Author: Imke Gerhardt

The phenomenology of trans-masculine gender flux in performance

In a political climate that demonises and pathologises trans realities, this insightful text by performative researcher Kars Dodds is both an intimate documentation of their own being in flux and a political call to action. Responding to the persistent absence of trans-led inquiry within academic discourse, Dodds’ embodied, phenomenologically centred methodology not only addresses significant epistemological gaps but, through the positioning of the Self as both subject and object of research, simultaneously enacts a political gesture of queering and destabilising the epistemic rigidity of academia itself. This writing — and Dodds’ artistic practice more broadly — is situated within the context of queer theorists such as Sara Ahmed, T.J. Bacon, and Susan Kozel, and is influenced by queer artists such as Wet Mess and Cassils. Yet, while this text engages with those queer voices, its sensitive tracing of trans-masculine corporeality allows it to become something of its own.

Author’s note: This piece was completed in September 2024 and addresses the social climate facing the trans community up until that point in time. With the current risk of segregation as a measure to remove trans people from public life, the gender flux I describe has become an even greater risk in the past year. The core of my work lies in a yearning for freedom of expression for all. None of us are free until all of us are free. Free Palestine. Free Sudan. Free Congo.

This piece is a protest of trans visibility by documenting and discussing my experience of ‘having tits’ as a trans-masculine person. This text is built on the research for my work Trans-masc Tits: WHY NOT CHOP THEM OFF which confronts readers, viewers, and myself with the aggressive realities of gender dysphoria, specifically chest dysphoria as experienced by individuals assigned female at birth (AFAB), while also allowing for ambiguity and the irreverent pleasure of being trans. The phrase WHY NOT CHOP THEM OFF originates from my practice, the ambiguity and potential for misinterpretation of which are deliberately employed as a provocation. Being trans is not a pathology, and there are many pleasures to this semi-dissociated relationship I have with my tits. The joy of being this way is that there is no given way to be. There is space and endless permission to fail my undefined gender joyfully. While undergoing periods of gender questioning, there is a gender ambiguity that offers an abundance of possibilities to the individual. In itself, being trans provides a natural liberation from gendered social expectations. The continual questioning and discovery have given me the most immense joy and pride in myself and being trans. 

It is my hope, first, to provide an example of raw trans visibility for anyone who is questioning their gender identity and finds themselves confronted by transphobic attitudes and institutions. Secondly, I hope to provide a reference and example of in-betweenness in the transition process for artistic and academic discourses, where binary gender is dominant. 
Beyond my interests, this writing — along with my ongoing performative exploration of the topic — counters current Gender Critical discourses across academia and socio-political dialogue. My motivations for this research are personal, where I firmly believe that the personal is political.  I attest to the challenges my identity, body, needs, desires, and those of those within my community face.

Positioning the Self: On Motivation and Method

On a broader scale, transgender visibility is increasingly essential as anti-trans legislation, institutional transphobia, and Right-Wing ideologies continue to chase us with metaphorical torches and pitchforks. Trans people, and our allies, are tasked with amplifying our voices for our right to healthcare, safety, recognition and unadulterated, messy, loud, colourful, authentic queer joy — none of which we take for granted. Historically, queer resilience, protest, and community have been our primary tools for survival towards the visibility we have today. Current matters show that while we are more visible than ever, we still bear the weight of excessive discrimination. The United Kingdom has witnessed rampant and unfiltered transphobia across the lead-up and aftermath of the 2024 General Election. Trans kids, young people, and adults have been mocked and used as political pawns, for example, in the public and political coverage of the transphobic murder of teenager Briana Ghey. Rishi Sunak openly mocked trans-womanhood while the teenager’s bereaved mother sat in chambers. Keir Starmer, in retort, publicly shamed the then Prime Minister (Courea, 2024), an act of allyship he is yet to remain firm on post-election.

The vicious acts of transphobia, gender critical discourse, and conservative politics that mock and dehumanise trans people make being transgender in this environment a deeply challenging experience.
In a societally hostile environment, where possibilities for identification are limited or absent, queer people are compelled to cultivate resilience and the strength to orient and locate themselves within an unwelcoming society.

This often exhausting process of seeking orientation is examined by queer theorist Sara Ahmed, who, in Queer Phenomenology, introduces the concepts of orientation and disorientation. By doing so, she demonstrates that queer people are tasked with finding themselves constantly without the privilege of seeing themselves within the world (2006, p. 12). It goes without saying that in many communities and for many people, this results in denial and shame of the authentic experiences of the Self, or rather Self/s which I later explain. This highlights a social determinist frame through which queer visibility and resilience are limited, varying from individual to individual.

I encountered significant challenges navigating a binary-conceptualised world throughout my career as a professional dancer, especially within the rigidly gendered structures of the ballet world. While training and performing in ballet and contemporary dance styles at a professional level, I experienced more than ten years of gender questioning.
My first notable experience of gender dysphoria took place while preparing for a run of The Nutcracker (an annual ballet tradition). I could not recognise myself in the mirror as I painted my face and strapped myself into a tutu in the dressing room. This incongruence continued to fluctuate and peak over the next 3 years. I then came out as non-binary and started to decrease my commitment to technical dance training. I lived proudly under these terms until moments of masculine certainty became recurrent in 2021. These experiences and an ongoing incongruence with my trained artistic medium led me here, where the overlapping incongruence between my gender identity, embodied experience, and trained performance practice requires my attention towards reclamation.

Inspiration for reclaiming my artistic practice came from queer artists whose work exists beyond traditional canonical frameworks in dance, sculpture and performance art. One of those artists is Katy Pyle, who is the founder and director of Ballez, a queer New York City-based ballet company. With their company of queer and trans dancers Pyle has created a place for queer stories and bodies within the canon of story ballets and the ballet class framework. In their forward to (Re:)Claiming Ballet (2021) Pyle discusses the importance of reclamation from the traditions of ballet that made them betray themselves. They write “This applies to technical standards as much as dress code and classroom decorum. And we carry this lineage in our bodies right alongside our technique. These deeply internalised value systems do not just damage us, they also isolate and fractionalise us away from one another” (2021, Pyle). Similarly to Pyle, I easily lost my authentic sense of Self in the traditions and normative patterns that ballet drilled into my body. The eroded Self that remains, I perceive as being in a transitory place that fluctuates from affirmation, and dysphoria, and results in a messy, complex gender experience. In my current separation from ballet and dance performance, I am reclaiming both my Self and my artistry. Pyle has found a reclamation in redefining the norms of ballet, while I seek reclamation by expanding the mediums through which I create to make sense of my gender identity through bodily and material explorations. This expansion is like stretching the concept of the self, allowing fluidity and plurality to emerge.
The fluidity of Self/s that inhabits the gender-diverse individual throughout their lifecycle and the orientations they navigate socially and somatically, generates a multiplicity of opportunities for orientation. Normative notions of the biological body, gender, identity, and sense of Self are all opportunities for orientation or disorientation in contextualising ourselves and our experiences. Orientation towards the body as a place for making sense of things, for me, is occasionally disorienting due to the unpredictability of my gender dysphoria. The centrality of my tits within my dysphoric experience ironically informs my identity as a way of orienting me socially and internally as a trans-masculine person.

On tits. 

In the title of this work, I intend for ‘tits’ and ‘chop’ to stand out as colloquial expressions to disrupt formal academic linguistics and in an effort to reclaim them against my chest dysphoria. While each reader will hold different associations and reactions to the word ‘tits’, I chose to use it in protest and for the reclamation of my own body. ‘Tits’ holds a negative, patriarchal connotation that sexualises and objectify cis-women, trans-feminine people, and trans-masculine people with tits. As part of my research I explore the historical etymologies of the Oxford Dictionary and my trans-ed relationship to ‘tits’ and ‘chop’ to define my use, and relationship to the words themselves. 

‘Tit/tits’ are now most typically used as slang to indicate a person’s breasts (Oxford English Dictionary, 2024). As an object, ‘tits’ then become a source of sexual desire and degradation. The original use of ‘tits’comes from Old English (5^th century to 1066) to refer to the teat or nipple (Oxford English Dictionary, 2024). This first use of tit/tits references both human and animal bodies, suggesting a dehumanisation that likens women’s bodies to milk production in livestock, assigning a capitalistic market value in alignment with the body part. In later uses, ‘tits’turn almost exclusively to the bodies of women/AFAB individuals when implying sexualisation or sexual attraction. Since 1881, ‘tit’ has been used as an insult, meaning ‘idiot or fool’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 2024). This meaning degrades the individual to establish a hierarchy of worth and power between the insulter and the insulted by othering the insulted. By choosing to use this word of dense weight and history, I feel I am able to reclaim the sexuality, gender, and objectivity of my body. Descriptively chop is satisfyingly aggressive and definitive. To chop is defined as “transitive; to cut with a quick and heavy blow; now always with a hewing, hacking instrument, as an axe or cleaver; formerly also with a sword” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2024). The use of the word is productively destructive, in the same way that top surgery is to someone with chest dysphoria. Simple, only one sharp movement and done. As a noun, ‘chop’ refers to a type of meat, generally a rib (Oxford English Dictionary, 2024). Meat comes from an animal that is, or once was, alive. The act of chopping separates the object of material value from its aliveness to serve another purpose. In this sense, I could consider my tits already chopped. They may be mine in their attachment to my body. Yet I frequently experience them as disjointed, separate from myself. As a trigger to my dysphoria, they are perceptively other, in a denial of somatic attention. I bind them with tape or cover them with layers of clothing. And I pull, poke, and prod at them. In this, there is an in-betweenness of dysphoria and euphoria, and ownership and dis-ownership – where I can happily act on them as an object. Undoubtedly, I want to chop them off, to disown them and find myself imagining my body, myself, and a life without them. Me and my tits, somehow connected in flesh but disconnected in Self. I discover safety in self-objectifying my tits, as it affirms them as an object. It is as if I can reclaim my ownership of my body and identity, and of my tits, by rationalising them as an external object. 

