identity
Body + a million This article: written, read, edited, uploaded on to the internet, heard using assistive software, converted into…
I smell the judgement
and the disappointment
of my parents as I enter the hall;
it stinks of their silence on my sexuality.
That’s all the big roles and ethics
All there to fulfil.
Another task,
Another box to tick
Another concrete path to rush
Quick, simple and straight.
For the last seven years, I have been working on a body of work titled Hotel Rooms themed around fluid male sexuality, mental health, queerness, and challenging deep-rooted societal gender binaries.
Our bodies become the form and medium through which we present ourselves to the outside world, engage with it, interact with it, perceive it and are perceived by it.
Body is born, as a collection of many parts, into the various collections of bodies. Different combinations or collections are projected onto various historical, spatial and temporal dimensions, out of our needs, desires and capabilities.
For transgender persons the body is a very critical juncture where a lot of trans politics happens, given the fact that a lot of our identities in terms of gender do not match how we see our bodies.
I tell them to laugh freely but question as much too. This gives them a sense of sheer relief to be able to ask, talk, question, because, even if it is ‘really bad’, after all, it’s being said in ‘lightness, is it not?
I discovered that tennis is not only about having the privilege to buy a racquet and specialised tennis shoes and access a tennis court. It is also about how one performs and expresses oneself, requiring players to follow a particular aesthetic that enforces gender binaries.
So I am realising now that for me the space of borderlessness applies to everything. It applies to the physical and topographical border as it does to the borders we create between gender and their expressions. I think I would like to argue for a truly borderless understanding of the world.
Drag is more than a form of entertainment or art form or a form of comedic release, it’s the realization of the fun of being queer or having a queer perspective.
If the workplace looked anything like our world, it would have 50% men and 50% women, 7% would have a college degree, 55% would have access to the internet, and only 70% would have access to a smartphone.
We had gathered to [discuss] digital self-determination for people with disabilities… focusing on its core component: the self. How can I be myself in digital spaces? What gives me more of a sense of self in these spaces? How can design, technology and policy contribute to helping me determine myself in digital spaces?
We are two boys in our early twenties
who can read touch like that, who have broken into
a 200-year-old mansion, without permission,
to see from above where people like them go
after 377 has been read down only for those
who can stay behind closed doors — in the custody
of cheap hotels, or houses that welcome nights
with the sound of latches closing.
Who is this that works my hand?
Who is this that moves my pen?
Touch is a beetle creeping on this foreign thing
That wears my body like an evening.