What never makes the list? Makeup.
BY CECILIA CORRIGAN, IMAGE BY ERICA MACLEAN
Two things I love are being a gay gal and post-apocalyptic fantasy content. And neither of them feels like it has enough femmes in it.
On being a lesbian: I think when we imagine escaping the patriarchy, or the male gaze, we imagine that we would finally live without the pressure to perform the gender of – to quote everyone’s least-favourite people on the Internet, the manosphere – “females.” We imagine that pressure dropping away and leaving us with something else, which, in a lot of our imaginaries, looks suspiciously like what we’ve been told is “masculinity”.
Cut to: a montage of me, for the first decade of my out-queerness, being told I don’t “look gay.” It doesn’t happen as often anymore, which is weird, because I present more femme than ever. But I think that’s probably because I talk to way fewer men now.
Now cut to post-apocalyptic movies and shows: a whole genre that seems devoted to both skirting and reinforcing the forced erasure of the femme. Which is probably because that genre is created by and geared towards them!
Why is it that even in these stories – when we have the chance to imagine anything – we still present ourselves with narratives about starting over with nothing but what is supposedly “necessary” for raw survival? And what never makes the list? Makeup.
I could go off about how I believe the impulse to femme it up is just as “natural” as the impulse to be a masc badass, but rather than add to the already exhausting discourse of pseudo-scientific evolutionary psychology, I’ll say this: I believe that decorating oneself, getting dressed up, and adorning oneself is valuable because it’s fun.
The reason I like makeup is not entirely different from the reason I like having gay sex: I like it. It’s fun. It feels good. And I think pleasure is kind of one of the big reasons we’re here. Being in touch with pleasure – or as Audre Lorde calls it, the erotic – we become “less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.” Pleasure is the life-giving thing.
So much of the post-apocalyptic vision of living is just a kind of living without pleasure. Or pretending that pleasure doesn’t exist.
But I do know that whatever changes are coming – and hopefully they are coming for the better – someone is going to have to live through them. And I’d rather do that in a reality where we get to gear up with whatever gender armour we want.
If we’re imagining a future where we get to start over, why abandon something so pleasurable, so voluptuous, so full of possibility? Why, when we’re finally allowed to imagine anything, do we keep imagining a world where nobody gets to have fun?
You can see Cecilia’s show The Gay Divorce at Willow Studio at Greenside @ Riddles Court from 7-29 August.
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