Oyster. Feminist and Queer Approaches to Arts, Cultures, and Genders
Hongwei Bao, Susanne Huber, Änne Söll (Eds.)
Volume 6
Advisory Board
Daniel Berndt, Universität Zürich
Cuneyt Cakirlar, Nottingham Trent University
Jill H. Casid, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Brian Curtin, Chulalongkorn University Bangkok
Henriette Gunkel, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Lisa Hecht, Philipps-Universität Marburg
Antje Krause-Wahl, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Lex Morgan Lancaster, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
Zintombizethu Matebeni, University of Fort Hare
Fiona McGovern, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
TRANSFORMATIVE FEMINISMS
Nordic Art in the Transcultural
Kerry Greaves, Birgitte Thorsen Vilslev (Eds.)
Present
This publication is generously funded by a Novo Nordisk Foundation Investigator Grant in Art History Research
ISBN 978-3-11-133216-1
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-133225-3
DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111332253
ISSN 2940-7265
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I Feminism and the Welfare Model
Katve-Kaisa Kontturi Grumpy
II Gender, Sexuality, and the Body
Anne Kølbæk Iversen
Touching, Morphing, Splicing
Articulations of Bodily Complexities and New Erogenous Terrains in Contemporary Danish Art Practice
Maria Bee Christensen-Strynø
Feminist Disability Aesthetics 2.0
Emergent Refigurations of the Disabled Female Body in the Video Art of Luna Scales
Mathias Danbolt
Against Queer Monumentality
Interlude: The Poetic Work of Jessie Kleemann
Birgitte Anderberg
III Transculturality and Decolonization
Marsha Meskimmon
Against Complacency
Liisa-Rávná Finbog
“Lean Gierddahallan Jávohisvuođas”
Silencing of Sámi Women and Their Aesthetic Practices
Stephanie von Spreter
Broken Legacies, Potential Futures
Artistic
Anna Maria Dam Ziska
Weaving Transcultural Identities
Craft and the Notion of Belonging in the Work of Tita Vinther and Alda Mohr Eyðunardóttir
Æsa Sigurj ó nsd óttir
Dangerous Knowledge
and Other Feminist and Intersectional Actions
IV Posthuman Feminisms and Glitches
Nina Lykke
Introduction: Posthuman Feminist Aesthetics
Nina Mangalanayagam and Louise Wolthers
Vendela Grundell Gachoud
and Embraced
Thorsen Vilslev
Kerry Greaves
Introduction: Transformative Feminisms
Contemporary Art and the Nordic Paradox
Abstract
In the reputedly egalitarian Nordic countries gender equality has been positioned as a key component of welfare states. While feminism undoubtedly was decisive in bringing about important social and artistic advances in Denmark, Finland, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sápmi, and Sweden over the last fifty years, the general perception of the region as a beacon of social egalitarianism has led to a misinformed relaxing of concern for gender equality, contributing to the idea that it is no longer a problem requiring attention. Nevertheless, women remain grossly underrepresented in museum collections, exhibitions, and art historical studies, and both feminism and queer theory, approaches, and subjects have had a precarious relationship with Nordic art and its history, analysis, and dissemination. Arguing that Nordic feminist art, practice, and theory are at a crossroads that demands new approaches and visions, this introduction explains the book’s transhistorical, transcultural, intersectional, and decolonial approach, and provides an overview of important feminist interventions in Nordic art history since the 1970s, along with notable sources for further research. Rather than offering a comprehensive picture, it outlines general tendencies of the Nordic situation as a larger context for the focused essays.
Keywords: contemporary Nordic art, feminist art, Nordic feminist art, women’s art, welfare state, transculturality, posthuman feminism, decolonial art practice
As early as 1980, critic and curator Lucy Lippard poignantly stated that feminism is “neither a style nor a movement” but “a value system, a revolutionary strategy, a way of life” that “questions all the precepts of art as we know it.”1 Transformative Feminisms revisits Lippard’s rallying cry to reinvigorate an urgently needed engagement with feminism and contemporary art in and of the Nordic and Arctic regions.2 But before this introduction proceeds, it is important first to foreground and sincerely thank all of the
1 Lucy Lippard, “Sweeping Exchanges: The Contribution of Feminism to the Art of the 1970s,” Art Journal 40, nos. 1–2 (1980): 362.
2 I would like to thank the Novo Nordisk Foundation, which generously funded this publication through a four-year Investigator Grant in Art History.
