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TomBoy
Collaboration with Luciano Chessa
For video and one piano (barefoot player)
8 minutes
2009
Tomboy acts as the lesbian bookend to Tom’s Heart (2004), taking its titles from lesbian literature between the 1920s and 1970s. There was no real lesbian equivalent to Tom of Finland during this period, revealing asymmetrical gender constraints, still present today. The titles chosen reflect the tone set for the queer woman, where characters were afflicted, scandalous, tortured (psychologically), and disturbed, to say the least. (The Cunt Coloring Book was the only one that seemed to shine some light on a sex positive possibility.) While I don’t share the nostalgia for this period, the way Tom’s Heart does, it did open up room to re-imagine these titles both heartbreakingly and mischievously.
