Recent Developments and New Works, Plans, and Things

'Marlene and Me' dress rehearsal video still for Dundee Fringe Festival, '22

The last 6 weeks have been challenging, with all sorts of things happening: mostly good, but the Solstice was spent being hit by a chest infection as well as the need for emergency eye surgery. However, back on track again and to summarize everything:

21st May: Scottish TransPride in Paisley, Scotland:

June ('til present): submitting work (prose poem entitled 'Ravensong') to Cthulhu Books anthology call-out: Making Kin - Institute for Postnatural Studies The work is inspired by my studies of Old Norse and Old English literature, mythology and poetry.

1st June: a last-minute support slot at the Hunter S Thompson saw me premiering live one of my early 'lockdown poems', as well as an old standard:

15th June: performing brand new spoken word piece 'Stevie Nicks' (again at the Hunter S) which was directly inspired by the raw, emotional and very personal work of the headline act on the 1st of June:

18th June: public presentation of 'Welcome?', a BRAW Bursary recipient (in collaboration with ShaperCaper) in Dundee. My work consisted of a printed poster and 3 A5 flyers discussing international trans rights.

8th July: Presented paper 'Pornographics as Queer Method : Using Adult Online Entertainment as a Strategy for Developing Non-Binary Gender and Being' at the SGSAH 'Prospectives 22' online symposium. I'd planned to be away in Manchester that weekend hence the pre-recorded talk, but elected to stay home to better monitor my eye health, which allowed me to take part in the live Q & A:

In between all this action I was also able to rehearse and record the second instalment of my three-part 'Weimar Cycle', a tribute to the decadent era of German art of 100 years ago, as well as the cabaret tradition and the general air of sexual and gender liberation which flourished at that time. This is 'Marlene and Me':

I have submitted proposals to perform this cycle live at both Buzzcut '23 in Glasgow, and (as a 2-part work in progress) at the upcoming Dundee Fringe in September. I've also submitted a handful of films to the 'Queer Art Now' open call in London. 

Public Works: BRAW Bursary Presentation, 'Welcome?'

 

The  past few weeks have seen me focusing on producing materials for this upcoming event, organised between Dundee dance company ShaperCaper and Dundee Pride, on Saturday June 18th:

BRAW Bursary Recipients — Shaper/Caper (shapercaper.com)

It's been very exciting and rewarding to have the chance to present public work which not only fits my current wider research (social and political attitudes to trans/non-gender normative persons) as well raise awareness of wider internation trans rights (or lack thereof). The work entails one poster (A3) plus 3 A5 flyers, in which trans characters from Iran, Russia and Colombia discuss the realities of living under their respective social and legal conditions. The project is an extension of a piece I had planned during my MFA in 2020, but due to lockdown, it wasn't able to happen. This opportunity has allowed me to expand the original project from a single flyer (focusing on Russia) to three in total.

The project is entitled "Welcome!" and also invites us to consider which nations around the world are more welcoming to trans and LGBTQ+ visitors than others.

Following the event, I wrote up this report:

“All Your Women Look Like Trannies”…Or, Why I'm Here Right Now, Writing This

I've drawn comics (and 'comix') for over forty years. Comic-book art was a large part of my original art school submission folio in 2016, though my distaste for the more obvious elements of the mainstream comics world has only deepened in recent times.

The image of the powerful, ass-kicking (super)heroine in mainstream comic-book art may, at first sight, suggest to laypersons viewing such material that strong, independent, feisty females are a staple of such material, and therefore encouraging signs of gender equality in popular media. Whether they truly do or not is largely due to the writers, since the artists (whether individuals or penciller/inker teams) will likely be the same. However, the aesthetic ‘phiz/phys’ code, when examined, suggests nothing more than skimpiest lip-service to the Women's Movement, and nothing less than patriarchy-as-usual. Shall we break down the aesthetic attributes of all the so-called 'powerful' female characters in mega-selling, mainstream comics (not, please note, 'comix' – which by their very nature tend to be radical, subversive, and challenging)?

  l) Age (apparent): young. Late teens to early, mid-20s at most. Anything older is a mother, a granny, or a bitchy, probably sexually-frustrated boss-type. Superheroes, aliens etc. may in reality be much older, but they still don’t look a day over 24 ½ .

 2) Vitalstatistics: Barbie, or one of her numerous sisters, daughters or grand-daughters. Hip:waist ratio and bust size are vital considerations. Bared or exposed flesh is virtually a must, whether it's cleavage, thigh, abdomen, or all of the above (or more besides) as evidenced in, say, Lara Croft. (Speaking of which, I recently came across this BBC broadcast on the subject: Evil Genius with Russell Kane - Lara Croft, Tomb Raider - BBC Sounds )

 3) Physiognomy: eyes, nose and mouth set according to standard principles in line with l) above – small nose, small babyish chin, big eyes. Individuality, quirkiness, character and age-lines are deficient/non-existent, unless the bitchy bad boss or granny-type needs emphasizing just how utterly unattractive she is, and how redundant to the male viewer's fantasy world as a result.

4) Height: variable. Can be small and petite or tall and leggy in killer heels without damaging the viewer's feelings: the former more likely to be the 'cute/good girl' type, the latter the deadly/femme fatale assassin/hooker-with-a-switchblade/villainess variety.