Amelia Jones
Introduction: Thinking Through … Gender and the Body
Bodies matter. Bodies have meaning. Bodies act. Bodies matter, have meaning, and act differently in different contexts. Nordic feminist bodies matter and have meaning in ways I am accessing through Kerry Greaves’s introduction to this book and the other four luscious essays in the “Gender, Sexuality, and the Body” section, which this short essay is introducing. I am honored to be asked to write this, sitting at my desk in Los Angeles (approximately 5,500 miles or 8,800 kilometers away from the Nordic region), in my white, middle-aged, cis female-identified/feminist (queer/trans and BIPOC1 ally) American body, thinking about feminism in Nordic art and culture through an embodied lens. We share so much (having bodies, being human, having been formed by the European worldview, being feminists; and many of my ancestors were Swedish!) and yet I can never fully understand what the Nordic feminist artists and scholars feel and experience with their bodies. Feminism—as an energetic field, a politics, and (in Lucy Lippard’s words, quoted by Greaves in her introduction) a “value system, a revolutionary strategy, a way of life”—binds us together.
Greaves and the authors of the essays in this section point out that art institutions today are seemingly embracing but in reality struggling mightily with feminist and queer agendas, and (I would add) BIPOC agendas and other forms of urgent identity politics—often reducing the radical imperatives of activist rights movements and theories to superficial glosses on the same old processes and structures. The additive approach to art history and to museum collections and exhibitions is but one among many examples of this problem (adding works by women artists to fundamentally patriarchal discourses and institutions is not going to change the nature of how they function and the varieties of social privilege they serve). Hence, as Mathias Danbolt explicitly addresses here, the broad state or institutional mandates (often sudden, in response to swells of activism and protest) to address aspects of exclusion and oppression can result in enjoyable or even galvanizing cultural moments, but run the serious danger of not changing anything in the long run or in the bigger picture (or, even worse,
1 Black, Indigenous, people of color.
in the community and denuded it of any political or spiritual import. Finbog’s insistence on thinking with very different categories—in particular the Sámi concept of vuogas as aesthetics (not simply translatable to the English term); dipmaduodji, the aesthetic work of women in soft materials; and the gákti, a piece of clothing that carries rich genealogical significance—is a profound challenge to the epistemic complacency of the discipline. It also materializes the “dangerous knowledge” that plural feminisms—transnational, transcultural, decolonial, intersectional, queer, nonbinary, race-critical, and ecocritical feminisms—can offer to the static limits of siloed thinking that have constituted the narrow paradigms of Western- and anthropocentric concepts of gender, creativity, and transformation in more-than-human worlds. And in this shared adventure, there is no room for complacency.
Bibliography
Armitage, David, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram, eds. Oceanic Histories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Banerjee, Pallavi, and Raewyn Connell. “Gender Theory as Southern Theory.” In Handbook of the Sociology of Gender, edited by Barbara J. Risman, Carissa M. Froyum, and William J. Scarborough, 57–68. London: Springer, 2018.
Meskimmon, Marsha. Transnational Feminisms and Art’s Transhemispheric Histories: Ecologies and Genealogies. New York and London: Routledge, 2023.
Sivasundaram, Sujit. Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire. London: William Collins, 2020.
Stoler, Anne Laura. Interior Frontiers: Essays on the Entrails of Inequality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
Liisa-Rávná Finbog
“Lean Gierddahallan Jávohisvuođas”
The Silencing of Sámi Women and Their Aesthetic Practices
Abstract
The marginalization of Indigenous women and their knowledge is conspicuously lacking within the complex legacies of colonialism. This absence is encouraged by patriarchal hierarchies, privilege, and asymmetrical power relations. As a consequence, in the context of the Sámi people’s history, political motivations behind the specific lines of development and contestations of early colonization have been shaped (and understood) with a noticeable absence of autonomous women. Stories of Sámi sovereign womanhood nevertheless exist, only they do so within the framework of Indigenous Sámi epistemologies that speak to female presence in the form of oral stories, aesthetic (and other bodily) practices, as well as objects and things, all of which reflect what we might consider a Sámi “literature.” How are we to understand the presence of, as well as the positions and tasks conferred on Sámi women (in both past, present, and future) without applying their spoken words, aesthetics (or art), and objects? This essay looks to precisely such sources to explore female aesthetic practices and expressions of art as a gateway to understanding the social dynamics of a gendered Sápmi (pasts, presents, and futures); the process with which this dynamic was slowly changed to mimic (colonial) systems of gender discrimination; and the repercussions of this on contemporary Sápmi.
