Genderbender II

I have transformed from an androgynous AFAB body to a person who sees themselves as non-binary. The performance Genderbender II is a consequential process and shows my present self. I am neither cis /on this side, nor trans /on the other side. I am liminal and I am both sides at the same time, occupying the cis/trans border.

Genderbender is an ongoing performance series (2019–2024) that follows the shifting landscape of my gender identity and its public perception. Through these works, I trace the bodily and emotional thresholds between conformity and self-recognition — from the early attempts to “pass” within a binary framework to the eventual reclamation of my body as a site of truth and resistance.

Each iteration unfolds as a live negotiation between the performer and the audience: a shared witnessing of transformation, exposure, and repair. The series merges personal history with collective reflection, challenging the gaze that seeks to define gender as a stable category.
Rooted in queer and eco-activist practice, Genderbender embraces vulnerability as a political tool — a way to dismantle social expectations, but also to reveal the quiet, enduring resilience of becoming.

Three years later, Genderbender II questioned not how I was seen, but how I saw myself.
I stretched a rope between the audience members and hung all my underwear on it — a timeline of my body’s evolution. The delicate lace had been replaced by boxers, soft cotton comfort instead of performance of femininity.

The act was domestic yet intimate, absurd yet sincere — a drying line of identities, an exhibition of what touches the skin every day. The audience became part of this exposure, holding the line that held my story.

If the first performance was about endurance and adaptation, the second became an act of quiet resistance — acknowledging the right to exist comfortably, to choose softness on one’s own terms.

Photo: Anna Maskava

Performance festival "Starptelpa", Art Academy of Latvia, Riga, 2022

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