Sasha Weiss

Trans Proprioception: Hypermobile Extensions of Gender (Sequential)

This comic is an exploration of crip intimacy, the relationship between hypermobile joints and living outside “normal” ranges of motion, the freedom of being trans and nonbinary, and the ways in which normative expectations around gender, race, and embodiment interfere with accessibility.

Acknowledgements: I am extremely grateful to my bendy friends: Cal, Ayoka, G, Seth, Finch, I’m so glad to know you. And a huge thank you to professor Cindy Wu for teaching one of my favorite classes ever, for reading and commenting on this piece, and for encouraging me to keep doing this kind of work.

Alternative format: View a version with thumbnails and accompanying listing of image descriptions.

Squiggly lettering spelling out “Trans Proprioception: Hypermobile Extensions of Gender.”
Squiggly lettering spelling out “Trans Proprioception: Hypermobile Extensions of Gender.”
Me (scruffy short boy with messy curly hair and glasses, wearing a sweater over a plaid shirt) and five of my trans and nonbinary friends with collagen disorders, smiling like dorks. I’m in the front middle. To my left is a tall person with glasses and short, straight dark hair, wearing a binder and shorts under an open button down shirt. To my right is someone with long dark hair and glasses in a sweater and halloween leggings. Behind, from left, are a tall guy with shoulder length curly hair in a button down, a taller person with long curly hair, cat eye glasses and a two-tone ruffled dress, and someone with short hair in a ponytail, bangs, and glasses, wearing a cozy striped sweater. Text above image reading: “Almost all of my trans friends are hypermobile, and about half the hypermobile people I know are trans. While crip and queer people tend to find each other, this still surprises me, every time I make a new trans stretchy friend.” Text below image reading: “This “paper” is an exploration of why, of what it is about inhabiting a hypermobile body that resonates with expansive notions of gender, of what it means to make gender flexible.”
Me (scruffy short boy with messy curly hair and glasses, wearing a sweater over a plaid shirt) and five of my trans and nonbinary friends with collagen disorders, smiling like dorks. I’m in the front middle. To my left is a tall person with glasses and short, straight dark hair, wearing a binder and shorts under an open button down shirt. To my right is someone with long dark hair and glasses in a sweater and halloween leggings. Behind, from left, are a tall guy with shoulder length curly hair in a button down, a taller person with long curly hair, cat eye glasses and a two-tone ruffled dress, and someone with short hair in a ponytail, bangs, and glasses, wearing a cozy striped sweater. Text above image reading: “Almost all of my trans friends are hypermobile, and about half the hypermobile people I know are trans. While crip and queer people tend to find each other, this still surprises me, every time I make a new trans stretchy friend.” Text below image reading: “This “paper” is an exploration of why, of what it is about inhabiting a hypermobile body that resonates with expansive notions of gender, of what it means to make gender flexible.”
Me, sitting with poor posture, hyperextended hands, knees, ankles, etc, in front of some panels of outer space, stars and galaxies glittering. I look uncomfortable in my heavy ankle support boots. Text reads: “Proprioception is a good place to start.” Then, under one of the panels of a pink galaxy, “Where is your body in space? Can you send your consciousness around, surveying hip, shoulder, elbow? Do you know if you’ve subluxed a finger, or hyperextended a knee as you sit or lie down to read?” And at the bottom of the page, “I’m actually asking. I can only do it with concentration. The minute I start talking or reading or listening to someone, my spine loses alignment and my right hip gets jacked up inside my acetabulum.”
Me, sitting with poor posture, hyperextended hands, knees, ankles, etc, in front of some panels of outer space, stars and galaxies glittering. I look uncomfortable in my heavy ankle support boots. Text reads: “Proprioception is a good place to start.” Then, under one of the panels of a pink galaxy, “Where is your body in space? Can you send your consciousness around, surveying hip, shoulder, elbow? Do you know if you’ve subluxed a finger, or hyperextended a knee as you sit or lie down to read?” And at the bottom of the page, “I’m actually asking. I can only do it with concentration. The minute I start talking or reading or listening to someone, my spine loses alignment and my right hip gets jacked up inside my acetabulum.”
