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In an interview on imagining ‘The Future of Trans,’ artist and performer Alok Vaid-Menon spoke about how not seeing themself represented in media led to ‘giving birth to themself’:
“So much of what I am is just a collage of disparate things that I had to assemble together to make a possible life. Because one of the perversities of growing up in an Indian household is even though there’s such, thousands of years of history of gender-variant people, in the diaspora, I was taught a very traditional, formal gender binary… The only kind of queerness that I thought was possible was always through whiteness. And so at the beginning, there was already this war instilled in me between man and woman, but then also between the Western world and the Indian world. And I think creativity was the only place that I could go to escape from those kinds of false dichotomies and dualisms.”
ALOK also talks about the fear of the unknown, and how as an artist, they continually return to that “unknowability”:
“As an artist, fear of the unknown is where I live, it’s where I hang out, it’s where I relax, It’s where I invite friends over, because the best art is when you don’t recognize that you made it. And for me, my own gender journey was an extension of my art making, where I didn’t have a conclusion of, ‘I’m going here,’ it was just like, ‘Let me sense what makes me feel good.’”
Watch the rest of journalist Imara Jones’s interview with ALOK on vulnerability, flux, healing, and liberation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-SelRFhchM&t=109s