Femme (2016)

Self-portraits, digital c-prints, 30 x 30 inch. 

Femme, 2012-16, is a series of performances mining non-binary identity. Responding to the transmisogyny within Cuban culture, I use my body, dress, glamour, and body hair to make self-portraits that signal towards a future queer world. Employing photography to re-cast the non-binary body as a body not defined by anatomy, hierarchy, or the established social conditions of the collapsing gender binary. These self-portraits contest the violent erasure of non-binary people from the history of gender.

Latinx culture has historically used socially constructed categories like gender and sex as a tool to police and disappear gender variance. This series of photographs deconstructs gender norms that are shaped by legacies of naturalized patriarchy and gender violence. Performing an affective non-compliance that occupies the space of shame as a register of copious possibility.