Fuck the ‘stages of transition’

The trans-masculine frames my inquiry into the lived experience of ‘having tits’ to infer that, as a trans-masculine person, my tits are a significant trigger to my gender dysphoria, causing me to experience chest dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is defined as “when a person experiences discomfort or distress because there is a mismatch between their sex assigned at birth and their gender identity” (“Glossary – TransActual”, 2024). Additionally, gender dysphoria is a clinical diagnosis that is compulsory for gender-affirming surgery referral in the UK. For trans-masc people, this commonly includes a subcutaneous mastectomy, or colloquially ‘top surgery’. A common experience when coming out is that the surgical status of the individual’s anatomy becomes the first object of interest to the other party. Shon Faye and Travis Alabanza cite this experience in their respective works, The Transgender Issue (2022, p. 64) and None of the Above (2023, p. 41). In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) allows self and GP referral to Gender Identity Clinics (GIC), where waiting lists are notoriously long. This creates a significant barrier for trans people, as there is an elusive and undefined waiting period (Zaccaro & Fagg, 2024). In protest, a group of trans youth from the UK-wide action network Trans Kids Deserve Better scaled to the ledge of the NHS offices in London Waterloo to protest the NHS-commission Cass Report that led to the nationwide defunding of puberty blocker for trans people under 18 (Stonewall, 2024). They camped out there for 4 days. One activist, Deb (17), mentioned their mantra while camped out on the ledge,  “it’s safer up here than on the NHS waiting list” (Baker, 2024). Deb’s words are visceral and capture the mental state of trans people across the UK, myself included. 

The stages of gender transition, as they are understood and most commonly communicated, are incomprehensive and oversimplified categories that suggest an unrealistic linearity. The stages include self-discovery, social transition, and medical transition. This provides a linear timeline for gender discovery that is unattainable, if not impossible, for non-binary-leaning trans people. In 2023, an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) study on the trans-masculine experience of care in GICs showed that the medically accepted ‘stages of transition’ were commonly rejected by participants as a way of gatekeeping affirming medical intervention. Instead, participants were tasked with fitting their experiences into these stages to make them ‘convincing’ enough to receive medical attention (Mills et al., 2023, p.21). Fluidity, non-linearity, and flexibility within the gender binary and approach to transition were outside of the medical understanding of transness as a pathology. Mills et al. show that this rigid approach to transition was not recognised by anyone within their pool of participants (between the ages of 23-44) as they discussed coming out and discovery as a ‘life-long’ process, not a mere ‘first stage’. 

In my work, I am curious to investigate the decision-making process and waiting period between social and medical transitions. ‘Social transition’ defines the period in which an individual makes social changes to align their social experience to their gender identity, e.g. using a new set of pronouns, a new name, or changing their appearance (TransActual, 2024). Frequently, in the common binary understanding of transness, this occurs before any medical intervention as a way of ‘trying on’ and ‘trying out’ new forms of gender expression. Though there has been a significant shift towards self-referral in gender-affirming care, you are required to have lived socially as your preferred gender for at least 2 years to get a gender dysphoria diagnosis and gender recognition certificate (GRC). The diagnosis is no longer required under the Equality Act 2010, which protects UK citizens from discrimination across all aspects of life. Still, a GRC makes the process of accessing referral to gender-affirming surgery smoother. The Labour Party has promised to review and make the process simpler. However, this announcement preceded Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s public agreement with J.K. Rowling, in an interview with The Times, said that trans women should not be allowed in ‘biological women’s spaces,’ referencing the ongoing transphobic argument that trans women are merely predatory men seeking access to women’s spaces (Swinford, 2024). The requirement for a diagnosis and GRC act as a way of gatekeeping gender-affirming care from trans people (Ashley, 2019, p. 480). As a prerequisite to affirmative care, it functionally prolongs consistent experiences of gender euphoria and delegitimises the person-first trans experience. It also means the individual must tackle the dangers of ‘not passing’ or being perceived as trans during this period. In 2020, an IPA research study examining gender dysphoria found that alongside experiencing dysphoria, research participants experienced both negative social consequences due to their gender identity and internal processing of rejection and transphobia (Cooper et al., 2020, p. 7). Thereby informing the complexity of the gender dysphoric and trans experience through internal and external perception(s).

On sapphic imagination and desire

Swans For Play is a voyeuristic experience. An experience of something intense. Something a viewer might want to become a part of but is only allowed to witness from the margins. What happens is never fully given. It stays suspended between what is visible and what is imagined. Like sapphic seduction, the work remains soft and subtle, almost invisible, yet charged and dangerous, like sitting in a car just before it crashes.
I pretend not to see you, though I am aware. I feel you before I see you.
In Swans For Play, Emma Bertuchoz, together with dancer Alina Arshi and musician Giuliana Gjorgjevski, explores a dynamic between two protagonists who irresistibly desire each other. The piece unfolds in four acts, moving between what is genuine and what is performed, between what remains implicit and what becomes explicit. They approach and step back, moving between human, deer, and swan.
Extending the intimacy of Emma’s work, Moving Discourse is delighted to shares her personal notes, letting us follow the process of imagining a stage where desire can grow. These notes mix playful observations, scores for improvisation, and reflections on making costumes—a gesture of love. Central to the work isthe intimate process of makingshoes for her co-performer, describing to us how, by moulding the other’s body, she moulds her desire.

“Our (lesbian) reality is the fictional as it is socially accepted, our symbols deny the traditional symbols and are fictional for traditional male culture, and we possess an entire fiction into which we project ourselves and which is already a possible reality. It is our fiction that validates us.”
Monique Wittig, Le Corps Lesbien

I believe many projects are born from amoureuses states, carried by a special energy that feels both imaginative and a little naïve. My images of swans and deer came directly from the tenderness I felt for a woman I fell in love with at that time. Through her gaze I reconnected with my own desire and began to recognize myself anew. For the first time, my femme side was not only acknowledged but also desired in the way I had always imagined it could be.

Lying together with our eyes closed, we daydream a common landscape and its sensations:

Green, black, and dark blue. We are resting on very soft grass, at the edge of a pond. There is a low mist and a gentle breeze that brushes against our skin and fills us with fresh air. It is light and silent. We can hear our own breath, slow and close. It is neither warm nor cold. Our skin feels porous, as if it belongs to the ecosystem. We are surrounded by small bushes and taller trees. Some of the grass is bent, revealing paths that lead deeper into the forest. Beneath us, the water stirs, a bubble rising, a soft sound spreading. Like mycelium, it connects and quietly sustains the world around us. The water is immensely dark. We see our reflection in it, but we are not afraid of its depth. The water has its own gravity. It supports our hooves, carries us, lets us glide, sway, and commit.

It is here that our embodied imagination takes shape, through played anticipation, movement research and the secret codes of our costume:

We are two deer about to meet in a park. I am already outside, standing by an apple tree, peacefully waiting. You are inside your home, preparing to step out. You are the dark, watchful deer, spying on me, approaching slowly and silently. I pretend not to see you, though I am aware. I feel you before I see you…

A leather skirt barely darker than your skin, with little white feathers pushing outward, eager to meet the wind
White pointed leather shoes on your strong legs, like the curve of a swan’s neck brushing mine

“You spread your wings over m/e. I search their undersides with m/y beak, a slight moisture comes to m/y two respiratory orifices. Among the down I touch the delicate skin, I peck at it, you submit, then you stiffen briskly flapping your wings snapping your beak attempting a cry.”
Monique Wittig, Le Corps Lesbien

There is something undeniably intimate in creating shoes or costumes for someone else. So much care and attention go into making an object that another body will inhabit. While working on your pair, I constantly thought about your anatomy: what adjustments would give you the perfect fit, what might amplify your beauty, how the object could both serve and shape your performance. In this way, the making was never just about shoes. It was about the collaboration, about you testing them, inhabiting them, and becoming my partner in what I sometimes think of as soft, self-sadistic equipment.

I had decided, mostly for aesthetic reasons, to make the shoes without heels. I found them much hotter this way, bold and audacious. They also feature a curved metallic part that keeps the arch intact, even when walking flat. That meant the shoes allowed both a resting position and tiptoe, but with little actual support. Performing in them conditions our bodies: it keeps us on our toes, quite literally, balancing in constant muscular engagement. You love this, because it already shapes the way you move and performs.