5) Dress: Skimpy, exposing skin, or if all over, then spray-on skin-tight (nudity by proxy). Boots and high heels of at least 4” often in evidence, no matter the circumstances, terrain, weather or location.

Okay, so the above list is neither entirely serious, or free from stereotypical generalization either. But, as most mainstream comic book artists are male, they not only draw what they like to see, but what is demanded to be seen: the scopophilia of their majority readership ensures few variations on the above coded formulae and sometimes the styles can be almost interchangeable. Some artists do indeed seem to have a single, specific, female type (or personal archetype). Here are examples of completely different characters drawn by Brazilian artist Al Rio, all of whom look not only identical facially, but are carbon copies down to the very hairstyle and expressions:

We can turn now to an industry manual, written by a leading professional, for budding comic artists on how to draw awesome women characters, a title named “Incredible Comic Book Women with Tom Nguyen: TheKick-Ass Guide to Drawing Hot Babes!”

Herein I cite a secondary source rather than the book itself, as I consider the reviewer’s enthusiastic comments to be as worthy of discussion as the book under review. Thus

“Lets face it, if you’re going to become a comic book artist, learning how to draw a hot leggy blond is a must!”

Really? There’s no point then in asking if the blond in question may be black or Asian – they (well, obviously she) will be white. From the samples of Nguyen’s art provided, I saw immediate comparisons with the figure drawing manuals of Andrew Loomis, an artist so influential now that his name is still spoken of reverently in illustration circles, and who is frequently cited as a major inspiration for many of today’s leading professionals. That Loomis had a ‘type’ of woman as much as Rio cited above is evident – they are all young, beautiful, slim, naked (possibly the same model) and often drawn in high heels, with the fetishistic undertones now expected of an artist who understands his intended audience (as does Nguyen, evidenced later). Studying texts like this in my early illustration career (early 2000s) left me conflicted – here was a revered expert, giving sage advice to new artists, yet thoroughly entrenched in its time. In later years, I found Linda Neade’s survey of traditional artists’ drawing manuals to be very reminiscent of Loomis (‘The Female Nude’, pp. 46-55), and things have not changed in the 2l^st century when we consider Nguyen’s ‘how-to’ bible, with his bikini-clad babes guaranteed to maintain the youthful (psychologically, if not physically) male reader’s attention as much as Loomis’ flexible, and utterly traditional, nudes:

Curiously, Al Rio actually includes a re-draw of one of Loomis' costumed models in what purports to be a 'how to draw' class booklet of is own - though it's unclear if Loomis receives credit, it's very easy to see the influence:

Later in the review, the writer of the review of Nguyen’s book does cite diversification:

 “One of the cooler sections I enjoyed reading about was how to capture a specific woman’s likeness for a character, and how to draw ethnic groups that aren’t your own. His number one rule? Avoid stereotypes! It should go without saying, but it seems harder to do than it sounds.”

Yet for all that, non-racial stereotypes remain a continual presence, as is evidenced in a further reviewer comment “on how to draw younger women and older women, pointing out key attributes for each. For instance, it’s important to not make your older women look too agile, and contrarily to not make your younger women look too sexy. Both typically aren’t good things.”

Sexualising young females is certainly a short-cut to serious trouble. But seemingly older women must not be allowed to maintain their youth, whether through intensive tai-chi, dance, aerobics or athletics? Pina Bausch may have disagreed as, for that matter, may Tina Turner or Madonna. The “avoid stereotypes” advice is therefore immediately contradicted for the sake of enforcing cultural expectations,  that grannies must be stiff and useless, and also appear to be so. (From a personal recollection of a family holiday in l98l, when I was 8, I met my father’s grandmother – a lady named Margaret Ashby who was born during the reign of Queen Victoria, and was over 90 at the time. Out on a country walk, she continually succeeded in outpacing both my parents, then in their late 30s, admonishing them both to “keep pace!” - a story frequently retold in family conversations for years afterwards).

A reader, enmeyer_r, may have summed up the entire article (and the book) with his brief comment:

We may wonder why we might expect great diversification, and encouragement to go beyond socio-cultural norms, in a text devoted to producing comic art. I would argue that were any so-called “SJW” to accuse the mainstream industry of peddling outdated and degrading characterisations, there would be many fans who would angrily respond with examples of black, queer and other diversifications in recent Marvel and DC titles, as evidence that such accusations are unfair, unfounded and outdated. But the operative word here is recent, and the overwhelming mass of material carries on regardless, suggesting that the diversity is as much an exercise in tokenistic box-ticking to appease (or encourage) the non cisgender/het/white/males out there to buy into their products. We may also recall that the CEO of Marvel comics gave funds to Trump’s 20l6 presidential election campaign and that comics publishers are corporations like any other. While some may choose to dismiss all comic-book material as ‘harmless fun’ and nothing to worry too much about (assuming that comics are only read by kids, who quickly mature and move on to more serious literature – nothing could be further from the truth, if one chooses to peruse for even five minutes some of the comics fandom forums online), the internalization of such material and the coded forms and representations within are what have led directly to me pursuing this PhD research course, writing these words, on this very subject – the publicly-held belief that my drawings were unsuitable for the general audience (the majority) of comics readers, that my characters did not fit their stereotyped rules of where the boundaries between ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are supposed to lie, and what features and details of human anatomy are classifiable as specifically gendered (in my case, it was my female characters’ jawlines and chins which were problematic for many – being deemed "too masculine" (?), assumptions which reach far beyond comics aesthetics to the realm of ‘facial feminisation’ treatments for transwomen, or why certain men may be accused of having a “gay face” - both issues I've posted about previously). The result of these comments and criticisms soon transferred themselves to my own sense of being, of genderfluidity, and I saw a correlation between how things are perceived, how people are pigeonholed, and the outgrowths of a monstrously, Lovecraftian rhizomatic entity dedicated to enforcing its binary definitions of the world in every and any area of society, and suppressing or denigrating any attempts to the contrary.

