Dysphoric Aesthetics: Toward Trans Ethics of Spectatorial Sensitivity
by Lex Morgan Lancaster
In this essay the author theorizes “dysphoric aesthetics” by moving dysphoria beyond its medical deployment as a pathologizing criteria toward a method for trans ethics and aesthetics. Lancaster proposes that embodied encounters with trans art practices can elicit generative dysphoric experiences. In so doing, they contribute a trans approach to activated spectatorship, which takes seriously how art can cultivate embodied responses that have the capacity to affectively and somatically change us, as well as expand our own capacities for sensitive attunement to others and the world. As exemplary models of dysphoric aesthetics, the installation works of multidisciplinary artists P. Staff (b. 1987) and Ashton S. Phillips (b. 1981) mobilize sites of struggle and disturbance to attend to the difficulties of relational embodiment in the context of exploitative and oppressive biopolitical systems. Staff’s and Phillips’s work demonstrates that dysphoric aesthetics refuses to deliver some easily liberated version of trans subjectivity in a state of cured completion, or to reveal a trans subject at all; rather, their work materializes methods for working with feeling and sensation that are deeply political. Such work specifically deploys material and conceptual forms of contamination—primarily toxicity and plasticity—to create embodied awareness of the ways we are fundamentally enmeshed with the more-than-human world and conditioned by environmental contaminants. The installations of these artists become sites for exploring social and political harm in an aesthetic realm that won't limit us to those sites, in relation with other species and processes used to expel some from the status of the human. These encounters prompt us to stay with the discomfort to work with and through the unmanageable conditions that make some of us dysphoric.
Lancaster, L. M. (2026). Dysphoric Aesthetics: Toward Trans Ethics of Spectatorial Sensitivity. Art Journal, 85(1), 78–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2026.2624352
