Gorgades (2020)

The Graft series explores how subjects modify and manipulate their bodies to straddle (ab)normality. The series communicates how a Black subject, determined from without and defined by all she is not, actively participates in her own transformation – a metamorphosis represented by the adoption or removal of a new layer of skin.

In this piece, I toy with the limits of that category by covering my entire body in dark, artificial hair. While clothed in my dress of hair, I perform normal tasks like braiding, tying, and combing my hair, and complete actions, like sweeping the floor. My performance, which is paired with audio taken from instructional etiquette tapes on hygiene, pokes fun at society’s anxious surveillance of body hair in the name of “cleanliness”, beauty, and femininity.

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The third and final performance in the Graft series, Gorgades is named after the island and people referenced in the Periplus of Hanno, a Greek text of contested provenance. The text describes the journey that Hanno the Navigator took throughout Africa during the fifth century BC. Hanno attempted to establish colonies along the western coast of Africa and during his encounter with the Gorgades it is said that he killed multiple women, flayed their bodies, and returned their skins to Carthage.

These women were labeled “beast-like” and identified by the coarse hair that covered their entire bodies. Their supposed unruliness marked them as non-human and justified Hanno’s ultimate mutilation of them. Although scholars disagree over the extent to which the Periplus is a reflection of Greek fiction, its mythology communicates how its authors defined monstrous subjects.

In the Periplus, Hanno’s colonizing efforts designate those who are and are not human on the imaginary terrain of the Gorgades island. Recognizing that the Gorgades’ skin and hair served as markers of difference, I explore how body hair can be capable of expelling bodies beyond the limits of the “feminine”.

Women are traditionally expected to have smooth, hairless skin that is maintained by constant shaving, depilating, and waxing. The prevailing cultural assumption that women who let their body hair grow are less “womanly” and desirable offers another example of the many ways in which the category of “woman” is unstable, just as perceptions of body hair are racialized and gendered.