Panelist with the paper Face/Off at the Men and Masculinities conference at Stockholm University, Sweden, 2025
Pushing the focus from the binary “wrong body/right body” towards the individual self-actualization of making the transsexual “invisible me” visible to others, the performance lecture FACE/OFF tweezes out queer undercurrents in the narratives of the grotesque and the folkloric and with the theatrics brings it to the operative table of the fine art. The narrative of monstrosity can be captured in three R’s — Ruin, Release, Rebirth, the narrative similar to the transsexual cutting as caring. Stories of trans people self-medication is legion — a 2011 New York Time article focuses on the unlicensed injectors or pumpers, specifically on the trans-woman, S., who self-administered silicone to feminize her face. The lecture brings in documentation of DIY surgical procedures performed by trans-people on trans-people with all the bare enthusiasm and gore that comes after the institutional betrayal of the clinic. And lastly, the lecture is enthused with auto-theory that traces my own phrenological experience at the facial surgery consultation with Doctor Javad Sajan, the tentacle-like bureaucratic suffocation of the insurance battle with the subsequent denial of the surgery, and my investigation into the doctor, a crook being sued by the Seattle attorney general for 5 million dollars for pressuring his clients to sign illegal NDAs.
Panelist with the paper Queer Extremities of the Body Politic at the 2nd International Trans Studies conference at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, September 2024
Terrorist Extremities of the Body Politic examines how the modern state produces and weaponizes the category of the terrorist not only against separatist or insurgent movements but progressively against its own citizens—particularly queer, trans, and medically vulnerable bodies. Through an auto-theoretical recounting of the 2004 Beslan school siege and its aftermath, the essay traces the evolution of state violence from militarized counterterrorism to intimate biopolitical control, showing how surveillance technologies, medical bureaucracies, and border regimes converge to mark certain subjects as ontological threats regardless of their actions. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s viscerality, Jasbir Puar’s homonationalism, and Franz Fanon’s account of dispossession through unacknowledged pain, the text situates trans embodiment and post-mastectomy bodies—across ideological lines—as targets of state suspicion, policing, and erasure. The essay argues that the classification of terrorism operates less as a response to violence than as an instrument of defining who is allowed to belong to the nation, revealing shocking continuities between counterinsurgency, medical paternalism, and queer criminalization in Russia and across the Global North.
Essay This Thesis is Dedicated to the Brave Mujahideen Fighters of Afghanistan - a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts, University of Washington, May 2023
This Thesis is Dedicated to the Brave Mujahideen Fighters of Afghanistan applies methods of historical revision to trace the connective tissue between the fascistic linear power structures and the way cameras and cinema historically played the major part as the chosen art field of the status quo. This thesis parses out queerness as a redemptive iconoclastic way out through gender abstraction and identity anarchy, while also focusing on the manner in which queerness has been coopted and commercialized in the world of late-stage capitalism.