Cecilia Gentili: An Interview

The following is an interview with performer, activist, and advocate Cecilia Gentili conducted by Che Gossett and Eva Hayward. Cecilia Gentili is a longtime trans activist in New York City. Gentili has been involved in queer, trans, AIDS sex worker, and antiviolence organizing for decades. In this interview Gentili discusses her recent performance The Knife Cuts Both Ways, the limits of trans narratives and representation, and how she pushes at the thresholds of those limits such that they seem to break, fold, and corrupt. Gentili refuses the liberal humanist narrative of proper citizenship, for her trans cannot be incorporated, it is an excess, a story that does not claim redemption or resolution. Instead, trans is antagonism.