PERFORMANCE ANXIETY, (2024) Single channel high-definition video (color, sound), 7:03 minutes. Screened in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts Commencement Show, May 2024. Featuring Cosima Gardey, supported by the Brown Arts Initiative.
This semester, I finished a thesis on psychoanalytic approaches to trans (health)care. This is an attempt to ‘translate’ some of it. I’m interested in the relationships people have with medical care, and the divisions between psychic and ‘somatic’ care. Everyone hates going to the doctor. Is that reducible to the fear that you’d find something bad out? Marginalized people often hate doctors, usually for different reasons than that. Doesn’t it always feel like you’re performing, at least a little bit? Or is that just me. Why does it feel like caring for my body is always a spectator sport? Why do you all spend so much time thinking about what’s in my pants, and what it says about me?
The script of this piece is based on and only a slight addition to this poem:
"Every two years a trans person who came out two years ago declares herself an old school transsexual. Every trans elder is
like so old now, in their thirties or even late twenties. Every rich trans person who just came out is a new hope for trans people, the
one to really get this right. Every trans person who got a media job invented gender fluidity a year ago. Every trans person who tracked
tenure before transing out is the leading intellectual. Every trans person speaks for every trans person, which is to say there is only one trans person. Every
decade is a new trans moment, the first trans literature, the first talk show interview, the first trans billionaire, the first transsexual polemic, the first arrival
of trans arrival. Every older transsexual is problematic. Every trans discourse is the new discourse. Every trans joke is the new joke, told over and over.”
― Amy Marvin, “The First Trans Poem” We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, 2020.
kolya shields 