I modified roller skates, for the final swan-like scene. I made them to be worn in a bent-knee position, but our bodies are different. What is slightly uncomfortable for me after seven minutes is already unbearable for you from the start. I spent a lot of time adjusting the skates to your body, taking precise measurements to support the right parts of your feet. I admire how you advocate for your body’s safety while still embracing the challenge. When I suggest changing the choreography so you would not have to wear the skates, you insist it is not necessary. You trust that we would find a way to negotiate and adapt. You trust my imagination.

I trust your body

I trust our suspension

I trust desire

The virtual realm has long been a sanctuary for queer self-expression, a place to slip effortlessly into new digital skins. But as safe spaces come under threat in the physical world, the need to bring those avatars offline becomes urgent. Moving Discourse is delighted to present Opsis: Taking the Glitch Away From Keyboard, a thoughtful exploration of this tension by writer and founder of Hyfae Magazine, Lily Bonesso. Articulating how digital fantasies can be encountered in physical space, embodied through movement, and activated as a stage for resistance, Bonesso draws on Legacy Russell’s ‘Glitch Feminism’ to trace how curators Ocean Dobree and Jessye Curtis have developed Opsis – a programme serving as a rare container for queer imagination.

“We are bringing the ‘glitch’ AFK (Away From Keyboard). We are bringing the error into the room.” – Legacy Russell ‘Glitch Feminism’

On the edge of an industrial estate, beside the busy Surrey Canal Road, Avalon Cafe is a blip on the edge of New Cross. Out there on its own, it’s concrete shell feels like a suitable subject for a George Shaw painting; ideally viewed against the rain-soaked pavement. It’s here that OPSIS (ὄψις), ancient Greek for appearance, sight, or view, has planted its flag. Founded as a dedicated programme for experimental movement by Ocean Dobree and Jessye Curtis, OPSIS creates a testing ground for artists to share work that’s still wet from the birthing process.

While it’s easy finding images of alien-esque queer avatars, trans angels, drag queens and lesbian power couples online, these people are often on the DL when out on the streets. Even in a city as open as London, queerness still needs safe spaces to self-express IRL – an idea Legacy Russell explores in her 2020 text ‘Glitch Feminism’. Russell argues that the “glitch” – technically an error in a machine’s system – is actually a form of resistance. For marginalised bodies, refusing to be “readable” or to function as society expects is a source of power. Russell argues for the necessity of bringing that glitch AFK (Away From Keyboard).

It raises a question at the heart of OPSIS: What happens when the avatar enters the room? Performance is the ultimate act of vulnerability because the artist literally becomes their art. OPSIS is about creating the freedom to perform that self.

To hold space for that vulnerability, you need a specific kind of container. The night feels less like a traditional showcase and more like a resurrection of the ‘Happening’. In his 1966 guide How to Make a Happening, artist Allan Kaprow laid out a crucial rule: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid as possible.” He urged artists to reject the polished separation of the theatre and instead embrace the rough, the ready, and the real. A Happening is an event where the line between viewer and art is dissolved; a situation to be lived rather than an object to be viewed. OPSIS channels this energy, acting as a laboratory where the “glitch” becomes flesh.

Nothing captured this shift from digital to physical more than ‘Tethered Feedback’ by Ocean & Zhuyang. In a world where we are increasingly disconnected, their work forced a re-orientation of intimacy, yet ironically, that intimacy is facilitated through tech. The audience was held in total darkness, the performance lit only by the staccato flash of Eve Chen’s camera, documenting the show. Forms of closeness and separation emerge as carved out single-frame exposures – a guitar suspended mid-air, a mess of wires, a leather jacket rigged with sewn-in speakers. Connected by two guitars, the performer’s aesthetic was pure cyberpunk – two bodies converging and pulling apart in the dark.

Ocean told me later that the audio is entirely improvised – it’s happening live. Using wearable sonic devices, the performers become instruments, a feedback loop created by their proximity to one another. It was like witnessing a cyborg rock concert. The perfect embodiment of Russell’s theory: a “refusal to be readable,” they created a language that was all sensory.

But if technology offers one escape route, the grotesque offers another. Throughout the OPSIS programme, I get the sense that to find our “real” selves, we sometimes have to become monsters.

My take on it isn’t coincidental. The curation is clearly influenced by Ocean’s thesis, Beautiful Monsters, which investigates “queer post-human dreaming”. Ocean writes that, since the very definition of “human” has historically been used to exclude queer and trans people, we can find hope by looking beyond it. Whether through the machine (the cyborg) or the monster, embracing this “post-human” state allows us to imagine a future where we’re free.

Yihao’s piece, ‘Higher, Faster, Stronger’, leaned heavily into this uncomfortable metamorphosis. He appeared as a giant bug-like creature, transforming the stage into a site of mutation. The performance was chaotic. After a jarringly sexual sequence involving a lot of water, he swung wildly from a wire, quite literally nearly pulling down the lighting rig, before crawling and rolling through the crowd.

Yihao uses the language of drag to critique the 2010 Shanghai Expo’s slogan “Better City, Better Life.”  The drag queen’s plastic wig becomes a commentary: that we are all just parading through life in synthetic fibres, pretending that artificiality is progress. But does covering ourselves and our cities in plastic actually make for a ‘better life’? In the safety of the OPSIS underground, the queer body reflects the absurdity of the world back at us.

Beyond the monsters and the machines, the night serves a simpler purpose. It brings people together in a room to deal with all the mess outside. OPSIS is distinctly unpretentious. Since half the room seems to know the other half, the barrier between performer and audience is already thin, creating this feeling of safety that allows us to go to a more fragile place.

From Camille Boukobza’s (aka. Lily McMenamy) winesoaked crescendo, to Petrichor & Flowfinch’s office-core styling and rolls of printer paper, the more mundane the props, the better. It’s all very Kaprow. Tough Boys whipped up a storm with ‘God is a Taxi Driver’ using just a torch and some gaffer tape. Their bodies, oscillating between dog-like submission and rigid stiffness, trembled as if absorbing the frantic energy of the city itself. Their movements formed a code of repeated sequences that became a sort of full body sign language, before collapsing to the floor, whispering into a microphone as the music swirled around us.

The climax felt like a hallucination. Using the strobe setting on the torch, they created the sensation of being inside a storm. It became a bouncing fight, or maybe a dance, where one person kept falling and the other caught them. By the time it ended, with one of them dancing another repeated sequence, but this time sensual, expansive… the whole room felt like it was vibrating with them.

Leaving Avalon, you get the sense that you haven’t just watched a show, but survived something together. These artists are testing out fantasies, purging anxieties, and building new realities. By celebrating these ‘glitches’ – the cyborg, the bug, the siren, the creature – OPSIS is building a queer utopia that refuses to be readable. It reminds you that performance is at its best when it’s risky, intimate, and just a few centimetres from your face.

References

Legacy Russell ‘Glitch Feminism’ 2020

Allen Kaprow “How to Make a Happening” 1966

Are affects socially mediated, or are they, as philosopher Brian Massumi argues, autonomous — operating in the body before language? What about something in between: between raw expression and social codes? During the Enlightenment, when reason, individual liberty, and the organisation of society through rational principles were central concerns, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote The Social Contract (1762). Considering how individual freedom relates to collective norms, he proposed that society is formed by individuals who rationally agree to a social contract: an unspoken framework that shapes our interactions. While Rousseau thought of this contract as juridical and abstract, after the performative turn we might ask how such agreements are enacted in daily behaviour, and how, when the body and its expressions are socially coded, we can question, stretch, or transform the contract. The performer Bruno Brandolino reflects this in the most melodramatic way on stage, and in the most poetic way in his writing. Originally published in Portuguese as the programme note to his piece Melodrama: senza te, Moving Discourse is delighted to share its English translation here for the first time. Brandolino asks: can affects serve as the experiential counterpart to social pacts — allowing us to enact, challenge, and transgress them?

To introduce Melodrama: senza te is perhaps only possible by turning to what remains invisible. That which gives rise to the work, sustains it, and exists as its negative space — within both the piece and its process. Though never stated, and not conceived as a theme, this invisible dimension is a fundamental part of the shared event. It unfolds inherently, alongside and inextricably bound to what we are able to apprehend.

Within this negative space, I find, for instance, my own history of migration. To move away from a territory — from the places and affections that, for more than twenty years, shaped who I was and gave me contour — is to lose a framework through which I had been building, reading, and understanding myself. Once this framework of reference, belonging, and identification disappears, the figure is set against another background. One that no longer returns the same contrast, but a different, unfamiliar one. As a result, the perception of one’s own figure shifts. Its form is altered, and with it the account — the narration, the meaning — we make of our life and existence.

Thus, this becomes a process of negotiation — between what remains and what transforms, between what was once mine and what no longer is. In distinguishing what belongs to family, to the nation-state, to the city, or to friendships, what ultimately remains is the exercise of deep listening: listening to that which may correspond with me. And among what I heard, there was this melodrama.

This melodrama — this melodramatic affect, as I have called it — emerged in more solitary times to embrace me and to remind me of a particular pleasure: a familiar and delicious one, romantic and delirious, emotional and melancholic, playful and ironic. When it arrives and takes hold of the body, turning solitude into company and one into two, it becomes impossible to deny our bond. To transpose this affect from the intimacy of my home to the scenic space, and to make it an object of study and aesthetic experience, required tracing and examining where it comes from, and what this affectation is about.

