The concept behind my work stems from my experience as a black “gay fat” cisgender male within the LGBTQIA+ community. I have realised that there is an unspoken hierarchy of attractiveness in the community which causes people to have very problematic discriminatory “preferences”. One example is the “no fats, no femmes” preference category (mostly used on dating sites) and it basically situates ones desires within a framework that excludes particular kinds of bodies, mostly fat, feminine, disabled, HIV positive and the list goes on. The preferred type is always the “fit, muscular and hyper-masculine” cisgender male body. The problem with this standard is that its an unattainable, fantastical false representation of ‘manhood’. I aim to redefine this representation or highlight the sense of invisibility that one feels when being at the bottom of the hierarchy of attractiveness.
In this body of work, I am exploring ideas of navigating in space, entering politics of disorientation, disruption and possibly chaos. I am inspired by Sara Ahmed’s ideas that she expressed in her text titled the “Queer Phenomenology”. Exploring what it means for the body to be situated in space and in time, where bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves towards or away from objects and others. Ahmed speaks to this idea of how social relations are arranged spirally , how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach. This is what I aim to explore in this body of work and also touching on navigation as a queer fat black person in both the heteronormative world and the queer community.
Untitled
2022
Video Performance