An eclipse series in Virgo has made transmisogny all too visceral in my embodied experience as a transfemme and all too disappointing in my endless search for love.
Its the season of the Virgin, and as my students and I have been decan-walking under starlight, we’ve been sitting with the 8, 9, 10 of Pentacles, Virgo’s cards of course. I’ve recently written about the Ten of Pentacles and have a very Eight of Pentacles project to announce sooner than later, so I figured I’d share the legendary doll that inspired my vision anew for how apt the second decan of Virgo, aka the Nine of Pentacles, is toward queer articulations of beauty, self-image, and a gender euphoria geared toward breaking out of colonial binaries as terribly lavish as you can possibly tolerate.
Given the visual mode of tarot, the very visually oriented, Venus-ruled Nine of Pentacles, I thought what better than a visual essay to edify this decan’s delicacies? All images, other than the Smith-Waite Nine of Pentacles below will be from Martine Gutierrez’s Indigenous Woman, a single issue magazine released in 2018. Gutierrez here celebrates her Mayan Indian heritage and her navigation of contemporary indigeneity and is ever so virtuoso in my estimation.
This magazine becomes an impressive platform to translate her Mayan heritage and Guatemalan-American ethnicity as much as her fluid transgender. She proclaims herself Neo-Indeo.
She is Editor-in-chief, photographer, and model, fashion designer and hairstylist. She is her own muse, her own editor, her own art director. Her traje are inherited from her paternal grandmother (very much giving Queen & Ten of Pentacles), while her shoes, accessories and other clothes are from luxury brands.
She stages the environments, self-styles and moves across photographic genres in the serial and segmented form of a magazine to critique an art world that simplifies, flattens and appropriates Black, Brown and Red cultures so as to more easily consume them.
In the letter to the editor, Gutierrez writes “This is not a magazine about fashion, lifestyle, or celebrity. Fashion is a good veneer for making people look at what otherwise might make them feel uncomfortable,” essentially summarizing the second decan of Virgo, what I’ve elsewhere labelled “the blood-diamond decan.”
Like a creative director of any glossy magazine, she crafts advertising campaigns for shoes, perfume, jeans, sunglasses, and other imaginary luxury goods but inherent in her images and self-staging is critique. Using the visual vocabularies of patriarchy and cultural appropriation used to sell real world products, her commentary isn’t just smart as hell, it’s visceral and confronting. This magazine as an art exhibition is a “self-produced anthology of heritage.” Several of the self-portraits have since joined the Museum of Modern Arts’s collection, emphasizing a shuffling exchange between the high-brow art world and popular culture, much like we do in the shuffle of the cards.
See Venus rules this decan while exiled, “fallen.” Here, she is whatever is the opposite of dignity—obviously the whore is horrific to a misogynist, patriarchal ideology that punishes women for refusing sexual subservience and ontological ignorance. Why wouldn’t she be a worry doll, a muñeca quitapena from Guatemala, pictured first above? Put her under your pillow at night, she will ward off nightmares, but in the Nine of Pentacles she stands alone in the garden that is the site of Eve’s proverbial fall.
In my estimation any planet in a state of exile or fall is queered by context. In one image Gutierrez is the Red Madonna, the penitent holy whore, and in the next she is Tlazoteotl, “Eater of Filth,” depicted in the “Demons: Diabolized Feminine Devotion: Aztec, Mayan and Yoruba Deities of the Ancient World Resurrected in Hair” feature in her magazine.
Bright textile and ornate jewelry lavish these dark goddesses for which she becomes a vessel. Tlazoteotl is an underworld goddess, associated with adulterers and sexual vices, both burdening and alleviating us of carnal desires. She knows all of our dirty kinky desires, but also is merciful, forgiving, and purifies our body, mind, and spirit of the Catholic shame that warps our eros and retards our self-regard. She weaves gold from our offered pain and suffering. She has no prescribed gender. She is thus vilified because Christian European colonizers historically and persistently fear non-binary bodies.
By Guiterrez’s estimation a fallen Venus becomes a “Body en Thrall,” the final editorial in the magazine. To be “in thrall” is to be completely controlled or enslaved by someone or something, under someone else’s power, while to “enthrall” is to charm, fully absorb and spellbind. In the tension of how she plays with these near homophones is the bondage that evokes histories of conquest with the enthusiastic enchantment the viewer finds in her exhibition.
This body that knows how to move, how to dress, and dresses in her history with a revolutionary styling, who holds a mesmerizing gaze and poses with such power seems to be anything but a body in bondage. Her sartorial self-command is indeed too intelligent for a man who belittles a woman that knows she is beautiful by denying her a brain.
