New Self.
The journey began with the research question, “How does normativity shape violence in girlhood, and how could I emulate this process’ deprivation of subjecthood through erotic and symbolic representations aesthetically?” As my method began with journaling about my ideal boy writing about me as his “ideal others,” I stumbled upon many self-realizations that sparked my creative process…
Is “Birthday” a celebration, or another hallmark of the social integration that slowly depletes our individuality? Do we know who our ego really is?
In this project, I cut and burned photos of my younger self while I aggressively devour a symbolic birthday cake.
However, this is not a declaration of death; instead, it is a rebirth.
Which boy is my “Other” ?Contacting my shadow.
At first, the process seemed straightforward. I imagined my ideal mother as an attractive Asian man living in Beijing (the opposite of Nanjing, which was the capital of the Nationalist Party in Taiwan), who had a dream about a young Asian woman. However, I found this initial strategy confusing. Progress stalled because I could not fathom how a perfect, otherworldly gorgeous Beijing man would fall in love with me. Things took a turn when I let my imagination and thoughts run free as I dug into more reading. Reading “Venus in Two Acts,” I was suddenly struck by imaginary scenes in which a white, firm boy with a straight nose begs throughout the city. As I continued to read this essay, the boy begins to “come in contact” with a mythic slave girl, who is an actualization of the phantom Saidiya Hartman described as “difficult not to romanticize and imagine due to their historical erasure.”
I started writing in third person about this boy’s fate and his venture…
Feb 9.
Writing forces you to recognize your thoughts and recognize how absolutely vulnerable you are, fragile, as insignificant to this world as your words are to the universe, gibberish, artificial, detached from the material world.
It forces you to sit with your stupidity and confront your mind. But when you flip the script, suddenly writing something magnificent, life fluoresces in front of you, and then you have it. You could feel a form of power coming to life, the power to create meaning. It is like magic, like bending the universe to your well with letters and rhymes.
So why do I like writing? Because even the best writers sucks at it.
When I am trying to imagine the ideal boy, my other, imagining me as his ideal other. An animated image of a boy, from a totally different time and continent, came to mind. He travels from house to house, begging for food, carrying a stolen wooden toy boat.
And he was sexually violated trying to help a slave girl, who was later killed.
Part of me kept going back, to those days as a young girl,
For years and years I always walked alone,
Through the long long hallway
Walking alone, white socks, ponytail
In my old school uniform, dark black skirts
Stretching far far out,
Into my own shadow.
Day in and day out I walked across that long long hallway
Four floors of stairs felt like an eternity.
Every recess was an exile.
Every exile, I seek my sanctuary.
Counting bricks on the floor,
Hiding myself behind the locker door.
I think that is why the young boy is also lost, he is lost traversing through a wild landscape, while I was lost inside a suffocating hallway. I live in the exterior, the real world, but trapped inside my body, while he lives in the illusory exterior in exile, trapped inside my mind. He is lost within an imaginary exterior within my own interior, searching for an exit, swimming across different rivers, rivers that I created. Like streams of consciousness,
Traveling far, far in,
To the vastness of my own dreams.
And at the end, both of us are trapped in the mystery of life.
He feels emasculated the way I feel emasculated as a young girl. He feels complete the way I used to feel powerful in my femininity(by my definition). He is ideal because he is not afraid of emasculation, not afraid of castration. He is literally me. He is part of what constructed my heterosexual psyche because without the other, we wouldn’t have an image of ourselves.
He isn’t real, but he became part of who I am and what I am attracted to. To say he is unimportant, thus, is to say realness doesn’t matter.
Story isn’t real,
But realness is stories.
Get a peek at the documentation…Photography credit: Catherine Rodriguez
Maybe…I am also experimenting with “becoming the other” as a way to regain self-control…
“Self,” is always a fractured process”: The link between Disability and my curiosity in gender.
Works by George Bataille, Avgi Saketopolou, Luce Irigaray, and Simone De Beauvoir inspired my creative process. At last, I learned that my obsession with female emasculation and the pain of girlhood is intersectionally connected to disability studies as an autistic girl. In other words, I had to understand what it means to be a “normal” woman, literally, and that process revealed “illogical norms” and gender hierarchies. The process of self-actualization becomes a site of self-neglect(denying my status as an autistic girl) and self-devaluation(my status as a second-class citizen because I am a woman). Therefore, my fear of being ostracized as abnormal is mediated, influenced, and correlated with my fear of being “othered” as a woman.
