Subverting the Cisgaze: Antennae Journal

Summer 2024

Thinking and feeling with a multisensory Womb/Tomb/BooM of plastic bodies - insect, polystyrene, and human, this essay theorizes, critiques, and examines ways of subverting the “cishuman” gaze, including its fixation on legibility, moral and material purity, and its desire for complete and “resolved”works/bodies/objects. Can art embrace a poetics of opacity and illegibility, focusing on the pleasure, discomfort, and generative power of darkness and perpetual metamorphosis, instead? Can we frustrate the power dynamics of pity and objectification by inviting “viewers” into environments that confront them with the impurity, vulnerability, and plasticity (or transness) of their own bodies.