate various spaces. And occasionally, we get lucky (my Tweet from 2 days ago)…