UNDERDOG Fanzine

Fred Spenner interviews Mad Kate

I want to share the English translation of an interview I did with Fred Spenner for UNDERDOG Fanzine (still in print!). Thanks so much UNDERDOG, for this opportunity to think through these great questions.

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You explore the politics of boundaries between and within bodies. How does that translate into practice/your everyday life?

Thanks for the question! I believe that there are many opportunities to practice this tender balance between how we understand ourselves as autonomous individuals and how we understand ourselves as networked and collective, in other words the boundaries between bodies (self and other) and within our own bodies. Most of these practices start with the imagination, at least for me. We can’t actually say that all our bodies are physically joined, and most of us can’t see the energetic bonds that tie us, or even the ways that our actions regularly impact others. We have to imagine those things or open what some call a third eye. Sometimes this is called radical imagination or sociological imagination—its trusting the bonds, entanglements and interdependencies that we can’t perceive with our senses like seeing or hearing or touching. Rather we have to believe it or create a kind of condition where we perform the belief of it and then see how that belief informs our actions.

One of the things I have practiced since over twenty years is non-monogamy—lived out as what has been named open relationship, polyamory and relationship anarchy (these are all slightly different kinds of orientations around sex and relationship but essentially they reject the idea of monogamous sexuality and sexual partnership as primary site of emotional care). Because jealousy around sex and romantic love is so deeply engrained in most of our societies, this is a particularly hard one to embody and enact and one that forces us to rethink our individual selves and borders between selves. I’ve been living imperfectly in poly-relationship and non-monogamy for over twenty years. What poly practice challenges us to do is to practice compersion—meaning that we consider that the joy that other bodies experience is also joy for us, to practice seeing the spilling out of the joy. Im still in process of learning how to do that and make mistakes all the time but I stay in process with it.

By the logic of compersion we also have to consider that we share pain and sadness, or that we have the power to share those things; in other words, to help others carry mourning. This can be embodied in lots of ways—in really practical terms it could mean being a more conscious consumer, where we actually consider the conditions of labour and sustainability under which the things we buy are made. How do our actions impact others? But also it can be figuring out how to network with others in creative ways to collectively take on our pain and suffering, depression and mental health struggles. For me this means starting small—maybe its just about finding out how to decentralize our support systems and care systems. Recently I got involved with the Hologram network, founded by Cassie Thornton—which is an informal network of people trying to create decentralized and anticapitalist models for therapy.

I’ve also been practicing queer parenting for ten years, which means I share my role as parent with two other central people and a host of other helpers. As a non-birth giving parent and a nonbinary parent “dada”, I’ve been forced to think different about how linkages and bonds are built to the body of my child (who is not biologically connected to me). How do we together construct the story of our queer family to make it visible to others? We are worlding that.

Many of us live in two-person relationships or seek for two person relationships that carry a huge amount of emotional weight for us, maybe more than we or the other can bare. We of course also experience devastating loss when anything happens to those structures (and most of us lack the training, models and support to help us create generative breakups and positive transitions). What about forming a variety of vast support structures with many different people with many different skills? What about figuring out how to hold, meet and share different needs with different people?

“Practicing the politics of boundaries between and within bodies” include these kinds of practices and many others I’m still learning about. But essentially it comes down to recognizing the arbitrary ways that we make borders and render certain things exceptional, create difference and silo certain things, relationships or persons. Once we recognize that we can try to undo it.

One really can use the notion of the geopolitical border to understand the idea of “exceptionalism” or “siloing” or “privileging”. Imagine a person who carries a European passport and is white and cisgendered. Almost every single border they cross without being stopped for longer than a minute. Although they did nothing but be born, their body is privileged by WHERE they were born and the color of their skin. The nationstate says, this person is good, this person can be here; although they have done nothing in particular to earn trust.

This is the way that we privilege certain relationships, we say, for example, because I’m having sex with this person, then I should also co-parent with them. Because I’m friends with this person I can also expect them to be a good business partner, or because this person is like me (similar race or class background) they will make the same choices I will. We build huge structures around exceptionalism.

We do the same thing inside our own bodies, we silo and privilege different parts or different elements. The sense of sight is privileged over the sense of “feeling”. The relative “health of the body” is understood differently depending on where and how (mental health is not given as much space as physical health). We also have different ideas of the significance of body parts. Why do I ask for consent to touch my genitals but not my elbow? Or why are my genitals defining everything about what I do and who I am to you and not the shape of my chin? Although we are generally a sex-phobic society, we ironically still go around calling everyone by their (presumed) genitals. Isn’t that odd?