It was not difficult to trace, for it was everywhere. I first encountered it at the age of twelve, when I began doing theatre in a small hall  in downtown Montevideo — simply to be able to see my cousins at least once a week. That very reason already spoke of an affective, romantic impulse, and it led me — from total ignorance of theatrical art —  to fall in love with that old, neglected room: the smell of dusty wood, the yellowed scripts of works far too grand for the mouths of children, and an underground wardrobe filled with costumes of questionable taste.

I also found this affect in my adolescent passions: a fascination with the performances of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Their excessive, somewhat ridiculous, yet supremely virtuosic modes made me want to be an actress — not an actor, always held hostage by the unbearable restraint of masculinity.

I was fascinated by the works of Copi, with their subversiveness, their political incorrectness, their — literally — (de)generated delirium. Almodóvar’s films, with their saturated colours and pop references, accompanied by boleros and romantic melodies. Fassbinder’s films, more serious, openly politicised and intersectional; and the monumental interpretations of vocalists such as Mina Mazzini, Rocío Jurado, Lola Flores, Juan Gabriel, and Isabel Pantoja.

I even recognised it in productions of my own at school, such as that somewhat costumbrista text entitled Lágrimas de Satén, which I wrote with my best friend, and in which we told the melancholy of a woman alone in her house.

Melodrama has always been there.

In any case, its principal source must be, above all, my own mother: the greatest reference for this passionate romanticism. Every morning she took her shower listening to the radio program Aquí está su disco, where listeners always requested the same infallible Latin and Hispanic romantic melodies. Upon entering the bathroom, I was simultaneously enveloped by the steam of hot water, the syrupy music, and the scent of her body cream.

But it wasn’t this melodramatic affect alone that I inherited from my mother. Unconsciously, she also taught me about performance — the performance of life, and that of the stage. With her impulsive, irreverent, and somewhat erratic character, she allowed me to see that the rules of normative sociability are nothing more than that: a pact, a performance. Unconventional as she was — a trait that extended to my entire family nucleus — she made this social pact evident. Over time, we understood that this was not a condemnation, but a virtue. A way of being that, although not free from sorrows, taught us about acceptance, humour, and, above all, a certain irreverence and distrust toward normativity and decorum. Because, after all, normativity is nothing more than a performance, well sustained by a large cast.

This influence, these teachings, shaped my understanding of fiction and performance. As in life, the stage is built upon pacts between those who watch and those who perform: pacts that can be sustained, broken, or transformed. Pacts we agree upon without words, and to which we commit ourselves the moment we enter a room. My desire is always to play within the visibility of these pacts — to assume them, traverse them, stretch their limits until they break, and then reconstruct them or build new ones. In this movement, we are transported to other realities: becoming unknown to one another, unfamiliar with language itself, left without tools to understand, decode, or interpret what we are living. The only possible path of reading is the sensorial — what happens in and between bodies. How fascinating this space of performance is, allowing us — even if only for a brief instant — to inhabit the collapse of meaning, the fall of referential frameworks, a true poetic revolution.

I can say, then, that these are the invisibles of Melodrama: senza te — the negative space of this fiction. A fiction constructed to share an emotional complexity that oscillates between serious melancholy and unabashed irony. To inhabit my intimate fantasy and extend it to you; to invite you to experience the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of these pacts. To lose ourselves in language, knowing that we travel together.

Author’s note: This text was written as a programme note for the performance’s presentation at Teatro do Bairro Alto (Lisbon, Portugal) and was made accessible to all spectators. Originally published in Portuguese, this English translation is published here for the first time on Moving Discourse.

Utopias, like dreams, have the potential to transcend the present, allowing us to imagine alternative realities. A utopia can be understood as a collective or social dream, charged with a desire for systemic change. If we could not dream, we could not imagine things differently. Dreaming is a form of rehearsal for possibility — the emotional core of utopian thinking. On a collective level, societies rehearse utopias through literature and other forms of art. These works become pathways toward a different reality — or a momentary escape from the one we inhabit. To Desiring Elsewhere together, Moving Discourse invited Yvette Chan, winner of the Bloomsbury Fiction Mentorship Programme, to share the opening of her short story Nightrunner A dreamlike tale about chasing the moon, this brief excerpt reads like a shooting star — flashing across the sky.

I used to egg my father on to drive faster in the night. Not to feel the thrill of moving faster than humanly possible, or to hear the engine growl, inhabit something monstrous and disruptive. I asked my father to chase after the moon. He’d indulge, of course, revved the engine to overtake cars, and used the opportunity to teach me my bearings, distance, size, speed, perspective. My father also taught me about the ever changing moon, who was our guiding light as much as it was indecisive. Whose glow differs each night and phase, whose placement in our sky depends on the seasons and time. At the very least, the moon is chartable, predictable, which means we can always find our way back to it, and guess where it might go next. 

My father would roll down the windows as the engines worked double-time, raise his voice slightly to prevent the wind from swallowing him, “See how fast we’re actually going? Feels different when the windows are up, right?” I would laugh as speed ruffles my hair and fills my lungs, but no matter how fast we went, the moon was always a stretch away. After five minutes of my shrieking in amusement, he’d slow the car back down and say, “Well buddy, we gave it a good go. I guess the moon’s too far away again, we can try again tomorrow. ” And this is how I learnt that when things are far away, you can choose to close the distance, and discover that the object of desire is bigger, more real, and its surface texture will not always be a stranger to your fingertips.

The moon and sun were the world’s first clocks by being expected at designated places at specific moments. So, like clockwork, I lace up my running shoes and am out of my building at 23:00. By 23:20, I cross paths with Caleb from down the street—a “pre-successful” photographer most busy with potty training the cat he’s fostering this month.

Caleb likes surprises and changes in his life. I don’t just mean his dedication to the new cat. He has a habit of changing routes mid-run to get lost in town, and keeps a small film camera in his belt bag in case inspiration strikes and has this habit of. Instead of feeling stranded, he’s more interested in seeing the new details in buildings and trees, he’ll climb hills and wade river streams to get the perfect shot. Then, he’d text me pictures of himself wandering suspect locations at night. I reply with a suggestion to run toward the moon when he’s lost his bearings, but he never does. 

“I’ll manage”, he’d say, indulging in the turbulence despite how unpredictability clings. He was meant to have his first photography exhibition five months ago, but it’s been rescheduled twice now because time takes more than it gives. My shadow and silhouette are featured in several of Caleb’s photographs. At the end of the month, Caleb processes all his photos and shares them with me when we take a break. His pictures are quite good. Most of them are studies of contrast, an admiration of shadows and darkness of mundane things. There’s one where my silhouette is illuminated by the full moon, running away from the camera, my head very obviously tilted upwards as if in worship. Caleb says I run like that most of the time, and that he’d have to clap my shoulder to keep my eyes on my surroundings, as if I don’t know my running route with my eyes closed.

“The moon’s not going anywhere,” he says. “If you twist your ankle on uneven pavement, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” 

The moon is always going somewhere I can’t follow. The calculated distance between myself and the moon doesn’t change so long as my feet are touching the Earth. That said, in every step forward something lovelier than delusion makes the moon appear to be closer, brighter. 

“That’s called astigmatism, actually,” Caleb corrects. He’s wrong, though, because astigmatism can’t also be what makes shadows feel like the only subject he likes to capture on camera. 

Caleb and I part halfway through our run, with him usually following where the moonlight doesn’t shine while I head for its source. Tonight though, Caleb is returning home early since the skies don’t look friendly as midnight approaches. The temperature drops until the warmth I’ve acquired from running has been taken  by the wet and cold. The moon has been taken too. You can barely see her, she’s already so thin and trying her best to illuminate the clouds closest to her before she becomes just a smudge in the sky.

 Without a guiding beacon, my engines slow to a stop. I pant with my hands on my knees while leaning against a street lamp in the residential area before the train tracks. It’s always quiet here. There are never more than five people on the street at this hour, and never less than one fox sighting a month. The street is lined with red brick houses, and every door is coated in a different coloured paint. The pavement has seen better days, with how many potholes there are, but the street across me has a wider pedestrian lane. Cars park beneath lit street lamps, yellow lights leaking through tree leaves, and the three-storey brick houses have close-blind windows where minimal light peaks through. Between two of the houses sits a newer, plainer, building. A two-storey modern building featuring a fluorescent white sign with words in red: “Corner Market & Diner.” It’s a loud invitation to go in.

The paper taped to the storefront window says they’re a 24-hour store and diner, except on Fridays. The bell twinkles when I enter. The fluorescent lighting paired with empty grey walls and floor is overwhelming for a second, and I blink away the brightness as I close the door behind me.

The storeowner by the cash register to my left looks to be in her fifties, in a loose dress the same colour as the store sign, a deep red accentuating her black hair. Meanwhile, I’m in my wet running clothes and windbreaker, dripping water into her shop.

“Dine in or shopping?” She cuts to the chase.

The space inside seems neither big enough for a market nor a diner, much less both combined. There are refrigerators for beverages, snack aisles, a section for miscellaneous household items, and an entire fresh produce aisle. The white of the floors, walls, and lighting accentuates all the colours in the store. Fresh green cucumbers, brown eggs, and ripe blueberries are a burst of vibrancy I didn’t expect at a corner shop. 

“Where’s the dine-in?”

