grief rising
Jude Saint, Roro, Niamh Maher, Olivia Herkt
21st May - 3rd June 2023
An exploration at the intersection of love and grief.
Curated by Jude Saint. Jude is a Pākehā painter and writer based in Tāmaki Makaurau. They graduated with a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Elam. Saint’s work is concerned with eroticisation, body, and memory. Shaped by their experience of transsexuality their work spirals through the normal into the fringe, exploring how beliefs are moralised against the so-called perverted.
Much of the work documented contains graphic sexual imagery.
Grief Rising text by Jude Saint.
Download the full text by all contributors here
The only time I tried to hook up with a cis man it didn’t work. He told me it was because he was used to fucking real men. I wasn’t even attracted to him, just curious and bored. I’d been plagued by messages from anonymous men looking to fuck a trans. I had asked the guy if he knew that I was a trans man; he told me he was bisexual. That should have been a red flag. I wasn’t upset. The whole ordeal felt like an awkward British comedy.
I was still bored and a new man offered to drive his motorhome to me. He parked around the corner from my house. Inside his van were drawings done by what I assume were his children. He moved a box of loose cans and offered me a seat on a rolling chair. I said that, actually, I was going to leave now. On my walk home he sent me a message, I want to eat your pussy. I don’t know if hookups or sex have ever really been about pleasure for me. Maybe not even intimacy.
I’ve always been aware of the time passing, the claustrophobic sense that nothing will stop the clock hands moving a millimeter forward each second I exist. In a podcast I listened to about time travel, it’s described as pearls on a string. Each second a pearl slips off the string into an awaiting abyss. The absent space on the string, the only reminder that it once existed.
My time has always moved at a slower pace. I’ve travelled time through my queerness, only to arrive in post-adolescence as a child. The empty string that marked childhood wasn’t mine. I was manufactured at 21. Before I was myself, I was something better. I miss the fragments of time that I was a child. I can’t make sense of those memories. I feel as though I am thinking so often of my childhood, that I don’t remember that I’m not still there. It's like becoming stuck in a dream.
You wake up and the memory of that dream is so compelling that you must follow it at all times. You must return to it when you sit or stand, and lose yourself in its presence.
I wish that time was not linear. That I could live my best and worst moments simultaneously, live every existence and friendship at once. Feel grief and pleasure simultaneously. I think that might be how it is already. At every moment you are grieving that moment that was before it, every new second spent celebrating the previous.
I spent my girlhood rope learning normality, knowing that if I spoke to the other girls without a word out of place then I would join the real world. Those right words that would let me molt out of the too tight cicada shell drawing the line between me, and everything, and everyone else. The pubescent fugue started my shedding. The fragments of before remain reenacted at every second as I molt the static casing from my body. The world stretches as a hospital hallway in front of me. If only I could charm the attending nurses. If I can convince them of my normalcy, then I’ll be wheeled into the operating theatre, which holds all the desire I have ever hoped and feared. I will be wheeled down the corridor following the red line on the floor. I will see each room containing a different past, the one where I didn’t say a word, the one where I said too many words, the one where my time moved at the same speed as everyone else. The one where the pearls slipping through my hands held the beauty of desire. I have never been beautiful, the invisible exuviae covering my body shielded me from the misogyny of teenage cat calls. My adjacency to maleness kept me safely undesirable. The inefficacy of my existence as an undesirable woman kept my social worth distanced from me.
To be a butch is to belong to the subset of girlhood that is unruly, unkempt in its undesirability to the normal straight man. A butch adolescence strips you of social worth. Your presence threatens the safety of normal women and the status of normal men. To be seen as a masculine woman is to fuck the sacred monolith of masculinity with a hot pink 7 inch silicone dildo; to defile the one truth that is held central to our social fabric. The butch threat must be eradicated, they must be invisible, lecherous, the antithesis to everything that is beautiful, desirable, and cis-hetero-pleasureable. Each notable pearl that slipped past me in adolescence was a reminder of my undesirability. A blank space in the place of pleasure. I don’t know if butches wear pearls. I don’t know if I’ve ever been a true butch, but by the same mechanism, I will always be a butch. The only stories I have ever truly connected with were of gay boys; of poppers, cruising, and hooking up. I thought now as a boy this would be a moment in time where I could become truly the faggot that I was called. But testosterone hasn’t made me more than a fetish. My missing limb doesn’t allow for that. I carry with me the void through which the pearls fall.
As an object I am desirable for my assumed submission. The evidence is the void in the place of assertion. In the gradient from butch to trans, dominance fades to submission through the assertion of manhood without manhood. For as long as I have a vagina my life and sex will be marked by misogyny. My vagina does not make me a woman. For however long it remains with me the misogynistic power play of assumed submission will haunt me. When I shed my static shell I found myself in the unfiltered world, the largeness of the moulting triggering time to dilate. Time moves slower the bigger you are. I am monumental, a monolith. Trans time is the slowest time of all. Suddenly freed from my shell I am vulnerable, built of imaginal cells waiting for a finalised form, desperate to mark the pearls with desire. If we are tender with our hands, what will you find? Holometabolise me, build me up, fill me up, I promise I don’t mind being touched.
Please don’t touch my chest, please don’t tell me you love me.
Every intimate moment I share with another person feels like an act of gendered violation. I perverse myself back to womanhood in those close moments. The quiet power plays that occur during 'normal' sex are more destructive to my gendered self than the explicit ones in BDSM. The play of power between a dominant and submissive removes the tender marks of gender from the moment. I don’t think I can separate what is, what might have been, and what may be when I’m with another person. Between my body and the other person is a small line of grief, in each way they touch me I know which role I play. In my imaginal state I gave the part one last chance. I marked my pearls with the random desires of far away online men, fascinated and terrified at the potential. I never showed my face, just played the silent submissive girl they wanted. It felt like a waste not to access the desirability my body always held. I used my unformed state to fit the desires of each person I came into contact with. Before I was a person with distinction I was a pretty girl. My conformance gave me value. By the time I was old enough to utilise my currency, deviance had overruled any desirability I held. I have a void.
I’ve almost entirely given up on sexual pleasure now. I’ve chosen to surrender my desire to myself, to devote myself like a nun to this process I’ve undertaken. Transness requires a massive radical shift, the imaginal stage makes way to the greatest pleasure experienced if only you can make it that far. On the other side of the hospital doors lies a true connection. A hug where my chest can touch yours. For now I’m designated the position of fetish, the caviar of sex, desired but an acquired taste. I’m seductive in my boyishness, in my proximity to womanhood. Repulsive after I unzip my jeans. There's a thread between my body and someone else’s, between pleasure and grief.
Each second another pearl slips off it, into my waiting abyss.