The artist (and viewer) therefore has no interest in an individual, as a woman or a distinct person, but as a type: a basic form which ticks the boxes of how much he would like to have sex with her. Before my readers laugh aloud at this ultra-Freudian blanket assumption, there are reasons why comic-book heroines continue to look as they do (differing fashions and styles through the decades notwithstanding) - they are made to appear to the male cis/het gaze which demands desirability, non-troubling glamour and can be 'read' as a female that the viewer can fantasize about, have sex with in their minds, or even project upon themselves (why do so many male gamers play female characters? - can the realm of 'forced feminization' pornography shed some sinister light on this area?). The male viewer desires a woman they control (or occasionally – desires to become a woman who is controlled, the ultra-submissive D/s fantasy of forced-fem. To elaborate somewhat on Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze as an immutable, monolithic tool of repression – not all men share the same desires and hang-ups; poor gay black men will not respond to a scene the same as a rich, privileged straight white guy, or even a Latin or Asian man – but each will bring his own form of masculinity, whether it is queer, straight, or confused, to bear on the semiotics inherent in any scene or representation, and encode them and interpret them accordingly:

 "Whatever happened to Fay Wray

That delicate satin draped frame
As it clung to her thigh
How I started to cry
Cause I wanted to be dressed just the same..."
        -R. O'Brien, 'Fay Wray', 'Rocky Horror Show'

 But wait, some will object - aren't there violent, aggressive, ass-kicking female characters out there? Surely they would intimidate all but the strongest barbarian bloke, no matter how seductive they might appear? I would argue that the 'ass-kicking' aspect of such characters is virtually irrelevant, when compared to the importance of the aesthetic appeal. Lara Croft gets to be smart, tough and hard because she obligingly exposes the expected assets to her viewers: bulging breastlines, cleavage, strong thighs and of course ultra-kissable lips. Her gun, sword, whip or whatever is just another fetishistic phallic adornment, to draw attention away from her implicit biology and gratify the male viewer by proudly presenting her phallic response to his innermost concerns: she's hot, busty, tough and has a dick - hey, she's perfect! Nguyen’s cover art to his book on drawing ‘hot babes’ shows, ostensibly, a gendered role-reversal scene of heroic, brave female rescuing an embarrassed, topless and underwear-clad male from certain doom at the tentacles of an entity of Lovecraftian proportions, parodying the exploitative lowbrow ‘men’s Adventure’ magazine covers of the l950s and 60s, and more B-movie posters and pulp fiction titles than my poor mind can even calculate. But the cis/het/male viewer isn’t interested in the re-gendering of a classic power fantasy trope – he’ll be too busy gawking at her metric metre of cleavage and exposed skin beneath the spray-on costume (conveniently angled towards the reader for the most revealing viewpoint). To me , the underlying message – and the appeal – of the cover is that once rescued, things will return to business-as-usual – the rescuer/rescued inevitably engage in some form of physical romance, and any traditional comic-book nerd would happily endure the cover character’s peril and humiliation if he got to get it on with such an awesome babe. After all, the cover man is a bulky, square-jawed, muscled-up dude of impressive stature – if not a self-parody of Nguyen himself – and still enforces the power-fantasy macho appeal of traditional comic males, with whom the reader identifies. To truly reverse the scene, he ought to have been depicted as a weedy nerd, clearly as incapable of extricating himself from his predicament as all those helpless stiletto-wearing glamour queens in their strategically-shredded evening dresses – at least, until the tough, bruising hero showed up to whisk her away from the clutches of the bloodthirsty aliens, villainous foreigners (likely one and the same), or savage wild animals. Robert Crumb was drawing himself into such fem-dom sexual fantasies five decades ago, playing upon his own geeky, bespectacled real-life persona, but we are a long way away from that here.

Again and again the reviewer of Nguyen’s book emphasises the ‘sexy’ aspect, as Nguyen himself does – he clearly appreciates young women in bikinis, and his ‘rules’ on what is right/wrong or ‘unattractive’ only help to enforce stereotypical attitudes which extend into other areas of art and representation, and ultimately into other areas of life. As this sort of advice is standard for the industry, I now understand why I was subjected to the sort of negative feedback that I received in my past – from other artists who digested and reproduced such fantasy idealisations of ‘how it needs to be’, as well as ‘how we want it to be’ - the latter which summarises the Comicsgate backlash against non-cis/het/white/male characters and creators.

