j'écris de la non-fiction (recherche théorique), de la fiction (un livre de science-fiction sur le toilettage canin, l'amour et l’insurrection gay et inter-espèces), de l'auto-fiction (la plupart des textes que vous trouverez ici + un roman autobiographique en cours). j'écris de la prose, des poèmes, des paroles de chansons, des textes de théâtre, des dessins (ou vice versa)
en ce moment, je suis super intéressé par l'intersection entre texte et lperformance, et j'ai très envie d’écrire pour le théâtre à nouveau. pour proposer une collaboration, un job ou demander plus d’échantillons de mon travail
i write non-fiction (theoretical research), fiction (a science-fiction book about dog grooming, gay & interspecies love & insurrection), auto-fiction (many texts you’ll find here + an autobiographical novel in the making).
i write prose, poems, lyrics, theater texts, drawings (or vice versa)
at the moment i’m really into the intersection of text & performance, and i’d love to write for theater again. for collaborations, job offers & more work samples
being natural is such a difficult pose to keep up
being natural is such a difficult pose to keep up
tokenism
& strategic
autofictions
in
art workplaces
This text was written for, and published in Rupert journal, as part of the Alternative Education Program in Rupert centre for the arts.
This advice suddenly brought me back to a subject that has occupied my mind since the beginning of the AEP. Given this year’s theme, our group finds itself circling on artists’ working conditions, our relations to institutions and the systems of power which they, and we, inevitably partake in.
Tokenism (not to be confused with tokenisation, which is a thing in cyber security I can’t explain) is the practice of making a symbolic effort to include a marginalised group of people, without making changes that would support said group in an effective way. In the workplace or media, it looks like hiring or giving a visible position to someone from a minority group, only to avoid criticism and/or boost marketing sales from this targeted group. Negative effects for the token include heightened performance pressure due to their representative quality, reinforced othering and isolation, expectations of assimilation, fetishization. This subject has mainly been studied in the context of racial and sexual bias in white and male dominated fields, but extends to other forms of discrimination.
Here, I will focus on the cultural field and artists as workers, from personal experiences and observations. I’m a white male, but fear not, I have other reasons to bring this up. My work may be classified as autofictional, my life is an open book from which I choose what to read. In all my constantly shapeshifting bios, a sentence remains: I’m a sucker for intimacy, between the risk of unveiling myself and the urgency to do so. In other words, I can’t keep my mouth shut about being a transsexual. Transness happens to be trendy, and I can now smell from afar the want for my trans authenticity, my representational value, my touching story. Transness is trendy, but it’s also under blazing attack and I find myself shuffling words and identity markers as I attempt to find balance between saying what I want and what I understand is expected of me. Juggling with slippery and ever changing counter-offers, this is what I currently have going on for me: self-tokenism, my strategic autofictions.
Institutions, consciously or not, lay out a set fiction of the groups they tokenise - a digestible one, of which the main flavours are authenticity and visibility. Tokenism appears as progress, while it smoothes edges and assimilates margins into themed exhibitions and star tokens in line ups. In order to work, marginalized artists might comply with this system. At this point in the text, you probably ask yourself: what does it have to do with chess? Well, self-tokenism abides by the same basic rule: I would define it as a strategy used to negotiate a hopefully equal trade between the risks and rewards of tokenism. It is not a refusal to sacrifice but a calculation of means and ends, a decision to partake in or resist the institution’s fiction by strategically fictionalising oneself.
Power imbalance is the basis of labour. Self-tokenism, thus, appears to me as a sort of survival method in the capitalist world, by which the marginalized worker might be able to secure a certain level of financial security and professional recognition. It has its gray areas, though, where borders blur towards complicity or lack of self-respect. As a sort of institutional critique, it also asks for meticulous self-evaluation: am I making a temporary compromise or am I damaging my work/ethics/self/community? Am I weaponising my ability to self-tokenise against an even more disadvantaged person or group? Such negotiations, their possibilities and limitations are very interesting to me. I can find plenty of examples of similar critical autofictionalisation by marginalised subjects in the arts, that interconnect with the subject at hand in a way or another: identification, counter-identification, dis-identification (José Esteban Munoz), freak art theory of radical, abstract and temporal drag (Renate Lorenz), and many texts wrestling with Camp. These, of course, are my referents - there are for sure other examples.
I’ve been asked to calculate the percentage of applications I self-tokenisingly write, but answering the question implies that I am in full control of the realm of perception. It’s not the case: partly because internal identity doesn’t exist in the world unmediated, partly because the capitalist machine has proven its capacity to digest and dissolve any sort of deviant position anyway. Cultural institutions play a role in this absorption. In their programs, collections, exhibitions statements and other manifestations, like everywhere meanings are co-constructed - always contextually, rarely equally, never neutrally. That’s why my beef with tokenism is not that it impedes my authenticity - the idea of a real and stable self that should be able to shine through my art practice unmediated - but that it acts as if authenticity was even possible. Let us be phonies!
It is a struggle for me, having a practice that is so intimate, reliant on the unveiling of myself but at the risk of doing so. There is a part of unescapable drive that makes it impossible for me to draw from elsewhere: attempts at opacity only resulted in years-long artist’s block. The maintenance work necessary to sustain a façade over my (trans) experience, over knots in my guts which an art practice is, in some ways, trying to undo, proved exhausting and ineffective. Stealth and stale, I once confided to a teacher about the immobility caused by keeping a secret - without sharing its content. He answered that there’s nothing shocking in contemporary art anymore, “you could get naked and no one would care”. I beg to disagree. My naked body would be consumed and spat out, either with appetite or disgust, and I’d be left dealing with the post buffet nausea.
Later, I came out to two teachers. With my graduation show coming up, I wanted to make sure at least some members of the jury would be able to grasp the subtext of my work. What my opening up created was not authenticity but the possibility for trust with selected allies. Being natural is such a difficult pose to keep up, said Oscar Wilde. I feel myself in this recognition of the efforts necessary to manufacture a convincing realness. I talked about all of this with a friend, who is also trans and an artist. Paraphrasing art world verbiage, we laughed as we said: lying as praxis. But, shh, don’t tell the institution about it!