Lazlo pearlman biography channel

Paper: Meat Magic: Grotesque-ing my Transbody at “The Box”

In popular culture ‘Grotesque’ is most often considered synonymous with ugly, disgusting, and monstrous; the abject Other against which we define the Self.

Lazlo pearlman biography channel

However, what most intrigues me about the Grotesque are the ways in which what it signifies, according to Sarah Cohen Shabot, is not a rejected other at all, but the postmodern subject, the actual ambiguous nature of existence itself: “interconnected, intertwined and total,” and at the same time “plural, heterogeneous, dynamic, fluid and changing.” Can the/my Transbody onstage function as a theatrical illustration of the intersubjectivity of all bodies?

All bodies and identities are double, hybrid, between living and dying, between and among genders. Could the Transbody, as the Grotesque, have the potential to create a heightened representation or experience of something that is, in fact, universal?


Presented at: Bodies: Flesh, Performance, Media, Disgust and Desire