I’m smiling, doing ehlers-danlos party tricks that I shouldn’t be doing – touching my tongue my nose while bending my thumb back to touch my wrist. I’m in a blue t shirt over a pink striped long sleeve. Top text reading: I’ve been told it’s supposed to hurt, but to be honest, it always hurts, so it always doesn’t. You get used to it. So used to it that you dissociate without trying. And you get used to it young, young enough to think it’s how everybody feels. Everybody has aches and pains. And maybe everyone can bend their thumb back to the inside of their wrist. Or lick their nose. Or wiggle their trachea.” Middle text reading: “Besides, it’s cool to be double-jointed.” Bottom text reading “I was 25 before I realized that my weird constellation of party tricks and symptoms were related. I’d always had strange symptoms doctors called anxiety or allergies or being a “sensitive person” as if the connection between pain and sensitivity should be apparent. I wonder if everyone who called me sensitive over the years would be surprised to learn I’m queer. Probably not.”
I’m smiling, doing ehlers-danlos party tricks that I shouldn’t be doing – touching my tongue my nose while bending my thumb back to touch my wrist. I’m in a blue t shirt over a pink striped long sleeve. Top text reading: I’ve been told it’s supposed to hurt, but to be honest, it always hurts, so it always doesn’t. You get used to it. So used to it that you dissociate without trying. And you get used to it young, young enough to think it’s how everybody feels. Everybody has aches and pains. And maybe everyone can bend their thumb back to the inside of their wrist. Or lick their nose. Or wiggle their trachea.” Middle text reading: “Besides, it’s cool to be double-jointed.” Bottom text reading “I was 25 before I realized that my weird constellation of party tricks and symptoms were related. I’d always had strange symptoms doctors called anxiety or allergies or being a “sensitive person” as if the connection between pain and sensitivity should be apparent. I wonder if everyone who called me sensitive over the years would be surprised to learn I’m queer. Probably not.”
A creepy felt doll with blue yarn hair and a pink dress. Below her are two panels displaying abdomen, un-velcroed to show her removable felt organs. The stomach, heart and liver are labeled. Below this, is an image of the organs crammed into my mom’s sneakers. Top text: When I was little I had a doll called Inside Girl. You could un-velcro her abdomen and take out her labelled, felt organs.” Bottom text: “The night before my mother almost died giving birth to my sister I put them in her shoes.”
A creepy felt doll with blue yarn hair and a pink dress. Below her are two panels displaying abdomen, un-velcroed to show her removable felt organs. The stomach, heart and liver are labeled. Below this, is an image of the organs crammed into my mom’s sneakers. Top text: When I was little I had a doll called Inside Girl. You could un-velcro her abdomen and take out her labelled, felt organs.” Bottom text: “The night before my mother almost died giving birth to my sister I put them in her shoes.”
Smaller, younger, hyperfeminine me judging current, masc me. The younger version has long wavy hair, a pink dress over a long sleeve pink shirt, pink tights, and pink mary janes, an accurate representation of how I dressed as a child. The older version has short curly hair, glasses, and wears a plaid shirt unbuttoned to show scars from prophylactic surgeries for my hereditary cancer syndrome (a mastectomy and salpingectomy) that resonate with gender affirmation procedures. Top text: I sometimes felt like a girl inside, too. Mostly, though, I felt defensive. “Pants are for boys!” my younger self would tell me if she could see me now.” Bottom text: “Being in a body is terrifying. It could stop running at any moment. And we all just live with that possibility. It seems to work for everyone else. So I wanted to perform the normative kind of girlhood everybody expected of me, as if it were a kind of protective measure. As if my organs too, would stay in place, neat, labelled, soft.
Smaller, younger, hyperfeminine me judging current, masc me. The younger version has long wavy hair, a pink dress over a long sleeve pink shirt, pink tights, and pink mary janes, an accurate representation of how I dressed as a child. The older version has short curly hair, glasses, and wears a plaid shirt unbuttoned to show scars from prophylactic surgeries for my hereditary cancer syndrome (a mastectomy and salpingectomy) that resonate with gender affirmation procedures. Top text: I sometimes felt like a girl inside, too. Mostly, though, I felt defensive. “Pants are for boys!” my younger self would tell me if she could see me now.” Bottom text: “Being in a body is terrifying. It could stop running at any moment. And we all just live with that possibility. It seems to work for everyone else. So I wanted to perform the normative kind of girlhood everybody expected of me, as if it were a kind of protective measure. As if my organs too, would stay in place, neat, labelled, soft.
