WE ARE PATIENTS / WE ARE SURGEONS 

solo performance 

“WE ARE PATIENTS / WE ARE SURGEONS” is a performance piece about monstrosity, pathology, and self-creation. The script is a ‘found objects’ poem pieced together from medical discourses about transsexualism, ranging from widely used diagnostic manuals, to groundbreaking early work on trans healthcare, to psychoanalytic study. Backed by a throbbing industrial soundtrack, different synthetic text-to-speech voices read the poem—each voice indicating the different sources from which the poem is compiled. I enter the stage wearing a large black jacket, resembling an old fashioned doctor’s coat, and as the audio track progresses I shed the layer to reveal a fleshy garment beneath. As the audio reaches its height of intensity, the text from the original sources at their most fractured, I extract organs from inside the garment and cast them away. The piece engages with the restrictive nature of medical authority, and emphasizes the powerful potential of bodily choice and self-creation.