Tranimality

   Change seems constantly on my mind. Political change.    

  Climate change. And tucked away, sex change. It’s my experience, after all. Like a storm’s energy before its bright beaks of lightening and fisted thunder, sex’s transformation starts imperceptibly. The effect can be dramatic, as with a storm, but sex itself is not any simpler than weather. In general, we pretend sex is obvious, some reductive algebra of chromosomes and physiology, but as we’ve slowly come to realize, sex is many different processes that include X and Y chromosomes, hormones, gonads, internal sex structures, and external genitalia as well as history, culture, environment, affect, and other variables still to be named. Moreover, our interpretations, definitions, and claims about sex help to shape sex, as recently illustrated by U.S. Representative for Missouri Todd Akin’s aim to redefine sex for his own theocratic ambitions. So variable has sex become that it is nearly impossible to focus on one aspect without recognizing the refractive effects of other aspects. Excitingly for some, unnervingly for many, and boringly for others, sex remains unfinished indefinitely. 

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            Cut Sex Animal

Erica Rutherford’s work explores transsexual becoming, how the changing of sex is not about loss or amputation, but about producing the conditions of physical and psychical re-growth. And, what I find particularly interesting about Rutherford’s later paintings is the way she extends these initial questions about transsexuality to consider the problematic of the category of “human.” The transsexual in Rutherford’s work transitions through animal traffic.

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Trannymonster

The gender ambiguous voice is unrepentant, a queer mixture of the sexes, “monstrous.” Monster comes from the Latin monstrum, meaning an aberration within the natural order. Denizens of the borderland, the so-called monster defies categories. Not surprisingly, what we call monsters are often only reflections of our most profound terrors and desires. Less obviously, monsters reveal the fact that we each contain something of the other; elements of “you” lurk within “me.” And with the hermaphroditic, we are reminded that even in our differences, we all possess male and female attributes. Writing about Michael Jackson’s violation of the rules governing racial and gender identity, James Baldwin offers that perhaps what is truly monstrous is not ambiguity, but the fight against androgyny in an effort to reinforce conventional gender roles. What is terrible is a restrictive gender regime; a terrorist is someone who polices the borders of gender.

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Octo-girl 

"Reality is an active verb, and the nouns all seem to be gerunds with more appendages than an octopus."

Reality is neither a state nor a fixed being, says Donna Haraway, but movement toward being that produces beings and becomings (gerunds) with “more appendages than an octopus.” She writes: “Beings constitute each other and themselves through their reaching into each other, through their ‘prehensions’ or graspings.” The prehensile quality of beings and their relatings involves both tactile, visual, and other sensual-perceptual forms of grasping: “reaching into each other,” in Haraway’s idiom, involves both physical and emotional forms of interdigitation. Reality takes shape in a touch, in a grasp. If reality is an active verb (anthimeria: that which turns nouns into verbs), then for Haraway, being and doing are octopoidal (resembling or suggestive of an octopus, or the arms of an octupus; octopus-like). The prehensions or arms of the octopus forge the activity of relating, what Haraway calls “potent transfections.” Hararway’s figure for the appendages of reality, for the prehensions and grasping in significant otherness is an octopus.

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Arachnosexuality

Arachne, the weaver, reveals the sexual  transgressions of the gods transfigured  into animals in her tapestry: Zeus (as a  swan) with Leda, (as a white bull) with Europa, Poison (as a bull) with Arne.  Offending the gods, Arachne is transformed from human to spider. A spinner of heavenly bestiality, Arachne melds species boundaries, but also transgresses nature and culture through a technological out-doing of the sacred. Arachne is a spiderwoman, but also a trans-woman.