ABSTRACT
This chapter will analyse examples of work by Lois Weaver, Lucy Hutson and Kate Bornstein. The artists interrogate and explore gender boundaries through performance and can be seen to embrace Halberstam’s ‘queer art of failure’ and work as ‘shadow feminists’ (Halberstam 2011: 124). In Susan Stryker’s terms they ‘cross over (trans-) the boundaries constructed by their culture to define and contain that gender’ (Stryker 2017: 1). They each articulate a different experience of gender identity and can be seen to draw upon the experience of shame, failure, marginalisation and misrecognition as generative material to inform their practice. I will argue that their work does not readily correspond to arguments circulating in feminist, trans* or queer discourse because they actively resist hetero and homonormative categorisation. Their work celebrates the ingenious, creative and manifold ways they have found to exist as queer subjects in a binary heteronormative world. The artists eschew the medical tendency to pathologise gender ambiguity and refuse to reiterate what Caterina Nirta has condemned as the depiction of trans individuals as ‘miserable souls’ that forge a ‘lonely and unhappy’ path through life (Nirta 2018: 2). The work is sensuous, erotic, celebratory, joyful, mischievous and intergenerational. It articulates a thoughtful and complex relationship with family members, particularly mothers.