Comicsgate was a reactionary and recent phenomenon, but the underlying mindset is not. I spent over 9 years as a user of Deviantart.com (2207 – 20l6) and saw many hundreds of comments posted on images of female characters, both original (to the creators) and otherwise (fan-art after copyrighted characters). The strength of emotion behind some of the comments and discussions on even some quite 'PG-rated' works were obvious - the scent of sweat and passion almost palpable. Patriarchy-as-usual polices these representations. The ass-kicking ability, as I've said, is irrelevant - it is a mere sidearm to the bruising gatekeeper of visual attraction, and the pleasure encoded in that representation. I know this because I deliberately fashioned my own drawing style over the years I was on DevArt. The images from Al Rio above are contained in an anthology of that artist's work which I purchased in 2000, when I began my comic book drawing career in earnest, and have referred to his images for specifics (line work specifically in the drawing of eyes) so many times that the book is literally falling apart. This was in my early, naive days when I sought popularity and praise, and felt I had to conform – to a point – to what was “out there”. While I admire his draughtsmanship in specific details I dislike very much his vapid, interchangeable production-line mannequins which bring to mind the fetishistic sculptural female objects of Allen Jones, and the sad, grimy nudes of the later Renoir, utterly devoid of character, personality, or a thinking brain behind the bovine stare. One can enjoy and admire the details of a work or an artistic style without being in any way a fan of that artist or that style (in the same way that one can argue for the right for pornography, as a form of representation, to exist, without in any way condoning the actual extremities, attitudes and degradations to which it most usually stoops).

I refused to change my own ways of phiz/phys representation, and certainly refused to buy into anyone else's. My female characters were tough, ass-kicking, and frequently carried lethal weaponry, too. Sometimes they, too, were busty, sometimes not so - it depended on whether that would suit the character and her background. They were often tall, leggy, and invariably muscular. The costume may or may not be tight or revealing, or not (the former the better to show off that hard muscle tone whilst maintaining dignity - the latter, the better to foster ambiguity). So far, so typical, more or less. They were also evidently older than High School age, and had the lines to prove it. The result?

"All your women look like trannies".

So, we come to the pivot point of this writing: the misreading of my characters by a viewership expecting apples, and complaining when they were being fed bananas (for those who missed it, this metaphor is a cheeky nod to a l972 work by Linda Nochlin. I'm not going to spell it out further.) While I had never any intention of depicting transwomen at the outset - I simply drew women as I saw them, with character, occasional wrinkles, strong or stern facial bone structure after the l9th C. and especially the PRB tendency. The broad frames and heavy musculature came later - when I had become annoyed enough, by late 20l5, to start having fun with my characterizations and drawings, and in line with my own developing and radically evolving notions of gender, both personal, and general – and the fact that I have never enjoyed ‘traditional femininity’ in any form, anyway.  I didn't care by then that people saw them as ugly, as rough, as old. Get over it, I thought: have you ever walked down the street and actually looked at the faces of real women (or, have you only looked at the teenaged ones in the tight skirts)? Do you really expect 50% of the world’s population to confirm to your infantile notions of what you deem your “type” for your sexual and aesthetic satisfaction? Are you seriously trying to tell me that a female character with a defined jawline is inherently therefore, by virtue of that single arbitrary physiognomical feature, a biological man?

These questions are anything but rhetorical – they resonate in me now, because they are the questions I ought to have demanded back in the 20l0s when I received those comments on my artworks. Nobody told me I couldn’t draw. Nobody told me I was rubbish, or should give up art. They did, however, warn me that I needed to learn how to draw women “better” (i.e., more stereotypical, more passive, more curvaceous, more bland, less demanding, less troubling, less biologically indeterminate...more desirable).

I quit DevArt before I gained the socio-political and aesthetic armoury to be able to shove it back at the critics, in spades:

After creating the deliberate mainstream trans superhero spoof 'Super TransFixItGurl' (with a trans friend of mine), I developed my first serious transfemale character, Sonya Smirnova, for the epic Russian-based crime series 'Bloodstains'. (To enhance the pointlessness and arbitrary nature of the negativity I'd encountered, she is in fact - facially at least - referenced from a cisgender female model, while many of the body references are from myself. The character is, therefore, a prototype of the definition of this very blog and research project: the sense of incongruity produced by welding one set of gendered attributes to another):

The logic was simple: she looks like a 'tranny' because she is, and is that a problem, by the way? The question was coded into the character. She wasn't young, nor beautiful, nor especially busty. She was a 6'3 ex-athletics champion, and former police officer in contemporary Russia, who had been kicked out of the force due to her transitioning and forced into sex work to remain alive. She was blonde and white, though, which was nonetheless a small chip off a very large chopping block of social unacceptability (herein I, I later realised, I found myself falling for a much-maligned trope in popular media, the transwoman-as-hooker: but to me the logic was clear. Russia's anti-LGBTQIA+ laws are utterly reprehensible, and my work was informed by much reading of contemporary articles on hate crime in Russia. That such a character would only be able to survive on the underbelly of society was taken as read. It remains a difficult work to categorize, and very recent events have left me wondering if I can even continue it at all):

