As part of our 2018 Visionary Fictions Programme, Jacob V Joyce delivered a workshop at our Collaborative Future Fictions Symposium.

Transcript

My name is Jacob V Joyce and I am I guess an associate artist, who is here doing a follow up workshop after a workshop last month, which was a speculative fiction workshop, where I set a variety of kind of exercises and tasks.

One of them, which was a homework, was to create a version of the future which undermines or subverts or makes impossible or kind of pokes fun at the history that we feel is prescribed for us by the dominant power structures.

So instead of writing a future which undermines the one that’s been prescribed for me, I decided to become the future. So I thought about the ways in which that as a non-binary person it feels as though I am kind of being goaded into certain directions.

First of all, there’s the most obvious direction, which is, um, don’t be non-binary. Pick a gender, be male or be female. What I see as the digestible type of non-binary which I see in the very little media representation that non-binary do have, it’s usually a androgynous person. Usually like a white person. Um and I thought, well I don’t really want to do either of those things. I kind of want to do something different.

So I thought, instead of kind of trying to look as adrogynous as possible and shaving and trying to wear makeup and clothes that kind of hide my figure and trying to make myself look a certain way, or instead of just kind of picking one look to go for I was just going to do something that I had done before, which was to try and embody a gender representation that didn’t feel like the ones that are on offer. So I kind of started thinking about serpents and snakes.

When I drew these two eyes on my face, I was thinking about the ways in which as a more feminine presenting person when I’m travelling people have very judgemental looks. But what I like to do is I like to stare at them and stare them out. Until they look away because I’m not ashamed of myself and I will dress how I want and how I feel.