V I D E O
Alien She
Project Statement
The video Alien She provides framework on displacement of gender identity through performance and the embodiment of a hybrid human alien creature. The imagery is grounded in public restrooms containing a classic male signifier, the urinal. In the case of Alien She, the performer activates and negotiates this space through a series of movements motivated by the queer dance form of voguing. This dance form provokes irrationality and queerness, dislocating the normative code and assumption of gendered bodies in a male binary space. Voguing is an expression of identity, that is within and beyond LGBTQIA+ gender systems as well as sexual subjectivities that have become activated and present in the body. Alien She is about negotiating and exploring highly-politicized private and public spaces atypical gendered bodies are realized and repressed in.
Time is at play for this creature. It places itself around the urinal as if waiting for something. The men’s restroom is historically a site for marginalized gay men to engage with other men in sexual activities. The anticipatory factor is apparent in the video however the high strangeness of the creature also irrationalizes the homonormative narrative within the space.
Embodying nineties fly girl, raver, and mythical alien creature, the performers’ identity is obscured by a collaged costume, exposing its’ humanness while it preserves its character. Artifice and costume is a method of outward surface identity, it can shape, influence, and abstract the body, its’ gestures and sexuality. The character possesses a multivalent gendered identity, one that is male yet feminized and blurred by its alien nature positioning it in a hazy border of ultimate otherness, plurality and non-normative queerness.