I refused to present Sonya as too much of a victim, though she is of course a helpless nobody against a brutal and authoritarian state government, and a society hostile to people like her - and her bodyguard and benefactor, the main hero of the piece, who is an ethnic Uzbek; a non-practicing Muslim and hence the other half of a completely anti-mainstream comic book partnership, with whom the traditional cis/het/white power fantasists are not expected to identify in any way. Nor did they, and nor did I want them to, though I gave the series one big final push in 20l8 – just as the Comicsgate and Howard Chaykin ‘Divided States of Hysteria’ débacles burst over the internet. I retired 'Bloodstains' and occasionally returned to it, trying to retool the work to suit my ever-evolving views of intersectionality, trans rights and such. While the series remains unpublished (and now runs to over 70 pages of finished work), Sonya found her way into a spin-off for Russian trans rights, a samizdat which came out as part of my MFAAH in 2020:

 

We’ve seen these socio-cultural eruptions in the past – cf. the angry white male burnings of disco records in the US in the 70s. How dare those queers/blacks/Latinos have their own music, and make it popular! It ain’t what we call rock ‘n roll, dammit! (because rock ‘n roll was – of course – invented by blacks, including at least one black queer – Little Richard – who directly inspired the architect of the noisiest, dirtiest rock and roll ever recorded: Lemmy, of Motorhead).

Clothes May Not Make the Man... Thoughts on Masculine and Transvestic Obsessions and Interactions

 As discussed elsewhere on this very blog, when it comes to sex talk, male viewers invariably focus heavily on their own penises, both in terms of how they are responding to the visual and sensory stimuli, and what they would like to do with it (often extremely keen to show it off, whether via stills or video cam, as if one organ is going to be radically different or more fascinating than any other). Interacting with a trans*/CD person, they literally became a part of the 2-in-1 pornographic duality described by Kipnis: 2 genders, 1 sex, in which both males and females are fully and completely compatible. Where I was concerned, we shared the same biology, making it much easier for viewers to identify with, but to also bring to bear a broad spectrum of readings of myself – anything from a 'sissy boy' to a 'bona fide woman' (in all but essentialist anatomy) - more thoughts on anatomy and specific body parts noted here.

From what I've observed, male viewers seem to have a very strong psychological need for the tangible, an attempt to grasp something beyond the immediate, unfolding visual pleasures, a projection into the future possibility of the corporeal – as opposed to, and derived from, the existing virtual here-and-now. A 2^nd or 3^rd message (following the inevitible “hi”), was often “Where are you?”, “location?” or some such variant, expressed more creatively through “Wish I was there now”, “I’d love to meet you”, “Do you ever get to x?”, where x is invariably some far flung South coast city (if within the UK), or else often in another continent altogether.

(Such desires, often very pushy in their articulation and insistence that they will travel to me, that I’m definitely worth the journey/time/money, almost entirely without fail, become laughable in the face of the reality – once the proverbial load has been shot and the user disappears suddenly and abruptly from vision, for ever. My deflections of such overtures started early in my career, with my location limited to “a long way away” (invariably true). The elaborate and seemingly earnest fantasies spun by users with regard to positing some potential future scene of togetherness, going beyond even the merely carnal to social public outings are exemplified in the illustration below. Despite his promises to travel to me (across the Atlantic), and wine and dine me (presumably at his expense, though the user admits to being 19, less than half my age), the suggestion that he spend a few dollars on fulfilling his desires for the here and now prompted a sudden and terminal disappearing act (note the time difference, bottom right, in the 2^nd and 3^rd screenshots below):

 

The very fact that I screenshotted these messages at the time demonstrates my understanding that here was, in fact, an object lesson in the fantasists’ rhetoric – or perhaps, less a desire for actual reality than an extension of the fantasy currently being played out before them, the need to discuss his imaginings and his projection of himself into my physical (not just virtual) space.

