New Body

New Body, I filmed myself drying a sheet of SCOBY across my chest and shoulders, gesturing at an attempt toward letting it become a new skin, or trying to grow new skin. The embodied exploration is directly related to gender and transition while at the same time the whiteness that mediates it.

 

As I explore learning what embodiment means as I am transitioning, I bump against the edges of what is possible. In experimenting with growing a new skin, I am playing with immediate transition, as well as modular, wearable, adjustable, removable. If the skin is not exactly mapped onto human gender, it can also relate to my interest in undermining hierarchies of being. At the same time, the pink squishy pellicle foregrounds the whiteness of my skin, the way that gender is always racialized.