Me sitting down to draw only to accidentally pop my shoulder out of place. I look surprised, my shoulder popped too far forward. I wear a pink tank top. There’s a dramatic little sound effect star shape that reads “POP!”, and I’m saying “Hmm? Oops!” Text reads: But when your body deviates from normative embodiment without even trying, it raises possibilities for embodying gender beyond the normative limits prescribed.
Me sitting down to draw only to accidentally pop my shoulder out of place. I look surprised, my shoulder popped too far forward. I wear a pink tank top. There’s a dramatic little sound effect star shape that reads “POP!”, and I’m saying “Hmm? Oops!” Text reads: But when your body deviates from normative embodiment without even trying, it raises possibilities for embodying gender beyond the normative limits prescribed.
Me standing with good posture looking healthy enough and wearing standard grad school sweater, button down combo. My face is blank. Text reads: “I have an invisible disability. Unless you catch me with a joint obviously out of place, the ways in which my embodiment deviates from the fictive norms of human anatomy are subtle. This is not an unfamiliar concept; lots of disabilities are invisible, and society often does what it can to render disabled people with visible disabilities invisible too. I don’t look sick. I look “young and healthy.””
Me standing with good posture looking healthy enough and wearing standard grad school sweater, button down combo. My face is blank. Text reads: “I have an invisible disability. Unless you catch me with a joint obviously out of place, the ways in which my embodiment deviates from the fictive norms of human anatomy are subtle. This is not an unfamiliar concept; lots of disabilities are invisible, and society often does what it can to render disabled people with visible disabilities invisible too. I don’t look sick. I look “young and healthy.””
Me looking happy in a very femme dress, pink and flowy and covered in an “xoxo” pattern. I’m wearing a choker and tights, and holding up a peace sign. Top text: “I also look pretty feminine. And I don’t do much to change this. Even though, or perhaps because, I’m pretty comfortable with myself as a nonbinary trans guy.” Side text: “Judith Butler argues that gender is an “illusion,” a performative “incorporation” where “acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core…on the surface of the body.”(Gender Trouble, 185-6) For Butler, “the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe” in this gender performance, but never “fully internaliz[e]” it, as it is impossible to embody.”(192) I’m not the first and I won’t be the last to argue that this performance has significant internal elements beyond “illusion". But more than that, I think there’s power in conceptualizing the potential of invisible genders that are embodied both through gesture and through internal feelings of occupying a body in social space. Like invisible disabilities, there are ways of being that transcend the visible or the recognized. Not just an internal performance, or a performance for the self. But a way of inhabiting one’s body in space even in the absence of gesture or freed from its refraction, from the outside looking in.”
Me looking happy in a very femme dress, pink and flowy and covered in an “xoxo” pattern. I’m wearing a choker and tights, and holding up a peace sign. Top text: “I also look pretty feminine. And I don’t do much to change this. Even though, or perhaps because, I’m pretty comfortable with myself as a nonbinary trans guy.” Side text: “Judith Butler argues that gender is an “illusion,” a performative “incorporation” where “acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core…on the surface of the body.”(Gender Trouble, 185-6) For Butler, “the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe” in this gender performance, but never “fully internaliz[e]” it, as it is impossible to embody.”(192) I’m not the first and I won’t be the last to argue that this performance has significant internal elements beyond “illusion”. But more than that, I think there’s power in conceptualizing the potential of invisible genders that are embodied both through gesture and through internal feelings of occupying a body in social space. Like invisible disabilities, there are ways of being that transcend the visible or the recognized. Not just an internal performance, or a performance for the self. But a way of inhabiting one’s body in space even in the absence of gesture or freed from its refraction, from the outside looking in.”
First panel features BoJack Horseman (the depressed anthropomorphic horse and washed up actor from the eponymous animated show) looking sad. Second panel features me as a zebra in BoJack Horseman style (cartoonish and anthropomorphized), giving an awkward smile. Top text: “I come from a family of doctors. So when I started complaining about weird symptoms, I quickly learned the phrase “when doctors hear hoofbeats they think horses, not zebras.”” Bottom text: “Similarly, when people see a short person in a dress with a round face and wide hips they think she/her/hers.”