Beyond those who identify as men (by far the majority of users I interacted with on video chat), those who identify as CDs, TVs or any trans* spectators, however, tend to refer primarily to appearances – whether the details of my own (appreciation), or theirs, frequently in terms of the materiality of clothing and underwear, and how that makes them feel as a result, and are usually very explicit in terms of what they are wearing (taking care to mention pleats in skirts, seams in stockings, colours, etc., as if either looking in the mirror or referencing very specific images, which they may well be looking at at that time). The zone of interest in each case therefore descends into a strangely traditional – even stereotypical – binary of experience, reflecting precisely John Berger's famous sentiment that “men act, women appear” - herein refined to “men fuck”, “CDs dress [to be fucked]” since much of their discourse focuses around how their clothing makes them feel in the mood to be sexualised, and to experience the pleasure they both seek for themselves and to give to others – whether or not anyone else finds it arousing (it is assumed that someone will). The men seek an object of pleasure – the CD chooses to be that object, often with overt reference to their own desires to be used, abused, and to be seen and denigrated as a “slut”, “whore”, “sissy” etc. Herein I find myself deviating completely from this generic, fetishized CD/TV scene, where the focus is on the lowest, patriarchal interpretations of femaleness: the objectification, the submission, the eagerness to please, to be (ab)used, even humiliated publicly – zones of pleasure which I do not enter, as I do not read or view femaleness on that level, so therefore have no interest in aspiring to it. My observation is that, as cisgendered women (outside of pornography, whether hard or soft) are no longer willing to fulfil those roles unhesitatingly socially or sexually, that men turn to the 'safer' form of the CD/TV with their outward manifestation of femininity, their biological and psycho-sexual phallus and its comforting familiarity, and the CD's very raison d'etre being often solely the gratification of pleasure – woman surrogates who are only too happy to please and who can, one suspects, be treated the way certain men would like to treat their cis women (but cannot) – a worrying tendency I've theorized in the past² as “cis-misogyny by proxy”, in which transfemales are degraded and used with the knowledge that there is no (or scant) legal or socio-political protection for a group of people who remain stigmatized, persecuted and, in many territories, legislated against. That many (who at least claim to be) on the trans* spectrum both allow and seek out this, is indeed a problematic issue, as it bundles paraphiliac fetishists together with both part-timers and full-timers, genderfluid and NB persons, and therefore lends weight to at least some of the transphobic rhetoric from opponents that, in some contexts, cross-dressing behaviour can empower patriarchy and misogyny, normalize such attitudes as a knock-on effect against cisgender women (if it's okay to refer to a trans* female as a “slut” or “whore”). As a performer, seeking reactions and embodying desires which I do not find problematic (turn-offs), I instead aim to operate as the controller of the situation, not the controlled. The presence of capital in the Xhamster ‘paid performer’ scenarios complicated things, bringing with it power on the part of the wielder of the tokens, which is why I very soon made explicit my ‘do/don’t’ list on my profile, to show that I wouldn’t tolerate just any old degradation for the sake of a few bucks. The ‘anything goes’ attitudes of many transvestite and cross-dressed users, for me, come very close to the fetishistic ‘forced feminization’ genre of (usually extreme) pornography, a subject I find personally distasteful, but which seems to go hand-in-hand with the attitudes cited above, namely the ‘sissy’, ‘slut’ fantasies of some. I find both forms of conversation very one-sided and boring, being as they are all about the voyeur, not about any particular interaction with me as a unique subject, but rather a malleable form to be manipulated into their own specific desires – as holes to be penetrated, a doll to be dressed or undressed at will – whether or not that is even compatible with my 'menu' or my own interests. The assumption that I can be persuaded to accord with their desires regardless is somewhat uncomfortably in line with the notion propagated in media and certain films, that cis women, upon resisting men's advances can, with sufficient persuasion and encouragement, be made to submit and agree to the encounter. In this sense I was repeatedly made to feel like one of Allen Jones' mannequin sculptures – an object to have the viewer's obsessions hung upon, rather than as a living, thinking “date” or partner, and which of course led directly to these works.

In terms of the overall situation of attitude/expectation, however, not everyone who is not a part of the solution is necessarily a part of the problem: many millions of women, at the height of the sexual revolution, still chose housework and child-rearing over sexual equality and career-building, although the situation of women in the career/home-making dilemma is not quite analogous to the paraphiliac/fetishist /genderqueer/trans* dichotomy due not only to overlapping tendencies and behaviours, but also that any woman is a legally-documented, tax-paying entity and therefore a statistical value: she either receives family benefits, or a wage/salary, and is able to be counted as such, while cross-dressing paraphilias are visible only when they are seen. Closeted (even married) men who cross-dress (whether through meetings, privately or online), and even cultivate a 'femme' persona and name, are under the radar as far as statistics go, which is why any attempt at quantifying any percentage of the population as trans* is always going to be wholly inadequate. The issue remains that many men are forced into acting as if they were paraphiliacs (sneaking out to hotels to dress, catching time when the spouse is away, 'borrowing' female family members' underwear) because the problems of 'coming out' are too immense or disruptive to family, career or other circumstances and that, given proper time to gestate and flourish, an inner persona may evolve into actual, realised physical embodiment – which is what happened to me³ once I found myself living by myself for the first time. My opportunity to fully investigate the hitherto repressed (albeit awkwardly) side of my personality manifested in a series of online feminine/trans personae (depending upon whether the website in question allowed gender options outside of the binary), and over the years of emails, messaging, chatroom and webcam interactions, I grew to realise that I was evolving as a person, and pushed this evolution as far as I dared. The climax was my first ever night out in public, in March 2014 – an evolution which could never have prospered had I remained with family, or stayed married or in other relationships. In my case, what could have easily been regarded as paraphiliac behaviour in its incipient stages, was ultimately revealed to be the logical conclusion to a process which had its roots in my early childhood.

