HOLESTAR
artist/performer/tranny
Unexpose
2 Hour performance
A time based piece, Unexpose explores the area between assigned gender and elaborate aspects of femininity. The sculptural process and transformation from female to counterfeit female representation as suggested by drag queens is is documented in front of an audience. As the character evolves, the 'sculpture' sings sporadically. Testing it's voice, repeating, rehearsing before walking away from the space suggesting it has function elsewhere.
2 Hour performance
A time based piece, Unexpose explores the area between assigned gender and elaborate aspects of femininity. The sculptural process and transformation from female to counterfeit female representation as suggested by drag queens is is documented in front of an audience. As the character evolves, the 'sculpture' sings sporadically. Testing it's voice, repeating, rehearsing before walking away from the space suggesting it has function elsewhere.
Looking at Holestar’s, work, including Unexpose, can set all kinds of queer feelings off in the viewer. Exchanging the symbols of an exaggerated drag femininity to a biologically female body (like Holestar in her persona) does more than reclaim those symbols and transcribe them on to a female body, it begs the question of the solidity of any and all identity. It is this mistrust of and experimentation with both lived identity and the representation and slipperiness of identity that typifies Holestar’s oeuvre from the earliest photographic work to the most current performance events.
With the best queer impulses in mind, Holestar’s work from the clubs of queer tranny-land to the boudoirs of the dominatrix, shows to what extent all gender is performative in the sense that we make gender as it, in turn, makes us. Gender precedes us and has a special quality – that the stuff of gender identity is naturally occurring. Watching performers such as Holestar shows to what extent those solid genders are culturally proscribed and how they enable or disenable a liveable life and a legible existence. Holestar’s work on gender performativity explodes this ‘natural stuff’ and queerly caresses the boundaries of the construction of identity by claiming a wrong identity, that of a drag performer. This, to me, sends messages about the apparent solidity of my own gender identity and what I might be able to claim in the name of my gender. At the same time Holestar’s performances invade a theatrical tradition in which females have been generally excluded (traditionally more often misogynistically derided and sometimes represented stereotypically – either as a slave to her body or as heroine worship).
However, it is important to note that the work Holestar as ‘The Tranny with a Fanny’ performs does not deny her biological body (although the solidity of her body can be queerly questioned too). Her political act of showing the construction of a drag identity (one might say this is an identity that has been aligned to, ironically, a certain kind of male masculinity) binds both her own emerging biography with a political step into a field of visual culture where girls are not allowed.
At the end of Unexpose, Holestar leaves the space as the transformed tranny performer – but I wonder, in a profoundly queer way, how much Holestar creates the tranny or how much Holestar is constituted by the performative process (as apposed to performance process). That is, ultimately to my queer reading, she makes the tranny as the tranny makes her – a truly cyclical and queer state of affairs.
Stephen Farrier, BA, MA, PhD
Senior Lecturer and Course Convenor, Drama, Applied Theatre and Education
With the best queer impulses in mind, Holestar’s work from the clubs of queer tranny-land to the boudoirs of the dominatrix, shows to what extent all gender is performative in the sense that we make gender as it, in turn, makes us. Gender precedes us and has a special quality – that the stuff of gender identity is naturally occurring. Watching performers such as Holestar shows to what extent those solid genders are culturally proscribed and how they enable or disenable a liveable life and a legible existence. Holestar’s work on gender performativity explodes this ‘natural stuff’ and queerly caresses the boundaries of the construction of identity by claiming a wrong identity, that of a drag performer. This, to me, sends messages about the apparent solidity of my own gender identity and what I might be able to claim in the name of my gender. At the same time Holestar’s performances invade a theatrical tradition in which females have been generally excluded (traditionally more often misogynistically derided and sometimes represented stereotypically – either as a slave to her body or as heroine worship).
However, it is important to note that the work Holestar as ‘The Tranny with a Fanny’ performs does not deny her biological body (although the solidity of her body can be queerly questioned too). Her political act of showing the construction of a drag identity (one might say this is an identity that has been aligned to, ironically, a certain kind of male masculinity) binds both her own emerging biography with a political step into a field of visual culture where girls are not allowed.
At the end of Unexpose, Holestar leaves the space as the transformed tranny performer – but I wonder, in a profoundly queer way, how much Holestar creates the tranny or how much Holestar is constituted by the performative process (as apposed to performance process). That is, ultimately to my queer reading, she makes the tranny as the tranny makes her – a truly cyclical and queer state of affairs.
Stephen Farrier, BA, MA, PhD
Senior Lecturer and Course Convenor, Drama, Applied Theatre and Education
The Central School of Speech and Drama
