2022

Artist: Dahlia Damoiselle

Title: Insurgent Hearts

Photo: Maria Silvano

From #DNL27 Transitioning: Art, Politics & Technologies of Gender Change, Berlin, June 17–19, 2022

Keynote Performance by Dahlia Damoiselle (U.S. Military Veteran, Educator, Sex Worker, US). Moderated by Jay Bernard (Writer, Artist & Activist, UK/DE).

We cannot discuss power and hegemony without confronting constructs of gender and their accompanying systems of violence, especially within the framework of Western Neo-Imperialism. We’ve witnessed the rise and resurgence of such masculinised victim/hero complexes in fascism, right-wing religious extremism, racism, and anti-queer ideologies which have infected institutional, cultural, social, and political spaces. In this performance, Dahlia Damoiselle seeks to use transition and gender identity as asymmetrical guerrilla tools by which to confront the rhetoric and violence employed by such forces with emotional truth, lyric, and vulnerability. This series of lived experiences and poems will interweave narrative threads of the marginalised assemblages that make up Dahlia Damoiselle’s many selves—as the son of Vietnamese refugees who became a soldier, as a boy struggling to define love, as a queer transgender woman eking out a living in America, as a disillusioned veteran returning home, as a poet, as sex worker, and as a lover.

This personal discourse will explore the wars in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, and ongoing Culture Wars around queer identity in the West, while seeking an emotional liberation through the act of transition and transformation via healing, community, and insurgent queer love. By centering this marginalised assemblage as existential threats to Western order, Dahlia Damoiselle hopes to stoke an insurgent imaginary that seeks healing, community, and liberation through the lens of gender and transition.