To return to the online chatroom environment and the difference between the cis male and the TV/CD users, my observation is that the TVs, often apropos of nothing in particular, are keen to describe in detail what pretty, feminine things they are wearing, whether in actuality, or fantasy, e.g.: "I am wearing a short pleated pink skirt and soft white satin blouse right now...", the abundance of adjectives both suggestive of amateur fanfiction as well as overt emphasis both on the look and the feel of the fetishistic garments, either inspired by images or videos, or the viewer's own preferred garments:

 

 This kind of description goes hand in hand with the submissive/masochistic tendencies cited by psychologists as a paraphilia, in which the clothing itself imbues that state of altered self, the objectified 'slut' (usually in the person's own words) who desires to serve orally etc., or be used any which way by a dominant other. The scopophilia of fetishized cross-dressing is therefore made blatant. Clothing as a tactile experience has never had much effect upon me, the result being more in general appearance (does it look right? Do I do it justice?) and how that affects others (do they appreciate it?). It therefore becomes necessary to, in theory, distinguish between paraphilia (cross-dressing solely for sexual purposes) and those who enjoy sexual experiences whilst cross-dressed but also exist in that mode in day-to-day life. Where I stand apart from this internalized form of idealised femininity, which exists only as a pleasure principle, is that my growth as a genderfluid person was refined over decades of masquerade as a cis/het person whilst internalizing my own brand of femininity, and my interest in female clothing and style was informed primarily by real women whom I knew (or at least saw on television or in the media), and whose styles appealed to me first and foremost as distinctive and radical, my recurring point of interest being a classic late 1970s/Bohemian look – long sleeves, long hemlines, boots, hat, gloves – in fact, pretty much full body coverage (think classic Stevie Nicks). I realised, as soon as I'd started to put all this together in the early 2000s, that my reference points dated back in fact to my own lived experiences of growing up with late 1970s, when long swirly skirts and boots were the fashion for women. That such styles now sit comfortably in modern genres as 'gothic', 'steampunk' and 'boho' endows me with accidental underground trendiness. Had I been born female, I would likely have been influenced by, and continue to wear, the same styles, as this was the look adopted by many female friends I had during the 1990s, in the Dundee rock/punk/gothic music scene – which embraced multiple subcultures without much friction or mockery, including bikers, heavy metallists, and others⁴.

2 In my undergrad dissertation, 'The Non-Binary Body' (2020).

3 My beginnings at an early age meant I had no 'girl' clothes to cross-dress into, so I had to rely on imagination, inner dialogue, fantasy and to a large extent, the use of mirrors in order to construct my Other, inner self. While I increasingly felt more female as years went by, it was only through visualising and creating a dialogue with the mirror (and later, the camera) that I was able to see myself as Other and judge, appreciate, modify that construction. Thinking, or 'acting female' whilst embedded in day-to-day 'male mode' felt completely incongruous, and is the source of my own limited, low-level dysphoria – when I find mysef in a situation in which I could only fully and happily express myself in a female mode of being (for example, hearing ABBA or 80s dance tunes whilst out in male mode – music has long been a driving force behind my gender fluidity to the point of me having two completely segregated sets of playlists on my laptops). By age 9 or 10, because I would have felt ridiculous asking my parents to buy me girls' dolls, I made do with 'feminizing' my action men, giving them plasticine breasts, long hair hacked from old rugs and felt-tip pen makeup, resulting in characters who, when dressed, probably looked like Nazi drag queens from Cabaret. This early collision of masculine musculature and physiognomy, and primary symbols of glamour and femininity, appear to be a symptom of my deep-rooted sense of androgyny which has so troubled some viewers of my comic-book art in the more recent past – where certain of my character drawings were regarded as little more than men with breasts and makeup. I recall being very proud of my 'action women', and they seemed far closer to my personal view of womanhood than the impossibly ideal (and very skinny) proportions of Sindy and Barbie. I cannot say if the sense of feminization of these customised figures was in any way heightened by Action Man's lack of genitals – in any case, I don't ever recall considering that aspect of women much until my teens.

4 The extent of my appropriation of my female friends' styles only really occurred to me when I attended a Halloween party in 2005 in full goth drag – my first ever tentative time 'out' (hiding in plain sight) – hosted by the high priestess of Dundee's goth scene herself (and who in fact ran her own coven). I walked in wearing floor-length black velvet, Spanish riding hat and spike-heeled boots, to be welcomed by my hostess: “Oh my God, he's come as me”.

Where have all the opinions gone..?

 As discussed recently with my first supervisor, I've already encountered one of the potential stumbling blocks in this line of research: we cannot force people to react, or interact, with a work, or with anybody else. Hoping to rekindle the kind of debates and discussions on gendered aesthetics I used to have on Deviantart.com when I was a member there 2007-2017, I rejoined a month ago and posted the three images comprising the '3 Questioning Cartoons' series. Despite several hundred hits apiece, zero comments and a few likes each (which I would more than happily trade for actual feedback) are all that have been received to date.

I later posted a photographic pinup work from the first semester of my MFAAH and discovered that even the trolls now no longer have the courage of their own convictions:

Whilst getting into fiery debates about self-image, gender identity and trans rights isn't my best idea of a good time, part of the point of this research is to understand why people insist upon thinking a specific way, and the fact they continue to do so is why this research exists at all. It occurs to me that 'comment culture' and feedback have become deprecated in recent years thanks to other social media and forms of interaction, where all that matters is a single 'like' or 'dislike' click, and number of 'hits'. That, and the tendency for many to explode with fury at the slightest provocation, the mindset which sees any form of response (that is not 100% cuddly-positive) as beyond offensive and a flagrant breach of their human rights, and it's no wonder that some just choose to not enter that arena in the first place. But being in the arena, one expects to be met with furious tigers and big guys swinging swords, not tumbleweeds and distant, unanswered cat-calls.

I must be one of the few artists or internet users around who longs for the days when people just posted whatever the hell they felt like saying...all in the interests of research, of course.

