Watercolor and ink help me dwell with the porousness of all morphologies emerging through birth/death, living/nonliving, dis/ability, interbeing, visible and nonvisible embodiments, and the passages of time. In real life, numerous non-trans people have told me that gender transition gives me control over what happens to my body and what people make of it; gives me more freedom than they have to choose what my body/mind does in the world; makes me get younger instead of older. Like me, watercolor has its own opinion and illumination. Like me, it is mortal. When I use ink, as in these black ink paintings, I often close my eyes as I make the lines. The canvas witnesses my nonlinear, non-Cartesian, queer experience of time and space, grief, and love.
Paintings: But I Love My Earrings, Dys Easement, Dyschronologic, and Dystypographic
Finn Enke is a professor of history, gender and women’s studies, and LGBTQ+ studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Finn is author of Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space and Feminist Activism (2007) and editor of Transfeminist Perspectives Within and Beyond Transgender and Gender Studies (2012). Their books in progress include a graphic memoir, currently titled “With Finn and Wing: Growing Up Amphibious in a Nuclear Age,” and an essay and comics collection, currently titled “Trans on Campus: Pedagogies of the Impossible.”
Finn Enke; Paintings: But I Love My Earrings, Dys Easement, Dyschronologic, and Dystypographic. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 April 2021; 120 (2): 363–367. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-8916102
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