When I think about my life’s aesthetics, I attribute my identity and self expression to what I've been privately calling an “urge to transgress.” I think I got this idea from Co-Star, which isn’t very scholarly, but it is apt: what could be more indicative of identity’s submission to culture than getting my personality from an algorithmically-generated horoscope?
Co-Star tells me that my Sun in Capricorn being in my Eighth House means that I feel a need to “distinguish [myself] from others through darkness, taboos, rebirth, sex, and transformation.” The first time I got the Co-Star app and read my chart at a small undergrad party, I remember another girl remarking to me how accurate that part was for me. I barely knew her, which made the observation stick in my mind even more.
But I do feel ~born to transgress~ for reasons that aren’t astrology app-based. For example, I’m a queer daughter of two Christian preachers. I’m from a culture of repression, in Canada’s poorest province, and I have a depressive/masochistic personality type. (I’m also hot and a lot of fun at parties, honest.) But I was born into alienation, so my strategy has always been to take control. Hence: the marked page, the cut wrist, the penetrated body, the tattooed skin. By embracing these forms of transgression I can disrupt and eventually transform my stifling circumstances; I can be infinitely reborn as I scab over.
No, this obviously isn’t the healthiest way to be, so I’m shifting these urges into art. In my writing I’m being (or trying to be, anyways) disgusting and erotic and bold. But what I want to focus on more is the surfaces I’m decorating, and how I’m getting away from constructing my identity through destruction or consumption, and moving toward personalization and customization. In other words, crafting visual/aesthetic identity that is true to my transgressive ego, but that is affirmative, not only in rejection of other things.
So here I’ve collected some of my most personal surfaces—personal in that I have collected words and artworks that make me feel “like myself.” I guess you could call it a glorified tattoo tour, but to me it’s more about documenting the healthy ways I make myself feel at home in my body, my apartment, my journal, whatever. I like for these signifiers to be provocative, but compatible with aging, and representative of my values.
For example, I love erotic art, not because it gets me off or whatever but because radical acceptance and usage of the body has great liberatory potential. I’m not sex positive in the sense that I think sex is inherently empowering (we really fucked that whole thing up in the 2010s) but I am on the sex/body neutral-to-positive axis. One of my favourite pieces in my room is a magazine cutout of Carolee Schneemann’s performance art piece, “Interior Scroll” (1975). In this performance she removes a scroll of paper from her vagina and reads off of it; you can read the script below. I also have that Remi Wolf poster with her tits out, and I recently bought a Jazmyne Araya print that I’m in love with. The unusual, frank, vulnerable, powerful presentation of bodies makes it feel safe to be unapologetic about my own, to use it as a tool for art, to be both sexy and to subvert sexiness in the abject reality of body occupancy.
I’m also still an avid diarist, and maybe sometime in the future I’ll feel safe to share more recent diary entries. (By the way, I was one of the kids who insisted it was a journal, not a diary, because “diary” implied femininity. But I lean into it now for the same reason.) They’re mostly too cringe-worthy to ever see the light of day, just a place to monitor my mental health and reflect on things I can’t talk about.
I was reading Susan Sontag’s “The Pornographic Imagination” this weekend for my writing group, and it really resonated (thanks always to my angel Noah for choosing texts that are perfect for me). Sontag defends pornographic literature like Bataille and Sade and argues that porn lit fills the void left where religious, proselytizing lit fell off. It creates a similar excitement in the reader, she explains, lending itself to ecstatic pleasure.
The essay also speaks to the extremity of emotion involved in sex, saying that to limit oneself to the “realist” tradition of the nineteenth century (especially pastoral lit) denies readers connection with a crucial part of human experience. In fact, pornographic writing accesses fundamental parts of our psyche, and it is more literary to address these feelings than to ignore them; it creates some of humanity’s most important art. Because an art world that’s obsessed with edification is self-censored and denies the obscene, the taboo, the horrifying things that make us feel alive.
So I believe Sontag and I are on the same page: transgression is a fundamental human practice, and transgressive art is the most important kind. Obviously this isn’t a call to, say, rape and pillage; it’s a call to disrupt via personalization. Alchemize your weird religious upbringing into a septum piercing or something.
Yours in obscenity,
Shan