The relics on which history (as we officially know it) has been established have all too often worked to limit female participation.1 Whether the analytic framework in question has been localized to social, political, or historical structures, women’s lives have, at best, been neglected. It is far more likely, however, that they have simply been erased from the equation.2 Similarly, the marginalization of Indigenous women and their knowledge is also conspicuously lacking within the complex legacies of colonialism. This absence is almost certainly encouraged by patriarchal hierarchies, privilege, and asym-
1 Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996). For an earlier treatment of the subject of this essay, see my It Speaks to You: Making Kin of People, Duodji and Stories in Sámi Museums (Lewes: DIO Press, 2023).
2 Joan Sangster, “Telling Our Stories: Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History,” Women’s History Review 3, no. 1 (1994): 5–28, https://doi.org/10.1080/09612029400200046.
ethnographic artifacts.11 “[I]n other words, the aesthetic objects of non-Western peoples had to be transposed into the Western system of classification” to be viewed as valid.12
Born of an enforced normativity, this system has its origin in the belief that art is for the sake of art, meaning that aesthetics purely focused on an external manifestation are valued above aesthetics that are also utilitarian, eventually shaping the Western white male art canon 13 Here we encounter the primary problem facing Indigenous art, which tends to approach aesthetics not by outward appearances so much as by the purpose behind creation, placing it in the category of the utilitarian.14 The Sámi view of aesthetics is certainly inclined toward this school of thought, as what makes a thing or object aesthetically pleasing is “the relations of a thing’s form to its intended purpose.”15
At first glance, the prevailing Western divide defining Indigenous “primitive” art and aesthetic “ethnographic” practice as craft or applied art is one that might seem beyond criticism. This divide nevertheless reveals a deep ontological difference. As the Sámi scholar Harald Gaski has pointed out, “aesthetics in ‘Western’ traditions lack the full implication of what Sámi mean when we talk about aesthetics.”16 Moreover, there is a marked difference in how genders express their aesthetics. To use duodji as an example, traditionally women have worked with softer materials such as yarn, fabric, skin, and leathers (dipmaduodji), as explored in a contemporary context by Samí visual artist from Finland Outi Pieski (Figure 1). Meanwhile men have focused more on bone and wood as their material of choice (garraduoji). Transmuted into the canon of Western art, the former is typically understood to be craft. The latter, however, is frequently considered to be art craft.17
The complexities and dynamic layers that are associated with Sámi aesthetics are, among others, found in the term vuogas. Though I understand the word here as comparable to “aesthetics,” the meaning of vuogas runs more along the lines of “pleasing,”
11 Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
12 Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher Burghard Steiner, “Art, Authenticity, and the Baggage of Cultural Encounter,” in Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds, ed. Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher Burghard Steiner (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 7; Harald Gaski, “Indigenous Aesthetics: Add Context to Context,” in Sami Art and Aesthetics: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Svein Aamold et al. (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2017), 179.
13 Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); Graeme F. Chalmers, “Cultural Colonialism and Art Education: Eurocentric and Racist Roots of Art Education,” in Art, Culture, and Pedagogy, ed. Dustin Garnet and Anita Sinner (Leiden: Brill, 2019), https://doi.org/10 1163/ 9789004390096 005, 37.
14 Rachmi Diyah Larasati, “Reclaiming the Aesthetic of Women: De-colonizing Land Ownership,” Cultural Studies 33, no. 3 (2019): 552; Nance Marie Mithlo, “‘Silly Little Things’: Framing Global Self-Appropriations in Native Arts,” in No Deal! Indigenous Arts and the Politics of Possession, ed. Tressa Berman (Santa Fe, NM: School For Advanced Research, 2012), 192.
15 Gaski, “Indigenous Aesthetics,” 187.
16 Ibid., 188.
17 Eikjok, “Gender, Essentialism and Feminism,” 110.
1 Outi Pieski, Ovdavázzit – Forewalkers, 2019, site specific installation, A Greater Miracle of Perception, the Finnish Alvar Aalto Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia.