“Order here and sit down later,” She says. With her left index and middle finger, the storeowner pinches a flyer from a clear plastic stand. A gold ring sits on her wedding finger, decorated with a small red gem the same shade as her dress. 

________________________________________________________________________

Text illustration

Artist: Jiaqi Lyu

Artwork Info

Tell Me about the Grassland, Will You? (heirloom jewelry passed down from my great grandmother)

○ 20*30cm
○ Oil on Canvas ○ 2025

● It is the only thing my great-grandmother passed down to me, a silver butterfly-shaped brooch, made by a silversmith in Jilin Province. She passed away before I was born. I know very little about her, only fragments of scattered memories. She was born on the edge of the Khorchin grasslands, and she died from a pneumonic infection.

GOSS, or being stupid and ambitious

By Lizzy Tan

Lizzy Tan’s text on Sam Burket’s show GOSS shapeshifts and experiments with form just as much as its subject does. Sam’s piece is defined by taking risks and venturing into the unknown — into unexpected depths. It is no linear show that the audience simply watches. Instead, they are watched by Sam, as Sam serves up observations that reveal tragicomic truths about us — about society. Tan writes in Sam’s rhythm — quick, sharp, alive — finding philosophy in the pauses, wit in precision. The form of her text keeps shifting, carrying a pulse as vibrant and restless as GOSS itself. 

GOSS opens with this image: a silent, shimmering tower of red fringe, lurking in the audience. Expanding into the space as it rises (prompting dread? delight?) and grasps the walls of the Pleasance Theatre’s black box, gastropod-like. Then, interrupting this pilgrimage and throwing off the glittering red mass, Sam Burket begins the show, topless and bare-legged.

It’s bold. It’s unserious. It’s just enough to carry the range and weight of ‘performance’ and ridiculous enough to intrigue. This titillation drives the show — not a sensualising one, but the resulting charge where curiosity collides with the absolutely unexpected. This tension hangs over GOSS, drawing the audience closer in, even as we brace against what might come next.

It is hard to describe what happens in GOSS’ 45 minute run. Audience secrets are revealed; movement interludes punctuate emotional beats. Burkett muses on our revelations, offering social commentary to acerbic riposte. We are asked to be vulnerable, and the very show depends on how much we are willing to give up to a room of strangers. The format is entirely improvisational, non-linear and non-narrative. Form emerges from content: directional shifts in the conversation are mirrored by Burkett’s movement. They pivot, swoop and pause, refracting the emotional current of the room through their body. Burkett’s hosting becomes choreographic, steering the conversation and composing it spatially.

This way of dancemaking demonstrates the malleability of performance (when is something a performance anyway?) but further still, raises the question of what makes something feel like a show?

According to Burkett:

1. Telling people you have a show (lies)
2. Something (anything) that is called ‘evening-length’ and nothing shorter (delusion)
3. ‘Volume. People love stuff.’ (illusions)
   
   

Telling people you have a show.

Burkett tells me they’ve been using the phrase ‘stupid and ambitious’ to embolden their pursuits: ‘I just started saying I have a solo show.’ The structure of GOSS emerged from solo improvisations and the question of how to make artistic work sustainable. Through these explorations and conversations with close friends, Burkett began experimenting with the lens of gossip as a way to frame stories and emotional space.

‘The only thing that I’m going to do is to get a fresh piece of gossip.’

There’s a certain lifecycle to many performance projects. Reflecting on their own work, Burkett mused that many projects had been performed, reviewed and developed in different stages but never felt ‘complete.’ They compared this to the expectations of dancemaking from their training:

‘I think so much of the struggle with making any sort of experimental performance is wanting to take a risk and kind of having the confidence that it won’t be bad, or at least it’ll be bad enough that you want to go see why it’s so bad.’

That’s where ‘stupid and ambitious’ comes in: Say it’s a show. Rise to the commitment. It’ll be just fine.

Something (anything) that is called ‘evening-length’ and nothing shorter.

GOSS is ‘evening-length’ because Burkett says so. That’s part of the joke. It’s also part of the point. The length gives the show legitimacy. The delusion makes space for something magical. What emerges is a meta-performance about performance itself. GOSS is finished in form, borrowing elements from Burkett’s experiences in previous work, but not codified.

‘In order for me to have that sensation of like, that completeness, I need to be able to fit into slots that exist. And what is that slot? In the evening, for an hour.’

In this way, GOSS resists the myth that commercially viable art must feel mass produced. It originates from experimental dancemaking, but resists the extractive tempo and timelines of production. In a landscape of ‘immersive’ installations which often lack genuine stakes, GOSS asks us for real attention, presence and risk. By creating an aura of legitimacy around an experimental format, audiences are invited to trust Burkett as a performer and take time to deeply engage with their work.

‘Volume. People love stuff.’

Burkett also detailed the process of sampling from their own body of work, e.g., performing in underwear, creating costume pieces from their own wardrobe, identifying bold visual moments that could fit into GOSS. We talked about playing with the audience’s feelings of waste, being conspicuous yet anonymous and borrowing aesthetics from standup. This dramaturgy, emerging from their own understanding of what makes a show feel exciting, revealed a sharp sense of the hidden ironies and anxieties embedded in images. Cleverly (and perhaps this is intuition rather than dramaturgy) the referencing Burkett uses in GOSS creates a visual language of illusion/allusion. As the images Burkett creates (the excess of the red cloak being discarded; the semi-nudity of the host; the flinging of the mic cord visually filling the stage) pass through the registers of the peculiar and the absurd, they demonstrate the interplay of what is seen (or denoted) and what it conjures (a connotation). What Barthes argues in Rhetoric of the Image and S/Z are present here: that there are no ‘pure’ movement images, and that every visual moment generates a dramatic reference (i.e., that something is signified). These illusions are sufficient enough to hold subtext, and the tensions between what is seen and felt is a vehicle for humour, irony and surprise (often delight). This novel directing style makes GOSS unique.

In short: to produce a show that feels like a show, one needs lies, delusion and illusions.

According to Burkett, a non-exhaustive list of things one can do to be more stupid and ambitious:

Ask for what you want and be happy with what you get.

Restage your own work. Or call new work a restaging.

Have pieces less than evening-length? Host your own triple (or quadruple, quintuple) bill.

Be bold. Then solve it later.

Unfortunately, even if your ask is ridiculous… put it out there.

aphorisms on Freya Thomas Taylor’s 

Rage Milk 

This text is not a review but an aphoristic response to Freya Thomas Taylor’s Rage Milk. Fragments of thought shift like perspectives around the installation. The poetic nature of the text resists a fixed interpretation; instead, it lets words linger, allowing meaning to unfold. The distance a critic typically assumes from the artwork — and from the language used to describe it — is closed. In its place, the I emerges, the body situated in dialogue with what it observes. As the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer reminds us, the artwork is not merely an object; it is an event. Meaning arises in the encounter, in the relational space between work and spectator. Each encounter is historically conditioned, fusing the world of the artwork with the spectator’s own situatedness in time and space. My reading of Rage Milk is informed by feminist art history. The perspectives I take reflect those historically taken on women.

on the floor
surrounded by white embroidered drapery, 
we see the replica of a belly. 
its beautiful curve and its pronounced linea nigra 
mark it, as the belly of an expectant mother. 
it is very lifelike, 
this actually lifeless form. 
forming a symbol 
the expectation of life

                                     the life it carries is an abstraction 
                                     as much abstract, as the         
                                     body, to whom this extracted part belongs.
                                     to whom, in turn, does this body belong
                                     the bodies of mothers?

A conversation Between Dykes about performing gender at the gym 

The following text is a transcript from the podcast Between Dykes. In their show hosts Dan Akanin and Margo Damm engage in critical discussions on topics such as queerness, allyship, practices of care, and trans experiences. Alongside providing intimate insights into their relationship, the hosts consistently interrogate their own positionalities and modes of thought.
The episode under consideration, entitled No Pain, No Gain, No Gender, addresses non-binary struggles within the context of sports. Central to the discussion are questions of gender performance in gym spaces, the reproduction of normative bodily ideals, and the critical confrontation with internalised assumptions surrounding these norms.
The original episode was released in German on 17 November 2024 and is available on Spotify: Between Dykes, Episode 8.

Exercise One:
Mental Preparation 

Dan: Hello and welcome back to a new episode of Between Dykes, with Margo and Dan.
Today we would like to talk about being trans people in the gym and how we have generally experienced the gym and sports during our transition. We would also like to discuss why we go to the gym and why physical activity is so important to us.

Margo: And why do you want to talk about these topics today? 

Dan: Because I feel that the gym is very important for us […]. And I think it is interesting to dedicate an episode to a subject that also brings joy to our lives […]. And at the same time, I immediately associate the gym with being a violent and toxic space. […]. 

Margo: That’s really interesting, and I would agree that the gym — and sports and movement more generally — carry a positive connotation for us. At the same time, however, gender is extremely present in the gym. Because it is inscribed at the level of the body, it automatically entails a dimension of violence. We need to question the kinds of images of the gendered body that we are confronted with there. I also think it is crucial to ask: why do we actually go to the gym? 

[…]

Dan: … to a place […] that could hardly be more binary, and where masculine performance holds such significance. Going to the gym is a bit like going on stage — everyone seems to play a role. Moving through this space feels highly performative and, at the same time, paradoxically, it is also a space where you can calm down and relax. Considering that the gym carries so much violence, I find it meaningful that it can also be such a plural space — a space that can bring us joy as well. 

