[JP (Jennifer)]:
I want to include a few excerpts from things I have written over the years; about my desire, my fantasies of masculinity and my failure in trying to embody them as a physical manifestation. I seem to keep hitting against a brick wall in my attempt to give form to an intangible ‘thing’ that always existed within me. In the moment of my desire, and only within this moment of desire, I would swing back and forth between girl and boy, penetrated and penetrator, a constant push and pull; an in between-ness that is manifest within the whole visceral body of my work.
From ‘A summary’:
‘My main character the Detective; explores my fantasies of masculinity and of coming to terms with my own femininity. The only ‘male’ in the story, although his lack is substituted with a bulging cock-sock lest his true gender be displayed, and his apparent masculinity called into question. Girls swoon in his presence, he only has to adjust the curve of wadded material and they moisten in anticipation. He is the super stud of my pubescent dreams, with the swagger that I always wanted to possess. [Growing up] I began to develop a kind of simulated hermaphroditism, where I could be at once both male and female, existing in a constant state of in-between. I did not feel as if I was born into the wrong gender per se, nor did I feel I wanted to become a boy. I was a girl, but the freedom of masculinity and its ideals seemed to appeal to me more than what I perceived as femaleness. As puberty encroached, and I [b]loomed toward womanhood, the balance began to shift as my interaction with the world as a ‘female desired by men’ took on shape. I no longer held the masculine gaze, I was in the male gaze, where men do the looking and women are looked at. Images to be consumed. The make-believe characters within my hyperbolic narrative explore this journey, trying to order and make sense of what is it is to be fe-male, or anything in-between.’
From ‘[Seduce and Destroy?] Notes on masculinity and failure#1’:
‘I am finding it difficult to visualise my detective character, it is something that I have been trying to bring to fruition for some time now. I don’t understand it, perhaps I am not focussing enough, perhaps I do not want to give him a face, maybe he has too many. He is within me, I can feel him. He is the stuff of my pubescent dreams. He is me. And yet, he does not want to come to the surface as I try to re-imagine him. An imaginary friend, he never needed to have a self. He came out through me. Perhaps that is what is more important. I have been trying to make myself a parody of a man, but it didn’t quite fit. It seems to keep rejecting. For me, it is not about a certain look, more of an attitude, a demeanour. As a child without the restrictions of societal morals of which I had not yet learned, and with a basic need to satisfy desire, I was able to ‘act out’ the man of my dreams. This masculinity was a part of me, with no need to separate.’
…..(continued on next post)