“pleasant,” and “agreeable”: something is vuogas when it is pleasing and/or agreeable both to the senses and in its function.18 Still, even in my choice of translation, what makes something pleasing and agreeable is very much centered in a sociocultural domain. Just as Indigenous knowledges and epistemologies are seeded in and from the land and the specificity of the local geography, so too must our concepts and storied languages be viewed from the ontologies in which they were conceptualized. 19 In the history of its use, vuogas as a perception of aesthetics has as such also included, but not been limited to, notions of spirituality, the authority of judicial governance, and matters of record-keeping. Many of these aspects historically have been connected to specific roles and tasks conferred on Sámi women.
Prior to colonization, Sámi women (as well as nonbinary gender expressions) were by all accounts regarded as equal to men, existing in a dynamic characterized by com-
18 Kristoffer Sjulsson et al., Kristoffer Sjulssons Minnen: Om Vapstenlapparna i Början Af 1800–Talet (Stockholm: Nordiska Museum, 1979), 91.
19 Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen and Irja Seurujärvi-Kari, “Introduction: Theorizing Indigenous Knowledge(s),” Dutkansearvvi Dieđalaš Áigečála 3, no. 2 (2019), 1–19; Harald Gaski, Sami Culture: The Norwegian Sami Experience (Karasjok: Davvi Girji, 1997), 13.
Höglund, Johan, and Linda Andersson Burnett. “Introduction: Nordic Colonialisms and Scandinavian Studies.” Scandinavian Studies 91, nos. 1–2 (2019): 1–12.
Kuratorisk Aktion, ed. Tupilakosaurus. An Incomplete(able) Survey of Pia Arke’s Artistic Work and Research. Copenhagen: Kuratorisk Aktion, 2012.
Lehtola, Veli-Pekka. “Our Histories in the Photographs of the Others: Sámi Approaches to Visual Materials in Archives.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 10, no. 4 (2018): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 200042 14 .2018 .15 10 647.
Lien, Sigrid, and Hilde Wallem Nielssen. “Bilder Fra Glemselens Dyp.” Klassekampen, February 23, 2021: 30–31.
Lindroth, Marjo, Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen, and Monica Tennberg, eds. Critical Studies of the Arctic: Unravelling the North. Cham: Springer International, 2022.
Schneider, Birgit. “Sublime Aesthetics in the Era of Climate Crisis? A Critique.” In The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, edited by T. J. Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, and Subhankar Banerjee, 263–273. New York and London: Routledge, 2021.
Anna Maria Dam Ziska
Weaving Transcultural Identities
Craft and the Notion of Belonging in the Work of Tita Vinther and Alda Mohr Eyðunardóttir
Abstract
Being a relatively remote country belonging to the Danish Commonwealth, the Faroe Islands and its people have a close but complex relationship to Denmark. Belonging to the Faroe Islands also means belonging to Denmark to some extent. Furthermore, a large part of the Faroese population ventures to Denmark and other countries to receive an education, work, and so on. In other words, the geographic and political position of the country results in experiences of transculturality and hybridity for many of its inhabitants. This essay examines issues of transculturality and hybridity as well as gender by examining works by two Faroese artists, Tita Vinther and Alda Mohr Eyðunardóttir. Though Vinther and Eyðunardóttir are from different generations, they have both worked within the field of textile art. Using Wolfgang Welsch’s writings on transculturality and Homi K. Bhabha’s analysis of hybridity, the essay considers Vinther and Eyðunardóttir’s personal experiences and argues that they both represent transculturality on different levels. Focusing on the notion of women’s work and crafts, the essay also sheds light on how the artists have worked within and against the traditional framework of “women’s work.” Lastly, the essay states that Vinther and Eyðunardóttir, despite their differences, both point to how transculturality intersects with gender, and argues that “women’s work” was never confined to the domestic sphere but has for centuries been a vehicle of transcultural connection and cultural formation.
Keywords: Faroese art history, Tita Vinther, Alda Mohr Eyðunardóttir, transculturality, hybridity, women’s work
This essay examines works by two Faroese artists, the pioneering textile artist Tita Vinther (1941–2019) and Alda Mohr Eyðunardóttir (b. 1997), and asks how they work with issues of gender, transculturality, and hybridity. Vinther and Eyðunardóttir are voices from different generations, both working with textile art and both representing transculturality on different levels. Vinther was born in Finland, spent her childhood in Denmark, and later moved to the Faroe Islands in the early 1960s, where she lived and worked for the rest of her life and became one of the islands’ pioneering textile artists.1
1 Mikael Wivel, “Tegn og underlige gerninger,” in Sekel: Færøsk kunst i hundrede år, ed. Helgi Fossádal (Tórshavn: Listasavn Føroya, 2011), 317.