Margo: Yes, but I also think that in this respect, we really need to differentiate between the various parts of the gym in which we move. Perhaps we should define these different areas within the gym […]. First of all, there is the way to the gym. Then, upon entering, you have to decide which changing room you want to use. After that comes the changing room itself, which is not the same as the gym proper […]. Within the gym, there are several distinct areas: first and foremost, the weightlifting area, which is heavily male-dominated and characterised by extremely high expectations regarding masculine performance. And last but not least, there is the women’s area, where we used to spend a lot of time in the past, but no longer do. 
What I want to emphasise is that the gym is not a single space, but rather consists of multiple areas, each of which has its own framing. 
But before we discuss these different areas, I would like to point out that there were moments in our lives when the gym carried a different meaning for us. When we first met, we usually went to the gym on our own. I mention this because it makes a huge difference whether I go alone to the gym or whether we go together. 

Dan: […] When we first met, you were going to a women-only gym. 

Margo: Exactly […], and then I joined your gym, which was open to all genders. In that gym, we were definitely perceived as a lesbian couple — which brought its own challenges — but that we used the women’s changing room was never in question. 
Now, we are a trans-couple, and I should also note that we have each had different experiences at the gym since transitioning. Yesterday, for example, you asked me: ‘Do I have to shave my face, or can I go to the women’s changing room like this?’ 
Whether we are talking about the weightlifting area or the changing room, it makes a difference whether you are alone or we are together — especially in moments like that. 
What I mean is that we went through through different stages which we were not only performing differently, but we were also perceived differently. I would also like to add that my body has changed significantly since starting testosterone, which has affected my creditability in the weightlifting area. Anyways, I’ve already touched on many topics, so let’s get started. 

Exercise Two: 
Passing / safety / barriers 

Margo: We already classified the different areas of the gym. You can give a general answer to my question, or you answer with respect to each individual area of the gym: Dan, do you currently feel safe at the gym? 

Dan: Yes, I do think that I currently feel safe at the gym. I think this is connected to the fact that I get stronger the more I go to the gym. 

Margo: Do you mean physically stronger or mentally?

Dan: physically […]. I’m proving that I can do that, too. It gives me a feeling of safety, knowing how those machines are working and how I execute certain exercises correctly. But, I don’t feel very safe, when we go to the gym together. Currently, I feel safer on my own. But how about you? Do you currently feel safe at the gym? 

Margo: I completely agree […]. That’s what I meant earlier when I used the term ‘hierarchy’: it feels like there is an invisible ladder that you are expected to climb. Only by climbing this ladder you can feel safer. For me, it is exactly that — I feel safer because I am stronger and because I know I can meet the performance expectations placed on me. And, like you, I don’t particularly like us being together in the gym, because it makes me feel less safe. That’s because we create confusion, especially when we go together to the women’s changing room. 

Dan: But that’s actually so crazy, because we don’t even show any affection to each other in the gym — not even touching hands. We basically perform like ‘bros’ in the gym: patting each other on the shoulder and so on, although it always feels completely ridiculous.

Margo: yes, I also find this whole gender performance at the gym fully ridiculous. And at the same time, there is something in that gender performance that seems to turn me on. I like that I am now accepted in that role — which shows how simple my thoughts on gender can sometimes be — but in that moment, it feels good to be recognised as part of the binary system. 

Dan: Yes, this whole performance of masculinity that we commit to — only so as not to attract attention and blend into the crowd for once.  

Exercise three: 
Changing room[s]

Dan: Okay, let’s arrive in the here and now — in the middle of transition. I think this is the first time that I start to feel uncomfortable in the changing room.

Margo: Yes, we already talked about this in the context of allyship. You mentioned ‘the queen’ in the gym, who, by being our ally, can give us a sense of safety. I should add that, generally, we have people we can really on in that gym. We have coaches who greet us and who not only know us, but also know where to place us […]. 
As I mentioned earlier, there is also an implicit hierarchy that assigns everyone a specific position. The ‘queen,’ for example, holds a very stable place in this system, and she genuinely likes us, which provides a sense of safety. This may seem to contradict what you said earlier — that you sometimes feel unsafe in the changing room — but I just wanted to emphasise that we have also had positive experiences there. 

[…]

Dan: Yes [….]. You mentioned earlier that us going together to the women’s changing room causes confusion. That’s something that concerns me a lot, because I’m currently at a stage where I’m afraid of being perceived as a threat in these spaces. I keep asking myself: should I go to the men’s changing room instead, to avoid being seen as a threat by others? But that would also mean putting myself in a situation that is far more dangerous. This whole situation is extremely difficult and complex — would call it a true binary struggle. What are we supposed to do? Should we walk through the gym carrying our sports bags the whole time? I mean, we don’t even shower — or at least I don’t shower in the gym. I basically just take off my shoes and jacket, and that’s it. 

Margo: Yes, I find this situation very difficult, too. I’m always aware of how quickly I move in the changing room and that I want to leave as soon as possible. To be honest, I don’t really have a solution for that. I also notice that I’ve adapted my clothing style: I’ve stopped wearing very tight clothing, and in the locker room, I change my clothes very quickly. I’m basically always already wearing my sports clothing, and I never take my top off. That said, I have to emphasise that my own safety is my top priority. That’s why I’m still going to the women’s changing room and intend to continue doing so for the time being. 

Exercise four: 
Performing within normal range 

Margo: I’m often in the weightlifting area, which is very male-dominated — or, basically, an area for men. Recently, my performance there has been increasingly recognised and acknowledged, for example with a brief nod. Whether you receive these forms of acknowledgement depends on your performance: how much weight you can lift, how well you execute the exercises. I actually play with accepting these ways of communicating. I take it exactly as they present it. I think they see me as a ‘small muscle-boy,’ and I just accept that, because it’s actually quite fun and it makes me feel good. 
Why don’t you do that too? I mean, why don’t you just accept it and see where it takes you? 

Dan: Maybe it’s simply because I’m too scared of internalised transphobia. […] 
We kind of play a role at the gym […]. We tend to conform to the norms rather than reject them. 
But Margo, isn’t it actually our responsibility to challenge those norms at the gym? 

Margo: You’re raising something I’m constantly concerned with, because I have political expectations of myself. On the other hand, I want to allow the gym be a safe space for me mentally.
For me, mental health is largely about how in touch I am with myself […]. Of course, I have high expectations and I consistently question body norms, but I also allow myself to let go for a moment. If I put all those high expectations on myself, going to the gym would quickly feel like work. 
Given my actual work, I would say that I generally have quite high political expectations of myself — and yes, I don’t want to abandon that at the gym — but you know, I already have to confront myself with my own self-image there, and that sometimes feels like enough. 
What I mean is: I already have to engage with all these problematic images and ask myself why I constantly go to the gym? 
At the same time, though, I associate the gym with something positive. For me, going to the gym is a coping strategy. It has taught me to get a sense of myself, to get out of my head and to connect with my body. 
However, as you rightly point out, the gym can intensify gender-related challenges, which is why I’m constantly questioning whether the gym is truly beneficial for me, or whether it forces me to adhere to gender norms that I then struggle to let go of. 

Dan: By ‘norm,’ do you mean a specific Western ideal of beauty? The idea of a non-binary, white, androgynous, and slim body as constructed by the Western gaze? 

Margo: Yes, for me, the question is: what am I working on when I go to the gym weekly? Why do I feel happy when a ‘muscle daddy’ acknowledges me and says, ‘I see you and your progress’? This is a form of approval, because it confirms that I now fit into the norm. My body is accepted as part of that norm and is seen as white, androgynous, lean, and muscular. 
Is that an image I wanted to achieve? Isn’t this extremely problematic? I mean, that I adjust myself so much to this norm. Just for clarity, I’m speaking about how general society sees me. We can later discuss the demands within the queer community on Tinder, because there are clearly norms and expectations there as well. 

[…]

Dan: Maybe going to the gym allows you, for a moment, to feel that you are able to fit in. I get the sense that we are constantly irritating others, and sometimes there is simply this longing to be like everyone else. Now that I think about it, it makes sense that you go there every day, because it offers that brief moment of fitting in, of being the same as everyone else. 

Exercise five: 
Building / body / images 

Margo: The queer community, too, has expectations about how the non-binary body should look. […]. On the level of the body: an average stage of transition … androgynous, white, not too much, not too little. So, there are certainly images — and I’m not saying these are the ‘right’ images or that they are realistic — but these images exist in our minds, and we have to respond to and critique them […]. 

Dan: Just for clarification: when we use the term ‘queer’ in this conversation, we are referring to trans and non-binary topics, because I think the gym carries a completely different meaning within gay culture. 

Margo: Yes, expectations regarding the body are completely different within gay culture. 

Dan: Absolutely

Margo: Same thing: there are extremely high expectations within the community.. 

Dan: Yes, but it is not a conversation about safety 

Margo: True 

Dan: Maybe it depends on how femme-presenting someone is. I think that because of films like Love Lies Bleeding, in which we saw Katy O’Brien as a bodybuilder fighting her way to success, it has become more normal to see strong queer bodies that are not white. I find this extremely empowering, and I feel that within the lesbian community, gym culture has become much more present and mainstream. 