But how can borders be defined as an expression of political relations of power and domination?

If we’re talking about geopolitical borders, then the relationship of power and domination seems to be entrenched and re-entrenched in the making and keeping of borders throughout history. Think about the ways in which borders have been arbitrarily drawn up by colonial and imperialist powers, dividing ethnic groups or dividing formerly united communities into two different nation states. Think about the kind of fighting which has then emerged from these false or messy divisions. There are countless examples of this kind of domination and exertion of power through the creation of boundary, border, or wall. In fact, any border—by definition—creates a division where before there was none, where there may have been differences, but the differences had slid subtlety into the next, like the way that a desert slowly turns into prairie, centimeter by centimeter.

It’s like trying to slice a spectrum somewhere along the spectrum and then saying one thing is to the left and another thing is to the right. If you divided a rainbow in two—what would you call the right side of the rainbow and what would you call the left side? But moreover why would you do it? You can’t make a spectrum into a binary. Well you can – but only through force and domination.

But furthermore, a border of a nationstate is generally about saying that everything within the border aught to protect—generally private wealth and the bodies of citizens—from those outside the border. This means that the border has to be protected from those who would somehow want to access that wealth in whatever way, usually through militarized force and violence. This means criminalizing anyone who would try to cross without the so-called proper papers. But the proper papers are generally only achieved through acquiring wealth or having those “birthrights” I was mentioning before, and in a certain circumscribed way.

What conditions do you formulate in order to create and enforce your own ideas of queer?

Hmm. Well the first thing that comes to mind is practicing queer sex and non-monogamy. While “queer identity” certainly has political meaning beyond sex, it still emerged from and within the struggles of people who were doing two things: 1. not conforming to the gendered expectations of the sex they were assigned at birth and 2. practicing sex with people who either had the same genitals as they did or were also so gender non-conforming that society couldn’t understand how to put them in a heterosexual box. I know this sounds really cut and dry but sometimes I feel like we forget that it wasn’t so long ago that even in the “liberal West” sex was policed and anti-sodomy laws and other anti-LGBT laws were on the books and of course they even still are!! But why I say queer emerged out of these movements is also to note that lesbian and gay cultures and even transcultures were still entrenched with binaries: masculine and feminine, penis and vulva. These are remnants of patriarchal thinking. Queer is essentially away from the binary.

So being queer for me means two things at root, both of which undo binaries:

1. practicing queer sex, queer asexualities and/or eroticism between bodies (self and other) by disentangling the significance of the genitals you have with the significance of the genitals of other people you have sex with, and opening up a myriad of ways to find pleasure outside of what has been understood as penis/vagina penetrative sex which is towards procreation.

2. practicing queer gender within your body (self and self): which has to do with disentangling the genitals you were born with or rather the sex you were assigned to, with the gender and sex that you live out.

So, yes, any two gender queer persons having sex with each other are having queer sex—because they are disentangling the binary from the sexual act. But I think its also something more that that, if I’m being honest. I think queer sex means being open to multiple and queer ways that bodies can intersect and interact, using all the holes and all the tools and also all the ways of being sexual and or (semi)erotic that can lead to an engaged enlivened way of being together. It also means using and engaging with all different kinds of language around how we call our genitals; how we imagine our genitals and what we imagine doing with our genitals.

But lets take queer further, beyond sex and gender. Queer(ing) in a political scale asks us to do essentially these same things but on a bigger scale—to undo our binary thinking. Like—how does our birth place actually NOT define who we are and what we do, how can we live out the unbounded way that humans are actually born into the earth, not divided by border and race but rather linked? If we stop defending to the death our “right” to be a woman or the ways in which womanhood must look like THIS—using this same kind of guiding principle, what does this cause us to do in terms of defending our birthplace, our nationstate, our home, even our family. This is queer—it means really queering ourselves in relation to the whole world. In that queering there is no room for strict binaries like good and evil, illegal or legal. In practice, however, our queer bodies are living in a very unqueer geopolitical world and we are criminalized for attempting to disrupt those binaries. We often cant survive when we do.

Your artistic and musical projects move between conceptual performance art and music. You've collaborated with Peaches and Bonaparte, you're part of the performance collective HYENAZ, and with you and The Tide you present works from your tonal-conceptual world with Tide Of Sound. How do you express your queer self-image here?