First panel features BoJack Horseman (the depressed anthropomorphic horse and washed up actor from the eponymous animated show) looking sad. Second panel features me as a zebra in BoJack Horseman style (cartoonish and anthropomorphized), giving an awkward smile. Top text: “I come from a family of doctors. So when I started complaining about weird symptoms, I quickly learned the phrase “when doctors hear hoofbeats they think horses, not zebras.”” Bottom text: “Similarly, when people see a short person in a dress with a round face and wide hips they think she/her/hers.”
Top text: “Being femme presenting has its downsides:” First panel features me having an asthma attack and it being called anxiety. I’m struggling to breathe, coughing into my elbow and look scared, while someone out of frame shouts “ANXIETY.” Accompanying text: “Every physical symptom of my disability has been labeled at one time or another as anxiety. From bronchospastic coughing…” Second panel is the same for tachycardia and chest pain. I’m sweating, shaking, and my hand is on my heart, while someone yells from out of frame that it’s “ANXIETY.” Accompanying text: “...to chest pain and tachycardia…” Third is the same for abdominal pain. I’m doubled over, clutching my stomach while someone out of frame yells “ANXIETY.” Accompanying text: “to abdominal pain from high histamine levels and overactive mast cells.”
Top text: “Being femme presenting has its downsides:” First panel features me having an asthma attack and it being called anxiety. I’m struggling to breathe, coughing into my elbow and look scared, while someone out of frame shouts “ANXIETY.” Accompanying text: “Every physical symptom of my disability has been labeled at one time or another as anxiety. From bronchospastic coughing…” Second panel is the same for tachycardia and chest pain. I’m sweating, shaking, and my hand is on my heart, while someone yells from out of frame that it’s “ANXIETY.” Accompanying text: “…to chest pain and tachycardia…” Third is the same for abdominal pain. I’m doubled over, clutching my stomach while someone out of frame yells “ANXIETY.” Accompanying text: “to abdominal pain from high histamine levels and overactive mast cells.”
Foreground: me fainting into my partner’s arms. My body is slack, eyes closed, arms hanging limp. My partner is tall, with long curly hair, a worried expression, and they’re catching me. Background: first panel is me fainting on my partner on a carnival ride shaped like a dragon that swings back and forth through the air, second is me fainting at the Target checkout lane, my eyes looking blank over my mask, and third is me fainting on my desk in class, slumped over completely while my classmate looks concerned. Top text: “When I started fainting, at first we thought it was nothing. People faint on rollercoasters all the time.” Middle text: “But then it started happening at the grocery store.” Bottom text: “And in class.”
Foreground: me fainting into my partner’s arms. My body is slack, eyes closed, arms hanging limp. My partner is tall, with long curly hair, a worried expression, and they’re catching me. Background: first panel is me fainting on my partner on a carnival ride shaped like a dragon that swings back and forth through the air, second is me fainting at the Target checkout lane, my eyes looking blank over my mask, and third is me fainting on my desk in class, slumped over completely while my classmate looks concerned. Top text: “When I started fainting, at first we thought it was nothing. People faint on rollercoasters all the time.” Middle text: “But then it started happening at the grocery store.” Bottom text: “And in class.”
First panel is me in a chair in the ER, with a Dr. coming in to talk to me. Middle panel is two shocked and concerned looking healthcare workers. Bottom is me lying in a telemetry bed, hooked up to a cardiac monitor and looking exhausted and confused. Top text: “The doctors told me this was anxiety, too. Or vertigo. Or a mild arrhythmia. Nothing that mattered.” Middle text: ” Until I told them it happened during sex. Then they hospitalized me for three days to check for tumors.” Bottom text: “Why do they care if I can fuck without fainting???”
First panel is me in a chair in the ER, with a Dr. coming in to talk to me. Middle panel is two shocked and concerned looking healthcare workers. Bottom is me lying in a telemetry bed, hooked up to a cardiac monitor and looking exhausted and confused. Top text: “The doctors told me this was anxiety, too. Or vertigo. Or a mild arrhythmia. Nothing that mattered.” Middle text: ” Until I told them it happened during sex. Then they hospitalized me for three days to check for tumors.” Bottom text: “Why do they care if I can fuck without fainting???”
