For my mother, who knows who she is.
Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother?
I recently had the pleasure of working with Corinne Singer and Maggie Kobelski on Corinne’s ongoing series in feminist self-portraiture. The first installment, entitled “Mother, May I?,” came into being in December when we wen visited a seaside town where I had spent my childhood summers, and I walked into the Atlantic in my mother’s wedding gown.
For as long as I can remember, it has been expected that I would marry in that dress, but in the wake of the deterioration of my parents’ relationship, my struggles with mental illness, and my efforts to come to terms with my own sexual and gender identity, the implications of such an assumption took on less welcome significance. Always vaguely symbolic of conformity, by the time of the shoot, my mother’s wedding dress had become a representative site upon which the traumas of my adolescence—the constraints of heteronormativity, the lingering anxiety of disappointing my parents—were made manifest.
In many ways, “Mother, May I?” was a challenge to my own body. Kneeling in ivory satin in the frigid water was a means through which to explore my own physical limitations. The entire endeavor can be read as a reflexive, even masochistic act.
The themes we discussed before the shoot were captivity, sacrifice, abandonment, solitude, desire, subjugation, shame, self-medication, rebellion, baptism and rebirth. I I have rarely achieved the sense of catharsis that I experienced modeling for this piece.
This narrative is dedicated to my parents, my queerness, my body, my self. It is dedicated, in short, to the willful destruction of beautiful things.
1. Surrounded by containers of makeup, clad from the waist down in my mother’s dress, I face a mirror imbued with my form. Although it was originally intended as a test shot, I begin to view this photograph, the first in the series, with uncertainty, and then fascination. It is strange to see my own image, twice framed. In this effort towards self-portraiture, I am the object of my own contemplation: the project begins, as it likely should, with the ongoing question of my gender, and the conscious performance of a self.
2. Kneeling in the sand for carefully constructed evocations of wedding photographs, the first thing I am conscious of is being colder than I could have imagined. The dress, which encompassed my mother’s form so gracefully when she was only 25, is too large for me: reams of white satin drape awkwardly over my angular frame. My lips are ashen, almost anemic. They echo the landscape around me.
3. These are the photographs that my mother dreamed of seeing when she gave birth to me, her only daughter. But like the dress, they do not fit. They are unsettling. Discontent textures each image. Is this only permissible way for a body to fill the space that surrounds it: as the object of another’s gaze?
I cannot be adequately represented, or even contained, by those sterile, bloodless images of a woman that I am not. The the tide advances. I move towards it. I anoint my face with sand and salt water. My makeup runs in rivulets, my hands claw at the earth. I am abject and full of rage. Rage for my mother’s abandonment, rage for my own mutilation: those years of self-loathing that that made me what I am. My entire body reacts against the fact that I was given so little say in what I would be expected to suffer and survive as a woman, as queer, as fatherless, as alive.
Something strange and sorrowful and maddeningly close to beauty lingers in the fading light.
Perpetually in conflict with this slowly dying body, smoking is a habit I engage in because it allows me to remain as sane as I am capable of feeling. It is an addiction born of trauma, which has nevertheless become my own. I can claim each breath I draw, pretend not to care about the choices I have made, even as they consume me. This is my reaction to a culture that reprimands self-medication without considering its origins or the consequences of its absence. After all of the ways in which I have been undone, here, at last, is a damage I inflict upon myself.
By the time the cigarette has consumed itself, burning away into ash, I am too cold to feel my skin, but my pulse is more realized than ever. The dress has been torn and cut away, baring my skin and its many strange desires. There is a primitive, almost feral element to my defiance.
Despite all of my bitterness and my retroactive grief, it is a mournful and lovely thing, to lay waste to the dress my mother thought to see me married in. The fabric is still beautiful, even in its ruined state, as I kneel beneath a radiant sky. It feels like a baptism, to immerse wholly in the currents, to reckon unflinchingly with the girl I was, the person I am, whatever I am to become. Is this what it feels like to finally begin to heal?
Maybe—but then again, maybe not. In spite of whatever language or meaning I impose upon it, the story the fabric tells is simple. I need a new beginning. I think I always will. But on the shorelines of my childhood, and in the object of my eternal fascination, the sea, I try for the next best thing.
Amid those timeless waters, I evoke the sensation of being reborn.
Those images are striking and powerful!
Why, it is an art-cry!
Not long ago a marriage was a dream in which every girl was facing she was marrying the Prince Charming of her heart and will happily live together ever after.
But here in these pictures, and sadly so often, instead of a pretty young princess, we see a fine Miss Havisham on her prime, tossing and turning in her wedding dress, in a futile expectance for a princess who will never come. Pity.
Isn’t nowhere for this hungry lioness on her knee, with lust on her yes, waiting with a cigarette on the corner of her mouth (as a provocation), for a hero fresh from the fight to sweep her of her feet ? But there’s no one street Hercules to fight the rising odds today. No any more.
Now really, where have all good men gone? I think there were chased to death by activist feminist since ’70 and now and in the last 20 years, they are a species on the bring of extinction.
I like those pictures, I really do, but this is my critical art opinion.
If I were Miss Grace’s mother I would have answered to her daring question :
“No my darling, you may not. You just need a hero!”
Bonny Tylor rest in peace.
PS: I hope I did not vexed you miss with my bitter irony, but amuse you. I considered you an really intelligent person, so we could talk about in this way, couldn’t we?