Cistem – Genesis Victoria
Queer Theory / Non-Binary / Subversion / Voice
Cistem” is a performative sound piece that reflects on the violence of the cis-tem of gender determination of identities, a normative system of compulsory correspondence between gender and sex into the female/male binary. Both concepts, sex and gender, have been criticized by feminism and queer theory widely as the milestone of a system of oppression. The violence of the oedipal binary, female/male, is the basis of the patriarchal normative. The cistem oppresses the multiplicity of indetermination and the possibility of self-determination. Moreover, the cistem had erased, historically, identities beyond binary through the colonization of gender, through imposition and repetition of behaviors and control over the bodies. Cistematic violence. In this way, the cistem works as a black box that restates our binary wound, a black box that restricts our impulse of transformation and limits the diverse ways to inhabit the world.
From a non-binary perspective, in a series of sound procedures and performative gestures, I attempt to subvert and destroy the word cistem through my extended voice. I used my voice to repeat and subvert the meaning of the word cistem in Spanish (my mother-tongue) and English. I allowed myself to drive into other words or phrases too. On the other hand, I extended and manipulated my voice through granular synthesis, hardcore filtering, reverse and pitching in order to sub-verse the normative of hearing: beyond something pleasurable, something clean, something organized. Repetition in order to create strangeness of meanings and attention to the sound as a something else: multiple foldings, tiny floating bodies, repressive meanings, genderized trauma exploding in our ears.
If we think from sensibility, the search for indetermination of the non-binary gender, its impossibility of definition, is the same indetermination that sound carries: an unintelligible sensitivity, unsound. Before we born, before the determination of our identities through a speculative mirror, we existed inside an aural womb. This womb resides in our memory as undetermined, unknown, abjection. A first configuration of the world filtered by skin and water: a low passed relation with undetermined virtuality. Under the legibility of binary recognition – visual recognition, repetition and meaning- lays an aural queer non-binary embodiment.
For the right to indetermination and self-determination. Non-binary resistance. Aural resistance. One day they/them.