Final Feeding
written a few days after performing this spontaneous ritual, nude, in a shopfront window in Hampton Wick.
Final Feeding. Spontaneous performance inside a WiP installation at RuptureXIBIT. 9 June, 2023. Duration: 75 minutes. Seated meditation whilst receiving an IV for pancreatitis, nude in a nest of Kraft paper, attached to a creature via surgical tubing. Nurse: Sharon Owenga (Photo: Sharon Owenga, street view through the High street shop-front window).
The last thing I remember was that my power was located in my sexuality, and that if I wanted to be seen beyond the event horizon of the female body I had been born into, I had to accept that. I had to accomplish my gender before I could be seen as anything beyond my gender. At the same time, social policing of women’s bodies, of my own body, was reaching me via my mother, sister, grandmother, aunties. Sit up straight. No one likes a fat girl. Beef curtains. Carpet muncher. Dyke. If you fail in the performance of your gender, you become dried up, useless, empty, husk-like, unfuckable.
No where in this litanty of how I should be’s is any room for how I might be, and I had to be led to the edge of freedom by my own two transgender daughters. My work knew I was queer long before I was brave enough to agree with it. This work lives at the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, and ableism.
For the past six years, I have been bed-bound about 70% of the time with undiagnosed pancreatitis, complicated by cervical angina (I’m a former athlete who has a neck fusion). I was told for six years that I was menopausal, anxious, depressed. I was hit on or ignored by doctors. Now, I am transforming into myself again, and they are unrecognizable, yet completely familiar to me. They are not free yet, because I’m 52, I’m married, this is scary. But shaving my heavy long hair – this indicator of femininity, this mantle I wore as a signifier of acceptance of my gendered roll – eased the pain in my chest significantly. The weight of my hair was killing me. Literally and metaphorically. I needed a medical reason to change my appearance to begin to approach the way I identify – that is how scary it is. But I am not Woman and I am not Man. I am non-binary.
As I received IV fluids for the first month of my recovery from a grave six-year illness, I began to let go of the patriarchal framework. As it fell, I saw myself. As it fell, I saw my construction. As it fell, I killed her off, in all her pretense of cleaving to the Shoulds of gender normativity.
In this performance, you can see mottled skin where I burned myself wrapped in electric heating pads for the pain. I cut my waist-long hair, shaved the back of it short, and presented myself as a supplicant to the creature I had been building. I sat before her, realizing whoever had gestated her in this too-small box had known she would die, that she would beat herself to death in a box she would never escape just trying to get off the ground.
As I sat, this creature became a mirror of my former self, and as the IV bag emptied into my plumping, healing body, I saw myself as separate from the battle to exist as a person living at the internationality of fatal disease and the female body. I saw my body very differently, perhaps from the rare perspective of the sudden withdrawal from the threshold of life. I’m unsick. I’m aging in reverse, watching her, who she had become, recede. An opportunity for the story to go a different way. I emerge no longer she, but They.