Margo: […]. I would disagree […]. I think the beauty ideals within the lesbian community are similar to those of mainstream society, especially regarding trained bodies. Trained bodies have become the new ideal, the new norm […]. Being muscular as a dyke is definitely considered a norm within the lesbian community. This represents an ideal, rather than true body diversity. 

Dan: That’s true, of course. But I think, from the perspective of mainstream society, looking at a muscular woman is not …

Margo: No I disagree with you […]. Muscular women are already everywhere. Many women in my hetero-cis friend circle are actively working on becoming more muscular. 

Dan: Yes, they’re working on that. But I don’t think they receive the respect they deserve. […]. If a woman is muscular, her femininity is often denied. 

Margo: […]. Okay, I generally think that being muscular is equated with being well-trained and healthy, and I would say this has been the dominant beauty ideal for many years. However,  I’d like to focus again on the lesbian community, because at the moment we are navigating multiple, overlapping expectations of femininity. Within the lesbian community, being muscular is a beauty ideal — period […]. I think this is problematic, because it reproduces ideas about how a dyke, or a lesbian person, should look […]. 

Dan: You’re right. Within the lesbian community, we’ve been talking about veins on our arms and  our biceps for ages. This beauty ideal is definitely a norm within the lesbian community. 

Margo: I guess I just wanted to generally discuss the ideals we have within the queer community — including the gay community. We also hold very strong ideals. And I really ask myself: why do we put such high expectations on ourselves again, if we already resist being pressured into norms by mainstream society? 

Dan: I can tell you why […]. You can’t consider the queer community independently; it is always in relation to mainstream society […]. If there were an independent queer community, body diversity would likely be different. Larger bodies of BiPOC individuals might then come into focus and be seen as beauty ideals. But because of the power structures of mainstream society, this is not the case. 

Exercise six: 
Stretching thoughts 

Margo: We are not always clearly legible in the gym. Even when I receive approval from a ‘muscle daddy’ for my performance in the weightlifting area, I still feel that I’m constantly negotiating and questioning my gender. This isn’t only because of how my body currently looks or how I physically perform — it’s deeper than that. What I want to emphasise is that my gender remains ambiguous. Being non-binary means constantly playing a game with gender norms. It’s about stepping outside the binary — but in reality, I’m never completely outside it; I am perpetually situated within it. This creates a constant tension, where I have to reflect on and interrogate my gender far more than most cisgender people do. 
The whole situation feels ambivalent: I’m non-binary, but at the same time, I want my body to look a certain way. I take testosterone in order for my body to … I mean the question is: what do I actually want from my body? In the sense of: what does it mean for me to ‘pass,’ and what do I want to feel in my body? 
Since discovering that I’m non-binary, I find myself constantly operating within binary categories, even as I try to step outside them. It’s a crazy ambivalence, and I feel it most acutely at the gym. 
That’s where it hits me: gender isn’t just a concept I think about occasionally — it’s something I confront every day, even though ideally, it shouldn’t have to play such a prominent role in my life. 
Do you know what I mean? 

Dan: Yes, but I think that this is exactly what makes you non-binary, because binary people don’t question their gender. 

Margo: No, they don’t have these thoughts all day long: What actually is gender? How does it articulate itself? Do I represent it — or not? 

Dan: Exactly — they don’t have those thoughts. They simply think: ‘I’m a man … okay, good. I’m a man; I can live with that , that works for me. That’s me […].’

[…]

Margo: For me, being visibly non-binary means causing confusion — denaturalising what seems natural.

Dan: But that would imply that everyone who causes a visual confusion is automatically non-binary — which is not the case. 

Margo: I also think there is such a thing as non-binary thinking. […]. When I think of a non-binary person — or a non-binary way of being — I think of you. You embody non-binary thinking; you play with the absurdity of gender and push it to its limits. For me, stepping out of the binary order like that is what is means to be non-binary. The way you think in a non-binary way is deeply political and profoundly liberating. I only encountered this way of thinking within the queer community, especially among trans and non-binary people. In general, I don’t believe being non-binary is necessarily tied to someone’s appearance. But appearance is the first thing visible to the outside world — and that’s why people so often link gender to how someone looks. And that sucks. 

_____________________________________________________________________

Text illustration

Artist: Max Petts
Century Versaflex; for Pantaloon, 2023
Steel, foam, vinyl, plastic wallet, polaroid, sticker 48 x 170 x 100cm approx. 

Century Versaflex; for Pantaloon is a sculptural work that brings together a vintage stretching machine and a plastic wallet containing a weathered Polaroid photograph. Intended for use by martial artists, gymnasts and dancers, the machine is designed to train the body for box splits – where the legs extend 180 degrees laterally. The photograph, usually hidden face down but exceptionally turned face up, shows an unwell newborn in a ventilator; an image of the artist captured by their father. 

The machine itself is reminiscent of contemporary fitness equipment, complete with wipe- clean vinyl and functional detailing, while being sufficiently esoteric to suggest medical, therapeutic, or even sexual applications, therefore occupying the blurry space between utility and fetish. Its purpose, to push the body toward an extreme (arguably idealised) form, evokes the tension between what we aspire to become and what we are made to endure. It speaks to the contortions – literal and figurative – that shape us for better and/or worse. 

The title refers both to the brand name of the machine – part embossed on the vinyl seat amongst pyramid logo – and to Pantaloon, the stock character from Commedia dell’arte: traditionally a crooked, old man driven by vanity and greed. Here, Pantaloon becomes a conceptual scaffold, allowing the work to touch on aging, time, and dis/ability, while hacking the personal and cultural scripts we inherit and share. The plastic wallet and Polaroid act as empty narrative triggers – fragments of an opaque story into which the viewer is subtly enlisted. Crucially, the work functions as a prop, staged, waiting to be activated by an absent body; yours, mine, Pantaloons. 

Moving Discourse in conversation with the performance collective Heavyware

In their newest work Macroplastic, the performance collective Heavyware [Alexandra Bierlaire & Gian Sanghera-Warren] takes the spectator on a fictitious journey through Gian’s body. Set in a laboratory 200 years in the future, Alex investigates whether Gian’s organs —  already infiltrated by microplastics — have transformed into cold, shiny polymers. With Moving Discourse, they explore the relationship between art and science, as well as new ways of understanding creativity and creation in the context of biotechnology. Together, we speculate about a shift in how we imagine the body and ask: can we imagine with the body? How can we harness imaginative power as a technology of resistance — resisting the current political climate, where truth appears to take only a singular form? Moving Discourse argues that reshaping, moulding, stretching this form becomes the political duty of our time. 

Interview by: Imke Felicitas Gerhardt

Imke: Your project is called Macroplastic. Maybe we can start with the name? At first, I thought it was a play on words: macroplastic instead of microplastic, which I connected to the omnipresence of microplastics, resurfacing on a macro level. Then I wondered if it might be a shift in perspective: through the ultrasound you, Alex, are using to examine Gian’s body, the microplastic is magnified — visually transformed into macroplastic. Or perhaps it’s a reference to the ancient microcosm/macrocosm analogy: the belief in a structural similarity between the human being (microcosm) and the cosmos (macrocosm). Is Gian’s body — infiltrated by microplastics — an analogy to the spread of microplastics on the macro level? 

Gian: It is, in a way, all of the above. I think it connects to how we are using plastic not only as a physical material, but also to explore plasticity. Plasticity as an analogy for a way of being, working, and moving. It is this idea that we are invaded on a smaller level — that we are synthesising with this material. But perhaps this idea can also be extended to the way we situate ourselves in the world. Maybe less in a cosmic sense, and more in terms of how we place ourselves within society — and how we might understand society itself as something plastic. 

Alex: Yes, so we started from this trend that Gian showed me — this anxiety on TikTok about microplastics. Gian knows more about it and can maybe speak later about how the algorithm works. What’s so fascinating is that once you are absorbed into this algorithm, what you’re exposed to becomes your whole reality. We were discussing that, but also the fact that microplastics have already been found in the blood, the brain, and so on. So perhaps the anxiety that microplastics are taking over your body isn’t actually that far-fetched. Just look at the oceans — they’re full of microplastics. There’s a clear need to take action. And we were discussing, what is the middle ground between being fully absorbed by that …

Gian: Eco conspiracy versus being completely oblivious. 

Alex: Yes. This middle ground is still something to be defined. That’s what we are discussing — but at the same time, we also want to explore and push toward the extreme. To question the extreme. I think this is why we chose the title. 

Gian: And it’s great to work as a collective on this topic, because we can benefit from having two very different fields of interest that we bring together in this project. Much of my work performatively investigates digital trends. I was really drawn to the aesthetics of these TikTok videos — like men explaining how we should use wooden spikes instead of toothbrushes, and all the absurdity of that. My work is rooted in an anthropological interest, I suppose. Alex, on the other hand, has a deep fascination with the body — an anatomical and medical interest in how the body works. Macroplastic grows out of these digital trends, but is at the same time a very material and embodied exploration of the body and bodily consciousness. Perhaps this is our middle ground. 