The pictures in these provocative scenes visually articulate our ever present questions of power, desire and self-objectification. Her sensual, queer, self-presentation becomes an exploration to the bounds of her own erotic power.
Gutierrez here imagines a perfume, Del’ Estrogen N°6, that would make transitioning as easy as I ritually anoint myself with my daily scents and sacred oils. Perhaps it is that easy.
The Doll poses with the dolls, mannequins, variously undressed and joined, in idyllic summerscapes with gardens and pools.
How has the structure of our desire been made to conform with being playthings to a white man’s fantasy? Dolls against dolls and its a plastic intimacy being positioned as idealized partner, a surrogate at best. Mirrored to a mannequin in a hyper-feminine grouping, the illusions are so seamless its easy to mistake what’s real and what’s artifice.
Gutierrez says with her tender compositions that the oppression fluid bodies face is nuanced through intimacy and inequality. And in this Virgo season, more than ever I’m realizing what bell has been trying to teach me for at least the past decade, that deep in the structure of misogynist transphobic patriarchal white supremacy is desire, fantasy and longing for the Other. Mass culture publicly declares and perpetuates the idea that partaking in racial difference is more pleasurable. Obviously, Otherness is commodified. Its obvious on every single dating app that bodies are all to easily commodified, ever-ready for racial, gendered consumption. The assumption of sexual agency within the context of racialized, and I’d add (due to all the chasers), gendered sexual encounter holds a seductive promise to transform one’s place and participation in culture. This tango is a trap.
All these men want want to fuck me because fucking is the other. Desiring, claiming, fucking the brown transwoman becomes a way for men to conquer unexplored terrain. My pussy is final frontier. It precedes the fuck out of me. And they want me to watch them watching themselves transgress and transform inside me. They openly declare their desire. They swear they are different. But all they ever offer is a swinging dick. No matter the rigamarole their seduction is still dangerous.
hooks teaches us that its a cis-male colonizer’s fantasy that makes the Other more sensual, more sexual, and instrumental in providing him a far more intense pleasure than Karen ever could. While Gutierrez describes her aesthetic of excess as a queer rage, an expression of frustration and fury. I see her serving cunt in every which way; I look back at myself in the mirror, and I’m reminded of my Remy Ma mantra, “I look too good to be fucking you.”
So, unexpectedly but imperatively in this eclipse cycle, I am certain I would rather be single and celibate and safe, rather than dating and in danger, subject to disappointment and disrespect. I delete all the dating apps off my phone, I block all the blatant, basic vulgar men from my phone. I call my friends to help me compassionately process the delayed understanding that I deserve more. I put on one of my bell hooks sermons, her in conversation with Janet Mock, and I’m stunned, smiling and affirmed to hear her response to an audience question. She’s asked: “how do we understand and acknowledge the historical trajectory of black women being subject to sexual commodification and exoticization while also creating a liberatory sexual framework for Black women in ways that honor their sexual agency?” And bell says thats the critical question, what does a liberatory sexuality look like? And then she stirs the waters, saying it may very well be that celibacy is the face of that liberatory sexuality. She asks “what does it mean to be able to say, I would rather not be sexual than to be sexual in any context where I’m being mistreated, where I have doubt, where my feelings are not, where I am triggered as an abuse survivor?”
She poses these questions about our choices in our journeys to sexual freedom so many years before me, but again days after I came to the same conclusions and resolve. I’ve listened to this talk so many times but now I know what she’s saying, experientially. This talk is where she offers her famous definition of queer being defined as being at odds with everything around it and having to find and create and invent a place to speak, to thrive, to live. That queer is where we are headed in trying to find that liberatory sexuality. bell thought it was crucial that trans people are at the forefront of this movement, because among trans people the imagination is called forth in the reconstructing and revisioning of self and possibility.
Seduction is dangerous. In this choice towards celibacy I feel a reclamation of self, I feel a self regard. As a survivor of abuse, and as someone who wants a loving partnership, who wants to build a life with someone, who wants to heal in relationship and believe in love, celibacy is a liberatory sexual choice and arriving at this choice feels like an expansion of my revolutionary imagination.
Martine knew waiting for someone to put her on the cover of a Paris fashion magazine would be in vain. So she made herself a CoverTGirl, featured on every page, every spread and in every image she showcases her chameleon-like artistry.
Authenticity, a word that presses upon colonizers and natives alike, has never been to exist singularly, or so she says. Truth thrives in the gray area. Self-exploration is an amorphous arena, and in Gutierrez’s work it swirls and swells in satire. Its an arresting, seductive synthesis between coquettish enticement, introspective intensity, erotic artificiality and the violence of a colonial confrontation.
She, Venus in Virgo, digs her pretty, painted nails into the dirt of her own image and comes up all roses.
x,
Christopher
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