I’ve been lucky to find the freedom and possibilities of self expression in my major projects and collaborations, and all in slightly different ways and over the course of the 20+ years that I’ve worked as a performer. Throughout all this time my own journey of queerness has continued to morph and change. As a dancer in Bonaparte, although I wasn’t writing the songs or creating the music, I could offer my own imagery to the punk circus. It was very punk in the sense that we were always A LOT of sweat, blood, liquids, raw sexuality and extreme performance (like tying my face up in gaffer tape so I couldn’t breathe or cutting my hair live on stage or being naked covered in fluids and dirt or just diving into a crowd). At the time as a younger dancer who had worked in many contexts where my sexuality was specifically about being a “young hot girl” I was presenting the image of being an AFAB genderqueer person who could do anything—be ugly, be bloody, use my sexuality but not be defined by it. Tits out cunt out punk rock not giving a fuck.

Thats where I actually first started wearing costumes with big genitals on them, like a huge stuffed dick. For me this over-expression of the “big dick energy” was like saying—yea in my imagination my body has it ALL—a cunt, a dick, tits and a big asshole. Just because you cant see it doesn’t mean all these sexualities aren’t there. This kind of attitude is already present and alive fully in Peaches work, so when I have danced for her in videos or with the group Clusterfuck, we completely jive in terms of our queer feminist attitude!

For my projects Mad Kate the Tide, my solo work, and my work with HYENAZ, I have even more opportunity to say what I want to say simply because I’m writing the songs and the music and the texts are very important to me. Therefore I can be even more specific in terms of what my queerness is or how I want to express it. I can write more personally in terms of how my sexuality or my gender has affected my work as a performer and or as a sex worker, my thoughts about labour war and other politics. There is a lot of freedom in that.

You use the possibilities of subversive art and visual culture in the sense of gender-critical knowledge production. What can you concretely realize politically and culturally with it?

I love this question because to be honest this is the question that I ask myself almost every day and I’m not quite sure I know the answer. Sometimes I feel really down and I think – art cant do anything. It thinks that it can, but ultimately its activism and laws changing that makes the difference for people. But on other days I think, no—we are all part of a system of change and a movement towards another place. I think somehow that I am part of a tradition of feminist and queer performance, and as one small part of that, I hope that I have made a bit of a difference for some people who have seen me on stage and it has meant something for them and for their lives. Maybe it has given them a window of a possibility of who they can be either in their gender, in their bodies, or in their life work. These small changes lead to big change, changes which I’ve actually seen since I was a kid. Things are not the same. Yes there is still patriarchy, racism, ableism, homophobia and transphobia and I could go on —but the way that it is expressed, where it is expressed, and how and who is affected and in what ways is not the same. My kid is growing up in a completely different climate when it comes to how she can understand her own body, her agency as a body and her relationship to sexuality. Although that said, I also wouldn’t simply “rest”—there is always more work to be done and plenty of things to talk about and dismantle.

You also always like to focus your queer being with nudity (Sisterhood) and sex performance art in Too much Pussy! Why do you think the focus on nudity is helpful to stimulate a social debate of heteronormativity and bisexuality?

There is a lot to unpack in this question because I think that nudity and sexuality are two different things. So first I’ll talk about nudity. When we say nudity we are saying the human body without any of its clothes on it. We are born nude and if we have no opportunity to ever change our bodies with our own agency (like, if we don’t transition, or cut our hair, or get botox, or get tattoos or anything else; ie we refrain from kind of body modification on our bodies which inevitably costs money), then our body simply is as it is as it is and it will STILL change—it will do what it wants. It changes whether we like it or not. In fact most of our modifications are a kind of act of resistance to the body’s own course. It grows, it hits puberty, it grows hair, it has hormonal cycles, it ages, it starts to “malfunction” and change and become tired, less agile. It will become sick—sick in the way that society defines it—from time to time and eventually will die. Our bodies are our vessels. What Im trying to say is that our bodies are already a queer multiplicity of hormones, gender expressions and strange lumps of flesh which are not inherently male or female or anything of the like. They are already a queer thing which we are in relationship with. They are not one thing. So for me to simply be in my body, in my nude body, in relationship with my changing body in space and in time, is a queer thing. Because it is constantly queer in its relationship to you and how it is read in space(s) and over time.

