Flagging Chimera
Just Femme & Dandy Volume 06: The Time Travel Issue, Winter 2024
“Not they/them as in Third Androgynous Gender Option, they/them as in a body that is crowded with Us. A chorus of both resonant and dissonant selves, contradicting selves, selves who are best friends, selves at war. It’s super loud in here. Queerness, in this body, doesn’t work as a noun; we only know the verb state, the constant motion of teeming I’s, like a beehive, a square dance, or a mosh pit, depending on the day. The more we talk to other queers, the more we realize our churning sense of self is not an anomaly. And as a trans non-binary, testosterizing, gender-bewildered fashion practitioner and scholar, we wonder: how do we dress for this dynamism and multiplicity?
Personally, we’ve found most of our style icons in mythical creatures. For example, goblins are a major inspiration for how we gender-identify on a day-to-day basis: natural born anarchists with an obsession for things that sparkle. We fondly refer to this embodied state as ‘goblin faggotry,’ and it makes us crave garish silk shirts paired with cargo shorts (the pockets are key to goblinized gender euphoria). The goblin faggot is a stance from which we have learned to comfortably navigate the world. It’s gender home-base.
But lately, we’ve cultivated a new-found reverence for the Chimera. Her body has three heads: a lion, a goat, and a snake. She didn’t get a great lot in mythology – while minding her own business out in the wilderness, some cis-guy (Bellerophon) showed up on Pegasus and slayed her. She wasn’t afforded a shred of character depth by the Greek poets. How misunderstood she’s been, labeled ‘monster’ and killed for it, and how relatable she is to all of us who fear this verdict. Out here in the wilderness that lies beyond the M-F gender spectrum, we’re all chimerical kin. How seen we feel by an old dead creature whose body was home to plural entities.”
This self-portrait collage is an exercise in creative destruction, a therapeutic slicing and dicing of beloved items from my wardrobe, hacking my routine outfits into fanatical chaos. The resulting assemblage elicits gender euphoria for my chimeral avatar.
Xeroxed selfies with digital wardrobe collage. Six grainy, black and white cut-outs of a white, trans masculine person with no shirt, white basketball shorts, and black heeled boots are intertwined in a mass, merging into a single body. Brightly colored slices of fabric are collaged on top, creating a playful, skimpy, uncohesive outfit. Breasts are often exposed and details include horns, streamers, and a clown nose.