Blisters Beneath the Satin: Queer Embodiment and the Flow of Water

If nature refuses containment, why do we still try to contain gender?

For as far back as I can remember, I have both adored and struggled with the concept of my assigned femininity. I love the colors pink and gold. My head holds higher in a dress of tulle and satin. Yet beneath these delicate surfaces there has always been suffering. I remember taking off my satin pink pointe shoes to reveal blisters, blood, and aching muscles. I bowed gracefully as the audience cheered, embodying the discipline, pain, and poise expected of femininity. I had upheld the standard: to suffer beautifully and silently.

(Stock Image of Feet En Pointe without Shoes, Highlighting the harsh reality of the practice of ballet)

But femininity has never fully defined me. It’s a label attached to what I enjoy (like dark poetry or metal music) but not to who I am. The word female weighs heavy. It forces me into a box. Even in my sexuality I am expected to balance roles of masculine and feminine, as though desire itself must always reproduce a binary. Even the pronoun they feels like another box, another aesthetic I could never fully achieve. My skinsuit of femininity attracts both praise and punishment, adoration and objectification, reward and violence.

This tension between surface beauty and submerged pain, between fluid desires and rigid categories brings me to my research question: what happens when we treat water as a collaborator in queer performance? Water is unstable, life-giving, and resistant to containment. It mirrors the contradictions of queer embodiment: it flows across boundaries; yet it also carries histories of violence, memory, and resilience.

My project objective is to use water as a subject and collaborator. Sara Ahmed's “Orientations Matter” gives insight into how disorientation leads people away from straight lines and expected trajectories. This instability mirrors queerness. Both refuse binary categories and instead ebb and flow as a spectrum of lived experience. In the article “Jagged Presence in the Liquid City,” SanSan Kwan describes the urban environment in watery terms. His work shows how liquidity complicates identity and belonging due to its instability. His work supports my project by highlighting water as a queer temporal spatial force. Both are always moving and rejecting narrated paths. This pushes me to consider how queer performance with water might generate jagged or fluid presences rather than systematic narratives.

(Photo of Sienna Schlesinger, 2019)

I look to educate myself as a choreographer by learning to work alongside the element instead of forcing it to conform solely to my preconstructed vision and aesthetic. For this project, I will engage with environments that allow collaborators to engage choreography alongside lakes, oceans, or rain. In order to ensure the safety of collaborators, this water will not be deeper than mid calf and all participants will be informed of the purpose of the project in order to ensure informed consent. The entire performance will be filmed. I will gather information in queer studies both through interviews and research articles.

My goal is to further understand water’s uncontrollability, learning to work alongside something outside of my control, and use it as an allegory and participant to show spectators the fluidity of both queer performance and the queer experience.

Karissa Thuy (She/Her)/University of Hawai'i at Manoa

MFA Student in Theatre and Dance (Choreography & Dance Media)

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Sources:

Ahmed, Sara, “Orientations matter” (P.234-257) In Diana Coole & Samantha Frost, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press, 2010

Kwan, SanSan, “Jagged Presence in the Liquid City” Epilogue: Kinesthetic City, Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces, Oxford Academic, 2013, New York