Once we start to modify the body—in any way, we start to control or sculpt its “gender” or how it is read. We do that primarily through wearing clothes but also of course through hormone treatments and hair management and other things. When I wear clothes on stage not only am I controlling or attempting to control how my gender is read, I’m also putting a host of other signs and symbols on my body which then influence how it is read. What is the difference between a body wearing an expensive lingerie and a body being naked? What symbols and signs emerge for you when I even say that? What if the body is muscular and has a vulva? Or what if it is fat and has a cock? All these images bring more complex layers of symbolism to the body. And what about the hands that made the lingerie and the labour conditions with which they work? What happens to that material later when the body no longer wears it? Where did the cloth come from and where will it eventually go? All of these things are complex and worth thinking about when we make choices to wear clothes on stage.

As a not binary body, the minute I put on underwear, I’m making gender on my body which my audience cant help but “read”. I like so-called “gay male aesthetics” like wearing “male” jock straps with room in the fabric for a cock. But in doing so I’m making a definitive choice about how I’m presenting. And what if I wear a “woman's” thong—what then do I present? What about underwear which tries to hide the fact that I have genitals at all? There is no wrong or right here, the point is merely that nothing is unmarked and nothing is without symbolism and meaning. Thats why I find nudity just as good, or just as problematic, depending on how you like to look at it.

The problem however is that nudity its been siloed as potentially non consensual—and yes, I do think this is real and to be considered seriously. That’s why I tell my audiences ahead of time if I’m going to be nude in a space where they might not already be expecting that (like a sex party).

But I think its also worth thinking about why nudity is viewed as potentially offensive rather than marked and gendered bodies. If you were to present a team of people covered head to toe in Nike athletic wear—you wouldn’t have to warn me or ask for consent. Thats because its assumed that Nike wear is not offensive to me. But just to let you know—it is! One might say that wearing clothing—any clothing—is better than showing ones genitals in public. But a body covered in athletic wear is not a “blank canvas”. By doing so without taking about it, it enforces the idea that low wage factory conditions are just “part of the art” or “part of the aesthetic”. What will happen to those clothes after the theatre is done with them? Is this a reality we have to accept or be okay with? We actually can feel discomfort and we can say, no this is bullshit and this is not okay. I’d rather be nude :)

Okay so thats a bit of my thoughts on nudity. So then you ask about sex performance, which again I think of as a very different thing. Nudity is not an invitation for sex, but sexual exploration with two bodies on screen obviously does do something else. What I like about sex performance is that, I think that the more we practice sex and all the different ways that sex can happen—meaning everything from erotic talk to consent practices to penetration of different holes – there is the possibility to imagine our bodies differently and in different combination with others. I think the process of performing porn and being in porn is really exciting. I have loved to contribute to this ongoing work of coming together without shame about our desires, capacities, kinks and boundaries to talk openly about sex and then to actively explore it. I love the process of making porn and how I get to work within that process. For me its much more about process than the product of what one later sees on the screen. Showing all the different possibilities (not all of them but a lot of new possibilities ) for queer sex is what we can do. Showing and presenting options is very important in understanding so much more about queer sex and/or sex that feels saf(er) and communicative.

Where do you see your performances adding discursive value for other women*?

Well we can begin with this interview. When performances spark conversation or dialogue exchange in whatever form, I think this creates room for increasingly diverse range of thoughts and feelings to enter these questions of who we are and what we want to be as individuals and as a society. Even informal small conversations are so powerful, don’t you think? I hope that the questions that I pose in my performances generate conversations about all the things we have talked about here, and more! I hope that my conversations get people to talk about the different ways that we provide care to one another. What is the difference between sex and sexism and how to think collectively about standing up for the rights of trans and queer people but moreover how our community can continue to challenge itself to queer our identities in the geopolitical world, to fight war, systematic oppression and criminalization of bodies who cross borders? This is way more than just our individual struggles.

Women should conform to the ideal of beauty, but not be too individual. Those who don't conform to the ideal should at least love themselves. The pressure on women is higher than ever, and as it has been for centuries, the male view determines which women's bodies are attractive. Are there visible successes for you for a diverse image of beauty and the acceptance of different body shapes?

