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.