(2000-2020)
ESSAY COLLECTION AND EP
This Morning Waking. This morning waking, I will wake up, I will wake up, I will wake up, and it will be the clearest morning I have ever woken.
Read the Full Introductory Essay HERE
Purchase the EP: Mad Kate | the Tide – This Morning Waking HERE
I have returned time and time again to the theme of rape in my work, to the theme of consenting or not consenting to sex, to the theme of how one assesses one’s own choice in the matter of their body and how that choice is adulterated by the paradigm within which one lives, one understands one’s self, the way in which the person is shaped by the pursuit of their own personal achievements of empowerment, their processes of waking.
In “This Morning Waking” I return to texts I wrote as I was first interrogating such issues: the naming and identification of an instance or instances of rape; the naming and identification of instances of non-consensual sexual encounters; the sensations of dis-empowerment; the embodied experiences of violation that I first experienced between ages 17 and 20. I return once again to writings and first “selfies” (though at the time I called them self-portraits) that I initiated as a young woman when I was trying to contextualize and understand what was happening to me as my body was being sexualized by others and by myself.
I return to the person that I was when I was first “coming out” as queer (though I understood it then as bisexual), as polyamorous (although I understood it then as non-monogamous); when I first was coming out as sex positive (which was then far more theoretical than physically manifested) and when I was first showing interest in experimenting with my body in the context of sex work. My desire was to challenge the internal writer writing about sex work and the internal academic theorizing about sex work, hoping to challenge those writers and academics outside myself as well. I knew then that I wanted a physical experience on stage, at work, and in the bedroom that would help me to “wake up”–wake up to understanding my own body through the body, to access knowledges located in the body and to see her/them in the larger context of what it means to be this body in the world—this particular body born with cunt that would grow breasts.
The music for This Morning Waking has been written together with Jacopo Bertacco aka “The Tide” in the form of our collaboration Mad Kate | the Tide. Sara Neidorf plays drums on When Did We Get Ill?
I return because part of the clarity, or the process of waking and clarifying, is a revolution, an endless revolving and returning to the first mornings of waking. Those first mornings were spent in confusion, in depression, in anger. What I might call these first mornings always call me back. They remind me of why and how deeply important sex is, and they also newly inform me and teach me that I was not alone at that time nor am I alone now.