Me hiding in a blanket fort labelled “fort medicalization.” The sign for it is like one of those “happy birthday” signs made of paper letters on a string. Its walls are stacked pill bottles. Inside I have tea and a back support pillow, and I’m inside a circle of salt (ha ha dysautonomia jokes). I’m sitting, clutching my knees to my chest, next to the bottle of salt, looking stressed. Top text: “My partner points out that the doctors write me off only until I stop being able to perform the actions expected of someone in their 20s. I exist in my medical chart, like in the eyes of the state post-Dobbs, as reproductive potential. And because I’m white and healthy looking, they want to encourage that potential, to make me able to perform (re)productive labor. My pain, my fear, my fainting, none of this matters until it threatens my ability to perform in bed in ways that are coherent to heteronormative/cis/abled society. And sometimes I believe them. Sometimes I want to keep myself “safe” from my own embodiment. Mostly from my pain. Or the risk of unconsciousness in a strange environment.” Bottom text: “I’m tired of feeling embarrassed fainting in the pharmacy line, in classrooms. But fainting with a partner, a lover, is something else entirely. It never occurs to them that there might be pleasure in this vulnerability. That it feels good knowing that when I faint, I’ll wake up in their arms. That this, too is intimacy. Like “twitch, twitch again…tremor…an antidote to shame.”(Clare, 19)”
Me hiding in a blanket fort labelled “fort medicalization.” The sign for it is like one of those “happy birthday” signs made of paper letters on a string. Its walls are stacked pill bottles. Inside I have tea and a back support pillow, and I’m inside a circle of salt (ha ha dysautonomia jokes). I’m sitting, clutching my knees to my chest, next to the bottle of salt, looking stressed. Top text: “My partner points out that the doctors write me off only until I stop being able to perform the actions expected of someone in their 20s. I exist in my medical chart, like in the eyes of the state post-Dobbs, as reproductive potential. And because I’m white and healthy looking, they want to encourage that potential, to make me able to perform (re)productive labor. My pain, my fear, my fainting, none of this matters until it threatens my ability to perform in bed in ways that are coherent to heteronormative/cis/abled society. And sometimes I believe them. Sometimes I want to keep myself “safe” from my own embodiment. Mostly from my pain. Or the risk of unconsciousness in a strange environment.” Bottom text: “I’m tired of feeling embarrassed fainting in the pharmacy line, in classrooms. But fainting with a partner, a lover, is something else entirely. It never occurs to them that there might be pleasure in this vulnerability. That it feels good knowing that when I faint, I’ll wake up in their arms. That this, too is intimacy. Like “twitch, twitch again…tremor…an antidote to shame.”(Clare, 19)”
This page is bordered by various splints and braces, neck, lower back, finger, wrist, thumb, knee, and ankle braces to be specific. The text in the middle reads: “The difference between hypermobility and hypermobility spectrum disorder is that the disorder label is applied to cover pain. I don’t write that down to reify diagnosis, but to emphasize the relevance of pain to constructions of embodiment. When I hold my body within specific limits, it is not because I don’t love to transcend the limits of normal range of motion, but because when I do, my tendons and ligaments let joints slide out of place, damaging cartilage. My muscles spasm, straightening my spine until my neck curves backwards. These braces don’t hold me back. They free me from further pain. I’m not trying to make my body legible, or protect my ability to work or fuck or be “ok.” I’m trying to celebrate the pleasure of feeling held. Feeling safe.”
This page is bordered by various splints and braces, neck, lower back, finger, wrist, thumb, knee, and ankle braces to be specific. The text in the middle reads: “The difference between hypermobility and hypermobility spectrum disorder is that the disorder label is applied to cover pain. I don’t write that down to reify diagnosis, but to emphasize the relevance of pain to constructions of embodiment. When I hold my body within specific limits, it is not because I don’t love to transcend the limits of normal range of motion, but because when I do, my tendons and ligaments let joints slide out of place, damaging cartilage. My muscles spasm, straightening my spine until my neck curves backwards. These braces don’t hold me back. They free me from further pain. I’m not trying to make my body legible, or protect my ability to work or fuck or be “ok.” I’m trying to celebrate the pleasure of feeling held. Feeling safe.”
A bottle of tramadol, a bottle of gabapentin, scattered pills, and a heating pad. Text reads: “Hyperextending a joint can hurt, though it doesn’t always. The support of a brace is not constraining, but enabling. It’s harm reduction. But there’s no reason to constrain gender like a shoulder-blade or an ankle. If anything, rigid systems of compulsory cishet-ness are themselves dislocating. I’m not a woman, and forcing my body/mind/self to conform to womanhood hurts. Hyperextending gender, allowing myself to be fluid and flexible, bending masculinity to make space for my femboy self is like popping a hip back into place. It feels right. It feels free.”