Imke: Yes, this trend on TikTok is fascinating because it really shapes our perception of reality. You get trapped in an echo chamber, and those videos and images become the only reality you are exposed to. It creates a paradoxical simultaneity: on the one hand, being stuck in this catastrophising, anxiety-inducing algorithm that calls for urgent action against climate catastrophe; and on the other hand, being paralysed by the addictive nature of the feed itself — scrolling inactively for hours. 
Anyway, I’d like to pick up on the word plasticity that you mentioned earlier. Perhaps this is the right moment to speak about the etymology of the word plastic. Of Greek origin, it means something malleable — something that can take on any shape or form. The word performance derives from per-formare, which means to fulfil a form, to bring something into shape. Performance generates forms, and plastic can take on any form. Was this shared characteristic the reason why you — as transdisciplinary artists— chose to work performatively on plastic and plasticity? 

Alex: Yes, I think at the beginning we were discussing the term plastic and plasticity, and how they can mean so many different things and be applied to so many different situations. We then began to think about them in relation to ourselves and our performance practice. Performance itself —  and the way we both came to dance — is also full of plasticity. It is about trying to shape the body toward something, trying to find the right form. Plasticity can be understood as the body’s response to training: a body that develops, grows muscles, and gains strength.

Gian: Exactly — training is very much a process of moulding and casting. But plasticity is interesting for us not just in relation to the body. Part of the analogy we are developing involves a more flexible way of thinking. Plastic can be both: malleable and fixed. And when it is fixed, it can be very resistant. It has the capacity to do both harm and good. I think exploring this duality — both theoretically and bodily — is particularly compelling. 

Imke: when you were speaking about plastic’s flexibility, I was thinking of fluidity. In terms of gender, we still live — or seem to be returning — to a very rigid binary system. To fit in, society demands an either/or approach:  a call for unambiguity, against fluidity. Before it hardens, plastic can take on any shape. You relate this idea of plasticity to queerness — can you tell us more about that? 

Gian: Yes, I think it is that. For me, queerness — especially within a creative sector — is often reduced to the identity of the maker, and that is something I struggle with. I feel that as a queer maker, your work is expected to be defined by that queerness in some way. Even when you try to resist it and do something else, you still end up responding to it. In recent years, there has even been a financial incentive to be marketed as queer, or to be seen as making queer art.
I reject that! But at the same time I can’t pretend that my work doesn’t interact with queerness, because my personhood inevitably does. 
What we try to do in this work instead is to engage with queerness as an action. This is not an original idea — it comes from a long lineage of queer theory. It’s about queering rather than being labeled as queer. That means making work that, of course, can play aesthetically with queerness — which I think we do — but which is queer because of its approach to making. In the same way that queer should be used as verb, so should plastic. Plastic as a way of changing, queering,  reshaping. We want to engage with queerness in a more plastic way. We know that our work is queer; we know it relates to queerness, but we try to do it in a moulded way. 

Imke: I agree — the verb form is much more accurate. A noun feels somehow solidified. 
Let’s stay for a second longer with the word queerness. I remember stumbling upon a sentence in your performance description where you used the word queering in the context of revealing the inside of Gian’s body. On the one hand, this made immediate sense to me: you might be referring to the discrepancy between how a body’s appearance is classified within gender categories and how that might contradict a person’s own self-perception — what they feel inside. 
On the other hand — given that the performance took place in a laboratory — I was reminded of Renaissance paintings depicting early anatomy sessions. Those sessions were spectacles, where opening up the body was believed to reveal an inner truth. These paintings also mark the beginnings of modern Western science, which in turn has shaped our understanding of the binarisation of the sexes — an idea that queerness critiques. 
So my questions are: why have you chosen a laboratory setting? Were you inspired by those Renaissance paintings? And finally, since modern science is deeply responsible for a fragmented understanding of the body: in your performance, you search for fragments (microplastics) using a visual device tied to modern medicine. What  idea of the body do you want to communicate through this work? 

Alex: Yes, for me those Renaissance paintings are extremely interesting. I find those dissections themselves fascinating — but equally, I’m struck by how opening the body was treated as something ceremonial, with all those elegantly dressed men gathered to watch. Such a big performance. 

Gian: The operation theatre. 

Alex: I think I approach performance as a way of dissecting the self. I have such a profound interest in the body — especially after having surgery myself. Living through that experience, witnessing how the body can be torn apart and then rebuild itself, how it can find stability again, has only deepened my fascination. What we want to portray is what we can learn from these different scales. When you see how your skin can be opened and closed, and then become an intact barrier again — it’s astonishing. I’m not a scientist, but paying attention to these small things, like a single cell in your body, feels deeply fascinating. Witnessing how something so small can do such an enormous job. 
For me, it’s about learning from both the fragility and the strength of the body at the same time. The body is vulnerable, but it is also strong and capable of constant adaptation. That duality is what we want to capture in the performance — making fiction out of it.

Gian: We portray a form of resistance. We are presenting a specimen of a body that is being invaded, yet finds ways to survive — or perhaps not survive. We are not entirely sure yet. But what  is certain is that it’s about a body moving through different stages of adaptation.

Alex: Yes, we play it out to the fullest — we experiment with these small adaptations on a fictive scale. 

Gian: I think working with Alex on this topic is so interesting for me because  the way we view the body is so different. Alex has a very visceral approach — they work with the body as something deeply physical. Whereas in my research, the body is much more of a screen, something which other references and ways of thinking are projected onto. When you asked earlier what idea of the body we are presenting or imagining in this work — my perspective is that the body functions as an archival site, which is nothing new in itself. 
But recently, I’ve been looking at algorithms and thinking about whether an algorithm is not only a tool of filtration on our devices — showing us references and things that feed our curiousity — but also whether algorithms could be adapted as a way of managing and researching through our embodied archive. In a way, I translate this technological vocabulary and software back onto the body. What excites me about Macroplastic is that it presents both of these perspectives on the body. It  synthesises the technological with the biological — a posthumous approach to the body. 

Imke: I have one more question about the laboratory setting. The lab is strongly associated with rationality, scientific truth, and experimentation, whereas performances are usually expected to take place in art institutions such as galleries. Art, in contrast to science, is not bound to rationality—perhaps it’s even expected to resist it. While art doesn’t need to adhere to scientific truth, we nevertheless tend to understand it as offering some kind of truth—maybe a more abstract, speculative, or even higher truth. 
Both science and art—despite having historically been positioned in opposition—shape our imagination of the world. In your work, you fuse art and science not only on an aesthetic level. What potential do you see in linking fact and fantasy?

Alex: I think on a larger scale we should be having discussions with people from many different fields of expertise. Working in a multi- or transdisciplinary way is far more fruitful than staying separated. Combining different forms of knowledge and approaches is, in my view, what needs to happen. Our work is inherently multi- and transdisciplinary, and we both gain so much from this collaborative way of working.

Gian: To me, this also relates to the creative process of Macroplastic. There was a lot of experimentation and working in areas where we don’t have prior knowledge. For example, we were working with 3D modeling software and animation — fields in which we have no formal training. But the question becomes: how can we use as many tools as are available to us in order to convey the knowledge and curiosity that we do have?

Alex: And again, it is also about playing with words and transposing them onto different things. 

Imke: Okay, this is my last question. I want to speak about time and link that to imagination. Imagination is closely tied to the visual sense. When we imagine something, we usually envision it in the future. 
Your performance is interesting, because it contains multiple temporal layers. Not only is it set in the future, but you also operate with a future perfect in regard to the sedimented particles. Those particles become visible through your use of an ultrasound, creating abstract images — a visual device that allows us to envision the future. 
In that context I’m thinking about the relationship between imagination and materiality. With the ultrasound, you envision the future, yet Gian’s body is still materially present in front of us. In a performance setting, how can we create fiction with the body when it has a tangible, material presence in space? Does doing so require the use of language or visual technology to project a future image on stage?

Gian: Yes, we are basically fucking with time. We include many different temporal layers: we set the performance in the future, we work with physical material, and we engage with a body that is obviously alive and aging. So if we were to repeat this performance…

Imke: Yes, wait! There’s another layer to consider: plastic. Plastic does not age; it is not degradable. It essentially resists the inscription or imprint of time. In contrast, the body—as you were saying—ages. And the particles that sediment in the body also materialise time in their own way.

Gian: Exactly. On a practical level, we are working with a combination of live performance and performative elements. We have a video that we’ve already recorded, which we use to disguise and abstract time. It’s also about having fun with the idea of science fiction — not only in the ways we’ve discussed, but also in terms of its aesthetic. The aesthetic of science fiction is incredibly fun to play with, experimenting with different materials and scenic ideas that will hopefully create a transient and temporal space.

Alex: Yes, but we are also inspired by the past. We are playing with time and the time scales of things. It’s as if we are creating our own rules for the world we are building within the performance. It’s particularly interesting to play with plastic —  something that has aged longer than the body, or let’s say, operates on a different time scale than the body it inhabits.

Gian: Yes, and I’m also thinking of it as a vision of the future that exaggerates the present. It is linked to this moment in time, but it also raises questions about nostalgia. I feel that the meaning of time today is completely different than it was ten years ago. The circularity of time—especially in the trend-based work I’m interested in—is so different now. Everything is exaggerated. We can only speculate whether what is aesthetically present now will also present then? Maybe not, but maybe is has nevertheless come back three times in the meantime. I don’t know, but I think it’s a lot of fun to play with that.