As for WHY play with gender and various body parts, I like very much what the famous butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno has to say on this topic: “Before birth, there is no such thing as being a man or a woman. Bodies long forgotten, the bodies of those long gone astray in memory are still living inside of me.”

Through dance and performance we are able to play temporarily with an artificial construction of these other bodies living inside of us. This is important to me because I can never “actually” be in any body other than my own. So therefore I have to pretend and play in order to get in touch with the myriad of women and men that I feel lie beneath my skin.

Similarly, reflecting on why Kazuo wears female clothing, Kazuo’s son, Yoshito, writes that, “By wearing female clothing, Kazuo says that he wants to shed the masculine role he assumes in his troubled everyday existence. When he puts on a gown, he can discard the social conventions inhibiting him and thereby fulfill his deeply held longing to return to where he originally came from. His body, through dance, is able to come into contact with its true nature. However, Kazuo can’t encounter all the spirits alive inside of him by dressing as a man. That, in my view, underlies his choice of female clothing for some dances.”

As for WHY show body parts that are as seemingly private as the cock or the vagina, I would say this: My sexual (sexualized) parts—literally, vagina and tits—are not a “private” part of my body, any more than is my head, my elbow, my face. How could one make a hierarchy of privacy about one’s own body? Covering of the body has merely to do with learned social conventions. As for those things that are truly private, sacred, and meaningful, I think of: real commitment, genuine love, and deeply felt emotions like pain and happiness. These things are far more important to me than what my body looks like. And they are equally more meaningful when shared with another person.

Body parts are what merely house the meaningful parts of me. Body parts are the temporary things that I “wear” during this lifetime. Whether you see my elbow or my vagina makes little difference as far as what you are “really” seeing of me. The only difference lies in the social interpretation of what I’m showing you, but either way you haven’t gained deeper access of my “self” or my private life whether you’ve seen my elbow or seen my pussy. And as for showing my cock, as I mentioned above, this has something to do with being a woman who wants to be and occupy every experience that life has to offer. A visible cock is one body part that I can “wear,” if even for a moment.

I’ve thought for a long time that one can only speak from one’s own body; this is one reason why I choose my own body as the site of experiment. I can never experience being a bio man—not fully. Even if I were to become a transman I still wouldn’t experience what a bio man feels growing up as a boy because I have grown up as female. But playing with gender is one way of experiencing some aspect manhood, a thing that I can never truly understand and can only glimpse at through performance and dance play. And even this works not because all “men” are the same on the inside but because of their outsides—“men” are interpreted in public spaces in certain ways.

Using the mode of the photograph, the photographed subject—in this case me myself—experiences what it is to be gazed at outside of a female normative gaze. With superficial appendices like the cock I can see how the interpretation influences my own sense of masculinity as I lounge and play in front of the camera with this new found, if temporary, gender. The cock is also an outward expression of an inner feeling that already exists. With or without cock, I have a sense of masculinity inside me, and through an overt and obvious expression of it, an appendage, I am able to further push this aspect of self from interior to exterior and perhaps explore the expression of masculinity through the photos beyond even the mere existence of the cock. Rather, it can and will hopefully extend to my facial expression, my body tension, my entire aura that I illustrate as subject of the photo. Still what I can truly say is limited; none of the photos can every truly tell the complicated nuances of gender that exist inside me. But they can hint at what might be offered beneath my skin.

With love,

Kate