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Stemming from the "theater and shamanism" idea... I'm soon embarking on a project to embody an alter ego. A few weeks ago I had the chance to attend a lecture by Del LaGrace Volcano. He/she is a photographer, performance artist and self-described "gender terrorist." Born vertically hermaphroditic (intersexed). In this lecture he (for he had adopted a male persona for the role) was presenting his theories of gender and an overview of his work, especially with drag king communities in Europe. This was GALVANIZING. The sheer lack of boundaries was staggering, predicated on the destruction of the male/female/gay/straight structure. Absolute fluidity of gender and gender roles. Gender being defined BETWEEN two people instead of as an intrinsic role. Gender and sexuality, of course, being distinct, even psych-gender and bio-gender. And concepts such as "cris-cross-dressing", overlapping drag...men as women as men...
AAAHHHH!! So this was a grand moment. Crash course in queer theory, maybe, and that's my loss for not digging in earlier. But anyway.
This inspired me to embody my lesbian sexuality. I'm a young white man (sometimes angry) of socially ambiguous sexuality. I am attracted to women but never quite connected with the defined 'straight' sexuality. In grade school? early high school? I was taunted a lot for being queer or being a girl, depending on the mood, and in response I'd say I was a dyke - a girl who loved girls.
A year+ ago I started considering this seriously. There was a community that supported gender-fluidity and several people that, in all serious, felt they were a man in a woman's body or so on. One person, a woman/professor/author, has actually had several mystical experiences in Europe, related to English history, that have confirmed this for her.
So I'm going to embody this lesbian facet for a period of several months. This is just being prepared right now, so details are sketchy, but the overarching goal is to flesh out this psycho-sexual state and, in essence, see what happens. I have a lot of ideas re: energy and aggression, maybe boiled down to assertiveness, connected to sexual expression which in turn connects them to this state.
My concern with this is the integral, or non-integral, effects on the rest of my being. The only other experience I have with such things is becoming hard-core goth for several years, which did wonders for adolescence but atrophied several facets which only now are beginning to recover. Mind you that transformation was basically unconscious. This one is an embodying and a pseudo-performance. I thus assume it will be more integral.
Or will it? Has anyone else tried something like this? And what were the effects? |
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