The Beginning: The Proposal

Starting at the beginning: the revised, abbreviated, and fairly rough proposal which was accepted by my supervisory team in autumn 2021, and which frames all the work, research, thinking and tangents which follow.
Title: Towards an Ontology of Gendered Aesthetics: Surveying Topologies of Self and Other in Performance, Society and Media

Description: A practice-led exploration, analysis and critique of the non-binary body in representation, in private reality and being, and in the public consciousness

Research Questions:
Why do some symbols persist universally in human collective consciousness (e.g. the hermaphrodite being, myths of gender-swapping beings/heroes, shamanistic bi-gendered ambiguity) and are yet ridiculed, challenged and suppressed in society and culture?
What constitutes an “acceptable” depiction of a non-standard body – is there such a thing? In what contexts?
Why can ‘niche’ areas like stage performance in an arts context and pornography seem less exclusionary of the Other in gender identity than the general public sphere?

Influenced by trans writer Juliet Jacques’ call for an écriture trans-féminine (after Cixous, see http://julietjacques.com), I hope to explore areas of experience and inner vs outer perception: for example in sexual contexts (e.g online interactions), and in general perceptions – a return to my ‘phiz/phys’ (physiognomy/physicality correspondence/duality) and how the Sartrian ‘look’ of the Other builds (or destroys) the inner sense of selfhood, creating a very real ‘hell’ that is ‘other people’ for those of non-cis gender. My own recent experience in online sex work (documented privately at some length last autumn) may shed some light on the darker (i.e., less illuminated, often ignored/stigmatised) side of non-cis/het being and lived experiences, responses, and interactions. This field of investigation helps to respond to 2 of my initial research questions:

1. What constitutes an “acceptable” depiction of a non-standard body – is there such a thing? In what contexts?
2. Why can ‘niche’ areas like stage performance in an arts context and pornography seem less exclusionary of the Other in gender identity than the general public sphere?

Trans discussions of sexual experiences may be accused of paraphiliac undertones (e.g. autogynephilia¹, fetishized cross-dressing, auto-erotic narcissism) but this must not bar the genuine lived experiences of others from being regarded on the same level as cis/het or gay/lesbian expressions of queer sex, attraction, and problems (attitudes, prejudices) encountered therein. A key text here: Julia Serano, Whipping Girl.

As recent MFAAH work has covered much mythologically-inspired practice, I’ll use the myth/collective unconscious aspect as a starting point, through references to hermaphroditism/bisexuality (cf. Juliet Mitchell, Feminism & Psychoanaysis).
Reiterating the flattening of high/low socio-cultural dichotomies (cf. Takeshi Murakami’s ‘Superflat’ theory) and interrogating those same existing structures (cf. Foucault, Stallybrass & White writing after Bakhtin on the grotesque body and carnivalesque – also Linda Neade, The Female Nude) - exploring the rhizomatic forms of such structures and where these structures break down (or don’t), and where fetishized constructions and judgement values are applied in a specific non-cis context (whilst acknowledging limited work already exploring, for example, non-fetishized attraction in males to transwomen – see Evangelista, 2020). As I already have a documentary body of work from these experiences, I’ve (tentatively) begun a series of photographic pieces echoing both the artist-as-sculpture concepts of Bruce McLean (‘Nice Style’ pose band, ‘Pose Works for Plinth’) and the fetishistic sculptures of Allen Jones (‘Women as Furniture’) in which I respond directly to the gaze of viewers, conversations, demands and comments received during my 5 months of online wor in 2020². Hence, the performativity of trans selfhood and how performance constructs the self through the reactions gained from others in a certain symbiosis (expectation→ reaction → fulfilment). Another key text: Laura Mulvey, Visual & Other Pleasures.

Returning to the phiz/phys concept of perceived gender aesthetics, what constitutes gendered (usually arbitrary/essentialist) human features and body parts? Hence, drawings/renderings of ‘difficult’ (ambiguous) comic-book style portraits and subjects as a response to the 2018 Comicsgate debacle, and negativity directed against my own works in this field over the years: thus, a challenge to fixed positions of ‘gendered faces and bodies’, and exploration of the narrow field of cis/het male expectation with regard to the aesthetics of female characters and representation (as well as trans/NB characters³). This may then move into public anonymized surveying.

A starting point for possible research outcome: Penthesilea (film), Mulvey & Woollen, 1974.

1 Admittedly a controversial term, which warrants further analysis as my work hopes to cover not only the trans/NB person as perceived by the Other, but also how such persons perceive themselves, and behave/display themselves as a result of this inner perception (as well seeing Self as Other).
2 From an ethical and data collecting point of view, such statements and attitudes may have limited value – one issue raised against the Stanford ‘gay face’ study was that it utilised image data pulled from adult dating sites. The best use of these messages might be the informing of art practice rather than as ‘hard’ data or research, given the circumstances in which most of them were created – although they do present a spectrum of attitude and perception towards the author in a specific anonymised, social context, from a broad cross-section of male viewers – wherein, the intersection of race, nationality/culture, language, and even income became apparent.
3 Traditionally, female readers are far happier with androgynous figures than males – hence the great popularity of Japanese anime and manga among queer and female fans and creators.