Blackspace by Anaïs Duplan

Author:Anaïs Duplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Ocean
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

MAKING USE OF THE MUNDANE:

BLACK PERFORMANCE & BECOMING

“Whatever a person wants to get out of art, life has more of it, and art’s duty is to take on a managerial relationship to the sensory by existing in a state of fluidity, even precarity—and in this ephemeral state it haunts life, it folds all life into it.”

—manuel arturo abreu, “Against the Supremacy of Thought”

AFTER practice one day, the other girls on my high school varsity tennis team walked off the courts and sat in a circle on the grass to stretch their legs and pack up their stuff. Josephine, the team captain, announced to everyone else how badly she needed to shave her legs. Laughing, the other girls chimed in about the unkempt states of their own leg hair situations. Standing, as it was in my nature to do, awkwardly off to the side, I realized I’d never thought to shave any part of my body. Not even once. That night, I ducked into the supermarket on my walk home and bought myself a razor and some shaving cream.

The next day, in physics class, I asked a tall, shaggy-haired lacrosse player named Tyler if I could borrow his jacket, taking my voice up about a half-octave and pretending I was cold by wrapping my arms across my chest. He gave me the jacket. I tried my best to hide my surprise. Tyler had never been particularly nice to me before, or even really noticed me, but there he was, smiling a sweet boyish smile in my direction. Somewhere in my mind, I made a note: if you want boys to pay attention to you, shave your legs and act like you need help.

To my lesbian mother’s delight, I came out during my senior year of high school. But my relationship with my girlfriend at the time didn’t last very long. Though I couldn’t have articulated this to myself then, I couldn’t make love to Maggie the way I wanted to. I was missing the body parts I thought I needed, and my feelings of dysphoria plagued our relationship. After we broke up, I un-came out to my mother. I dated men almost exclusively for years, despite the fact that I wanted to be the men I dated more than I wanted to date them.

Since beginning hormone therapy, sex with men doesn’t plague me—but for a long time, I hid my dysphoria from myself by convincing myself that if I could get the right man to love me, my feelings of emptiness and incompleteness would go away. Not only did that stop working (it’s hard to say whether it ever really worked in the first place), but it also turns out that most male attention felt more or less predatory to me while I continued to ignore the excessive amounts of toxic shame I was walking around with.

Like being a child forever, being a woman in our society tends to mean having weakness and vulnerability projected onto you. Before I was sure

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