A bottle of tramadol, a bottle of gabapentin, scattered pills, and a heating pad. Text reads: “Hyperextending a joint can hurt, though it doesn’t always. The support of a brace is not constraining, but enabling. It’s harm reduction. But there’s no reason to constrain gender like a shoulder-blade or an ankle. If anything, rigid systems of compulsory cishet-ness are themselves dislocating. I’m not a woman, and forcing my body/mind/self to conform to womanhood hurts. Hyperextending gender, allowing myself to be fluid and flexible, bending masculinity to make space for my femboy self is like popping a hip back into place. It feels right. It feels free.”
Clouds with blue shadows on a pink sky. Between the clouds is text, reading: “Jules Gill-Peterson writes about the “rigid medical model” of “binary normalization” that transmedicalism sees as the cure for ambiguous bodies like mine. (Histories of the Transgender Child, 4) The medical establishment sees in white trans kids’ bodies a “plasticity” that can be made to fit in, to pass. Gill-Peterson sees in that “plastic potential...the raw material of [the] medical foundation” of the “sex and gender binary.”(4) I’m 27 but my crap collagen means I don’t look it so doctors look at my too-soft and white skin and while they can’t cure my genetic disorders, they try to “fix” my genderfluidity and my non-reproductive queer desire by telling me I’m “too young” to want to be sterilized even though childbirth is not safe for me and neither is keeping my cancer prone reproductive system. Ellen Samuels calls this “being a crip vampire,” writing that it “spins me back into that whirlpool of time travel. I look 25, feel 85, and just want to live like the other 40-somethings I know. I want to be aligned, synchronous, part of the regular order of the world.”(Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time) I get that. I want that for time. But I’d pick crip vampire for my gender a million times before I’d try to pass.
Clouds with blue shadows on a pink sky. Between the clouds is text, reading: “Jules Gill-Peterson writes about the “rigid medical model” of “binary normalization” that transmedicalism sees as the cure for ambiguous bodies like mine. (Histories of the Transgender Child, 4) The medical establishment sees in white trans kids’ bodies a “plasticity” that can be made to fit in, to pass. Gill-Peterson sees in that “plastic potential…the raw material of [the] medical foundation” of the “sex and gender binary.”(4) I’m 27 but my crap collagen means I don’t look it so doctors look at my too-soft and white skin and while they can’t cure my genetic disorders, they try to “fix” my genderfluidity and my non-reproductive queer desire by telling me I’m “too young” to want to be sterilized even though childbirth is not safe for me and neither is keeping my cancer prone reproductive system. Ellen Samuels calls this “being a crip vampire,” writing that it “spins me back into that whirlpool of time travel. I look 25, feel 85, and just want to live like the other 40-somethings I know. I want to be aligned, synchronous, part of the regular order of the world.”(Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time) I get that. I want that for time. But I’d pick crip vampire for my gender a million times before I’d try to pass.
Top panel is my partner and I lying in bed watching Neon Genesis Evangelion on their laptop, and bottom is them dressed like Ayanami Rei (in a futuristic pink and white catsuit) and me dressed like Nagisa Kaworu (in a futuristic blue and pink catsuit). Text reads: “A few years into our lives as cracked eggs, my partner showed me Neon Genesis Evangelion. They told me how they saw the evangelions as extensions of gender inhabited to perform otherwise, to sometimes live up to, but sometimes shatter, expectations. In these cyborg bodies, organic flesh held together with armor that allows for but also constrains their movements, that renders them able to function but also to explode expectations, I saw my crip self.”
Top panel is my partner and I lying in bed watching Neon Genesis Evangelion on their laptop, and bottom is them dressed like Ayanami Rei (in a futuristic pink and white catsuit) and me dressed like Nagisa Kaworu (in a futuristic blue and pink catsuit). Text reads: “A few years into our lives as cracked eggs, my partner showed me Neon Genesis Evangelion. They told me how they saw the evangelions as extensions of gender inhabited to perform otherwise, to sometimes live up to, but sometimes shatter, expectations. In these cyborg bodies, organic flesh held together with armor that allows for but also constrains their movements, that renders them able to function but also to explode expectations, I saw my crip self.”