Alda Mohr Eyðunardóttir, To Change What Was Intended, 2020, wool, nylon, linen, silk, steel wires and rocks, 2 × 2 m. The National Gallery of the Faroe Islands.
Nina Mangalanayagam and Louise Wolthers
The Transformative Bug
Glitches, Moths, and Monstrosities
Abstract
This essay proposes a new “entomological” turn in the genre of glitch art, illustrated by the figure of the bug as an actual insect. Our point of departure is an incident from 1947, when engineers at Harvard University found a moth stuck in one of the Mark II computer components and taped it into their logbook, labeling it “first actual case of bug being found.” We suggest that approaching the glitch as bug and its insect characteristics beyond the humancentric points to wider critical potentials of disrupting a system’s logic, organization, and procedures through a “nonhuman vision.” Drawing on Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media (2010) as well as Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020), we argue that an “entomological” approach offers glitchy strategies for feminist, queer, and decolonial disruptions of oppressive systems. This is addressed through works by artists Amalie Smith, Esse McChesney, and Josèfa Ntjam, who in our readings are glitching museums, archives and collections, historical (colonial) narratives, and heteronormative concepts of gender. An entomological understanding of media embraces swarms, webbing, symbiosis, metamorphosis, virus, composite vision, and extinction. As this chapter will exemplify, approaching the glitch as bug thus opens space for agencies and frictions from both the machinic and the natural realms. In our readings of the works we highlight Donna Haraway’s monster as a counter-figure to the standard white embodiment of anthropocentric normality. Furthermore, the metamorphosis of moths is a powerful symbol for human changes and is often used in queer and trans* activism. Rosi Braidotti also turns to insects as ultimate hybrids, noting how they point to posthuman sensibilities and sexualities, suggesting an insect paradigm as a model for polymorphous anti-phallic sexuality. The contemporary art practices of Smith, McChesney, and Ntjam employ glitching in ways that create ecologies of in-betweenness in bodies, media, technologies, and insects and other nonhuman animals.
Keywords: glitch, bugs, entomological turn, contemporary art, feminist art
Small flaws in machines have long been called “bugs,” but in 1947 engineers working on the Mark II computer at Harvard University found a moth stuck in a component relay. They taped the insect in their logbook and labeled it the “first actual case of bug being found.” This moth is reimagined in the 2018 video Enter by Danish artist Amalie Smith (b. 1985), which is the starting point of this essay about bugs and glitches as transformative failures beyond the conventional technological realm (see Figure 1). En
ter leads us toward related works that embrace glitches as refusals to function within normative systems and instead point to feminist, queer, decolonial, and interspecies futures.
The glitch is a disruption that opens up scrutiny of what is hidden below the seamless surface. In a critical Nordic context, where feminism and LGBTQI1 politics are seen as internationally progressive, the glitch is relevant for questioning this image of Nordic and particularly Scandinavian exceptionalism. In the anthology Pluralistic Struggles in Gender, Sexuality and Coloniality: Challenging Swedish Exceptionalism, the editors address gaps in the hegemonic feminist discourse that has failed to take into account many of society’s minorities.2 They point to religious, colonial, racial, and gender differences that have been silenced and are incompatible with an imagined linear progression and create “friction” in the dominant narratives about equality. They borrow the term from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s 2005 book Friction as an approach to difference; that is, to imagine worlds that are not frictionless, but rather complex, contradictory, and full of conflict.3 This resonates with our approach to the glitch in this essay.
Through an analysis of works by Amalie Smith, Esse McChesney (b. 1998), and Josèfa Ntjam (b. 1992), we examine the glitching of museums, archives and collections, historical (colonial) narratives, and heteronormative concepts of gender from the perspectives of diversity. We draw on Legacy Russell’s conceptualization of the “glitch” as the refusal to function in a preconceived system. Russell insists on moving away from what she defines as a white cyberspace created by the first wave of cyberfeminists. She explicitly foregrounds Black, trans/nonbinary positions, for instance in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy. Russell’s glitchy intersectionality is closely related to the technomaterialist and anti-naturalist gender abolitionism in xenofeminism (XF). Helen Hester, a founding member of the Laboria Cuboniks collective that created XF, defines it as “an attempt to articulate a radical gender politics fit for an era of globality, complexity, and technology.”4 Although glitch is more often used to explain an error in a technological system, Russell develops the term to refer to larger structures in society that categorize and code our physical bodies.5 A body that pushes back and remains indecipherable within a binary assignment refuses to perform according to these set boundaries. As we explore the potentials of posthuman and nonhuman interferences, we propose the figure of the bug in metaphorical, technical, and methodological meanings: both as a glitch and as a moth. We are inspired by insect behavior and entomology with sub-
2 Erika Alm et al., eds. Pluralistic Struggles in Gender, Sexuality and Coloniality: Challenging Swedish Exceptionalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 1–18.
