Breaking Sex

My pal, writer and amateur scene photodocumentarian Gerry Visco just put up a set of photos on her Flickr entitled Lady Jaye Memorial by Genesis P-Orridge that is well worth checking out. Her photos are matched to her piece on the NY Press Blog, S/HE IS (STILL) HER/E. Here is the first bit of the piece to give you an idea of what this is all about

…Lady Jaye lives in perpetuity inside her “other half,” cult figure, musician and artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.

In 1999, they created an art project called pandrogyny inspired by the “cut up” method developed by Beat writers Brion Gysin and William Burroughs. Calling themselves Breyer P-Orridge, to transcend limitations of self, body and gender, they cut themselves up into a “third being” resembling each other thanks to surgery and other body modification techniques. In keeping with pandrogyny, both Genesis and Jaye used the pronouns “s/he” and” her.” Hardly your typical couple, they celebrated Valentine’s Day 2003 with matching breast-implant operations.

The genderfucker and body modder in me is both aroused and excited by this project, though the part of my brain trained to see gender aesthetics in a certain way (binary, untouched by obvious surgery and peculiar modification/deconstruction) feels a little grossed out too.

I saw a short documentary about the couple and their project at the Berlin Porn Film Festival last fall, and though the doc wasn’t the best, it was cool to see them interact with one another on the big screen. They referred to the project as the Pandrogyne, or as the title of this post hints at, the process of “breaking sex.”

Perhaps the most striking thing to me about their artistic choices (other than the whole hey let’s have surgery so we look alike thing) was that the body they chose to strive for was one with a lot of the trappings of femininity: breast implants, long blonde hair, botoxed lips, etc. Looking like a truly androgenous person - who might not stand out in a crowd - didn’t seem appealing to them. Instead, the sex they chose to break was female. And maybe it’s more shocking to see female beauty altered and reconfigured than it is to see that on men, and the purpose of the choice probably has plenty to do with being shocking. Culturally, though, I think it’s significant - women are sex, women are being broken.

Unfortunately, we won’t see the project come to fruition, as Lady Jaye died suddenly in early October, and Genesis remains as the living half of the project. Though I must say I’m already intrigued by whatever Genesis will do next.

For more, check out Why We Are Breaking Sex