Top panel is an Eva (the futuristic cyborg weapons of Neon Genesis Evangelion) crouching, silhouetted and bottom panel is me repeated in a diagonal series of receding images, referencing a famous shot of Ayanami Rei in Neon Genesis Evangelion. My face looks blank, my hands are in my pockets. Top text: “Evas can do things most bodies cannot. They are simultaneously seen as stunning, fascinating, and horrifying to onlookers. They have capacity for unintentional damage without restraint. I see in the eyes of Tokyo-3 citizens the look on people’s faces when I shift my trachea side to side. I also see the look on my mother’s face when I told her I’m nonbinary. Evas have the potential to free us from rigid gender roles and expectations. Evas render gender flexible.” Bottom text: “Evas can hyperextend gendered embodiment like me.”
Top panel is an Eva (the futuristic cyborg weapons of Neon Genesis Evangelion) crouching, silhouetted and bottom panel is me repeated in a diagonal series of receding images, referencing a famous shot of Ayanami Rei in Neon Genesis Evangelion. My face looks blank, my hands are in my pockets. Top text: “Evas can do things most bodies cannot. They are simultaneously seen as stunning, fascinating, and horrifying to onlookers. They have capacity for unintentional damage without restraint. I see in the eyes of Tokyo-3 citizens the look on people’s faces when I shift my trachea side to side. I also see the look on my mother’s face when I told her I’m nonbinary. Evas have the potential to free us from rigid gender roles and expectations. Evas render gender flexible.” Bottom text: “Evas can hyperextend gendered embodiment like me.”
Top panel is me looking at myself in the mirror, frustrated with the world. Below that is my desk, covered in papers, a cup of tea, and a plushie cat, with a sweater thrown over the back of the chair. Next to it sits the empty desk that was my friend’s. Text reads: “But I can’t talk about this without highlighting that I am able to get paid to sit here and sketch and think about this stuff because when I’m flaring, people understand, and I get accommodations, usually without too much struggle now that I’m a graduate student. People see me as a peer and don’t question my health issues. I don’t get interrogated or asked for proof (which is illegal). This is because I am white. I know it is, because otherwise you’d have been treated the same. And maybe you’d still be here if they treated you with respect. If this place had been safe. You deserve to be safe. We can’t dismantle ableism or sexism or transphobia without decolonization and antiracism. We can start in our classrooms. By treating BIPOC scholars with respect. By listening, not questioning. By making sure accommodations are for everyone who needs them, but especially, especially people of color. Because they don’t need this shit. They need to be heard, seen and believed. They need to be safe to be free.”
Top panel is me looking at myself in the mirror, frustrated with the world. Below that is my desk, covered in papers, a cup of tea, and a plushie cat, with a sweater thrown over the back of the chair. Next to it sits the empty desk that was my friend’s. Text reads: “But I can’t talk about this without highlighting that I am able to get paid to sit here and sketch and think about this stuff because when I’m flaring, people understand, and I get accommodations, usually without too much struggle now that I’m a graduate student. People see me as a peer and don’t question my health issues. I don’t get interrogated or asked for proof (which is illegal). This is because I am white. I know it is, because otherwise you’d have been treated the same. And maybe you’d still be here if they treated you with respect. If this place had been safe. You deserve to be safe. We can’t dismantle ableism or sexism or transphobia without decolonization and antiracism. We can start in our classrooms. By treating BIPOC scholars with respect. By listening, not questioning. By making sure accommodations are for everyone who needs them, but especially, especially people of color. Because they don’t need this shit. They need to be heard, seen and believed. They need to be safe to be free.”

Works Cited

Anno, Hideaki, creator. Neon Genesis Evangelion. Gainax, 1995, Netflix.

Bob-Waksberg, Raphael, creator. BoJack Horseman. Tornante, 2014, Netflix.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, Routledge, 1999.

Clare, Eli. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Durham, Duke University Press, 2017.

Gill-Peterson, Jules. Histories of the Transgender Child. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Samuels, Ellen. “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3, 2017.  https://dsq-sds.org/index.php/dsq/article/view/5824/4684.

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About the Artist

Sasha Weiss is a disabled graduate student at IU Bloomington as well as a poet and visual artist.