Q&A with Alok Vaid-Menon of Darkmatter

Member of poetry duo Darkmatter, Alok Vaid-Menon, chats to you about performance, faggotry being freakishly queer.

This might be an excerpt from
Archer Magazine #7, the THEY/THEIRS issue
.

Q: exactly how has actually your vacation to Australian Continent been at this point?


Politically and racially, everyone has yet another concept of what’s happening right here. you frameworks around race, identification and power cannot map really here. I’m kept with far more concerns than solutions.

Q: Many binary trans men and women completely reject the gender they certainly were designated at delivery, which works well with all of them. Being non-binary, though, is likely to entail a fluidity and multiplicity of sexes. In which really does maleness stay with you currently?


Its very messed up that transness is often comprehended as a getting rejected of who and everything we had been. Why can not I hold that in a number of rooms I might end up being gay? Inside my culture, it actually was discussed a lot differently. The lines between who was simply trans, homosexual and queer were not as finite and fixed. They certainly were usually flexing considering framework.

If, for instance, the only way my personal mother can explain us to my personal Indian aunties is, “My son or daughter is actually gay”, I don’t observe that as misgendering. I note that as a culturally certain way to present distinction.

I am less interested in just what terms folks ascribe to my human body and a lot more enthusiastic about the way they address me and how secure they generate myself feel.

Q: Do you really nonetheless recognize as homosexual, considering the fact that being non-binary complicates the sex uniformity that homosexuality signifies?


Openly, i’m there is often no space for gayness and transness to occur simultaneously. In private, though, naturally they do. In my opinion the essential difference between sexuality and gender is such a fiction, specifically a love story of which extends to end up being desired, and who doesn’t. Should you decide narrate your self as gay, you feel seen as attractive because your femininity is viewed as an addition towards maleness.

Whereas if you identify as trans, your own femininity is actually foregrounded and then you become hyper-visible and hyper-erased concurrently. In a misogynist world, people are taught to want manliness over femininity.

Trans individuals are constantly thought to be governmental subjects, but never ever intimate or attractive people.

Q: communicate with me personally concerning the ‘faggot’, and/or ‘failed male’.


Everyone loves faggots. Modern gender was created within a colonial job that determined exactly what a real guy and woman will want to look like. People with different genders whom failed to fit into a western conception of gender binary turned into seen as failures, or ‘faggots’.

Light records of gender usually realize faggotry, effeminacy, and transfemininity as something which are only able to exist about stage, constantly as a parody of cis womanhood, whereas in brown and Black records, faggotry can be a political exercise.

In Southern Africa, for example, faggots had been about frontline on the anti-apartheid battle. I believe we have to flip the program from problem to achievements: getting a brown faggot/femme/tranny is great, because i am failing woefully to support white supremacy.

Q: I’ll include it with my resume, next?


[Laughs] Correct! Femininity is certainly not weakness, its some thing very powerful and powerful. It really is exactly the things that we realize as troubles, and exactly the things which we have been terrified of, which could have the potential to actually liberate you.

Q: How can we shift the story of transfeminine people of colour from tokenism and aesthetics, and on the aggressive real life of our experience?


Typically at my shows, particularly when I’m doing worldwide, I’m one of several just

transfeminine individuals of colour for the area. It really is like the only real likelihood of an individual who looks like me is in a performance framework, which seems therefore explicit.

We must force beyond the face-value to actually adopting trans folks, and especially transfeminine individuals of color, in our entirety, and not just everything we seem like. We often ask, “can you value all of us when we walk off of the stage on the street?”

Absolutely this thing that takes place where we come for your aesthetics, but we do not stay for all the politics, as though looks and physical violence tend to be individual. For many people, how we look ‘s we are policed, and the cause we’re viewed as questionable.

Q: while doing so, the freedom to alter exactly how we present can be so important to so many non-binary individuals.


With regards to issue of appearance and transfemininity, what happens is that transfeminine people are attributed for being narcissistic and vain, and our efforts are lowered for the usage of make-up and garments. I detest that; its this type of a misogynist and particularly transmisogynist discussion.

We are now living in a world that literally tells us we are ugly. Frequently there aren’t any assistance communities besides our personal self-worth. Vanity becomes the only path we could survive.

To see the entire meeting,
choose the THEY/THEIRS dilemma of Archer mag
.