3 Ibid., 7.
4 Helen Hester, Xenofeminism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 7.
5 See Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London: Verso, 2020).
sembled in new ways. Occasionally the projected film is disrupted by a rapid flow of photographs of insects flashing by, which were used to train the neural AI networks.
The digital screens in Looming are LED curtains, making them look like tapestries with enormous “pixels.” They could be described as a glitchy counter-aesthetics that disrupts an expected seamless digital imagery. Here, glitch is also conceptually at work as slippage, movement, change, remix, and virus, to reference Russell. The screens in Looming form what Smith terms “a multidimensional image space”—and, just like Enter, attract one to the messiness, complexity, and instability of future image archives.14 Her work reflects the wonders of new digital technologies but also the potential threats, as suggested in the title “looming” as something impending, nearing, hovering. Collaborating with nonhuman visualities (as both the machine/AI/algorithm and elements from the natural world), the artist invites the potentiality of glitch to alter established knowledge systems, proposing a new symbiosis between human, nature, and machine/technology.
The connections between weaving , webbing, coding , and the internet have been unfolded by techno-feminist thinkers such as Sadie Plant. 15 Joanna Zylinska draws on Plant and Haraway in her essay “Webwords: From the Spider’s Web to Cyberspace” to explore the cyborg as the uncanny product of “the network of contemporary technologies and communication devices [where] images from the allegedly separate domains of nature and culture are positioned side by side.”16 Swedish textile artist Esse McChesney uses weaving, sewing, and stitching in their work on queer and nonbinary bodies. The embroidery Mastectomy (2020) shows a blue torso almost resembling an antique sculpture without arms, head, or lower body, but with yellow stitches under the flat breasts and small stitches around the nipples, mimicking interventions in gender affirmation surgery. The torso itself is also composed of stitches, challenging ideas about the original or natural body. Similarly, at the center of the large weaving Longing/Worry (2022) is a greenish, almost glowing torso with lines of dark green stitches after chest surgery (Figure 2). Here the torso is cut off by the frames of what appears to be a digital, screen-based image in the same visual language as the selfies taken and shared on social media that are particularly important among trans and queer community groups.17 The reference to online sources is emphasized by small squares, looking like pixels (or glitches) in various shades of green that spread out on the background pattern. This pattern consists of trees, leaves, branches, and more abstract growths looking like
14 See Amalie Smith, “Looming ‘Udstillingstekst,’” https://www.amaliesmith.dk/looming
15 Sade Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New (London: Fourth Estate, 1997).
16 Joanna Zylinska, On Spiders, Cyborgs and Being Scared: The Feminine and the Sublime (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 127.
17 See Tobias Raun, “Screen Births: Trans Vlogs as a Transformative Media for Self-Representation,” in Video Theories: A Transdisciplinary Reader, ed. Dieter Daniels and Jan Thoben (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 113–130.
2 Esse McChesney, Längtan/Oro (Longing/Worry), 2022, tapestry, detail.
roots, stems, or mycelia, all in a variety of purple hues. These organic elements form entangled layers with some gnarly furcations seeming to grow on the “surface” of the overall motif—like a mycorrhizal or bacterial network.
The borders of the weaving form a frame in the same shade of green as the surgery stitches and from the lower edge come tassels of varying lengths in the same bright green nuances as the torso. They could be read as tubes or similar kinds of tentacular extensions from the trans* body.18 The tentacular motifs bring to mind Haraway’s inspiration from the Pimoa Cthulhu spider in her conceptualization of the Chthulucene as an elsewhere of myriad tentacles:
The tentacular are not disembodied figures; they are cnidarians, spiders, fingery beings like humans and raccoons, squid, jellyfish, neural extravaganzas, fibrous entities, flagellated
18 The asterisk implies that trans* is used as an umbrella term. See Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2018).