I’d say that somehow we all are part of a system of patriarchy, which is ableist and racist, cis-normative and sexist, and that system determines which ideals of beauty are upheld and valued (by being platformed and funded) and it determines which bodies should be covered or exposed and in which places and in which contexts. Inside of that system over the course of my lifetime, yes, there has been some diversity in terms of which bodies are seen in advertisement and on screens—if screens are the measure of beauty standards (again, which bodies are platformed and funded). I guess we can applaud that, although screens are still funded and curated by big business and fueled by capitalism and the beauty industry still claims billions in profits as different bodied people try to stay fresh and young and beautiful. Don’t get me wrong—I also think that people feel happy when they feel happy in their body and when they invest in their body (with money and time). I don’t want to diminish that. But still, so many different people still feel policed and controlled by increasingly “invisible forces” in what they do and how they look, and they also buy into the consumptive system as a means of feeling happy in their bodies (if they can afford it). But the fact is that we still can’t all consume equally—not only because of the environmental impact of that (we simply couldn’t sustain it if we tried) but also because we can’t all afford it because of massive wealth inequality. Few people want to think about how much their consumptive habits effect others and there is violence in that.

In „Fear of Performance“ you talk about how „like so many other things in life, our relationship to this idea of performance (fake/real) requires the same tolerance of holding two seemingly contradictory concepts in our hands and moving forward. And indeed, these concepts feed each other.“ Why is performance fake/real and how do these contradictions help you?

Yes in some songs and essays I have written in the past couple of years I have been thinking a lot about the meaning of performance and how it is operating in societ(ies). I think that as individuals we have hypocritical or perhaps warring expectations of performance. On the one hand, I think that we understand, especially as queer people, that everything we wear is a kind of “drag” and everything we do is a kind of performance of an identity. We are able to have a very generous vision of how expansive and multilayered our own selves are. But at the same time we have an extremely rigorous idea of truth—that a truth lies there somewhere; a truth that could be exposed and named and trusted. We are obsessed with authenticity and origin and proof; we see it in DNA tests, in criminal examination, in politics. Is she actually this or that or from here or from that? We fear deeply the idea that someone would say they are something that “they are not” or would present something to us that “they are actually not”. We abhor the idea of betrayal. But when it comes to our own selves, we have a much easier time seeing how nuance operates; how we are both and neither, a little this and a little that. I’m curious in digging deeper into these ideas and how they are linked to the queer self and queer time and especially how they are coming up in this contemporary moment as we struggle with the fear of artificial intelligence creating things which are “not actually real”.

How do your poly-queer identities dialogue with your sense of home?

Another great question. So, I think when I say queer what I’m talking about is by definition an identity that is not fixed, that is not binary, that is spectral, that is shifting, that is relational, that is networked, that is dynamic over time and in place, that is also held with difference and held simultaneously to difference—not binary difference but close and distant difference. It is an identity that never says “this is who I am and this is where I come from” but rather says, “this is what I am in process with, the many things that have made me, and the linkages that I have”. It is slippery, it is changing and it is worlding itself and therefore in relation with others.

And when I say home I think what I mean is the place(s) that I live but also the people and places that make home and make kin, the places (locations and also virtual or energetic spaces) that I find and make place, even for a moment. They are the nodes of relata that I have with humans and nonhumans. For example, I find home in my child, where-ever they are. I find home in my body, no matter how imperfect of a home that it is—imperfect I mean that it is never able to fully express or visually express what I am or want to be. So there is this kind of dialogue between what home does for me, how it shapes me, and how I shape it. It is a slippery dialogue.

This started perhaps very early on in my life because my body-home has always felt itself to be gender queer, always changing—even when I couldn’t actively change it, it changed in spite of me. And my home places (my bed, my house, my family, my community) often also switched quite a bit (I went to five different elementary schools before the 6^th grade and have lived physically in many cities, slept in many beds, traveled and made home in many people’s homes). I am used to change, I am a product of change.

Your queer feminist actions are extremely diverse. Where do you get the strength to keep fighting/dreaming that another world is possible, where a decent life for all is self-evident?

That’s a very kind question. I think that I aim to trust the processes deeply and to work in very close communication with the hard conversations in my life. I tend to run towards the things that I fear the most, use the process itself to process, and stay engaged—its kind of like riding a bucking horse. The staying on the horse is hard but also the staying on is an intense physical activity that is a constant relationship of adjustment and release. When I’m there, I look for others who can help hold space for everything that comes up. I guess what I mean is that I often am really tired, sad, depressed, angry, just as much as I am happy and joyful. I cry and I laugh a lot. I scream and orgasm a lot. I kind of let all the emotions run through me as much as possible and find physical, energetic, artistic, and intellectual ways to let out what I’m feeling. Performance onstage is also a place to do that.