In 2007 Mary Bryson, a genderqueer artist and academic based in British Columbia, was diagnosed with breast cancer. After a double mastectomy, she found herself pressured by her doctor to undergo breast reconstruction, a procedure that would return her to a supposedly more desirable shape, which is to say a more womanly one. She wasn’t interested, but her doctor signed her up anyway, telling her, “You’re just crazy right now.”
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Joynt and Bryson tell these stories in “Resisterectomy,” which juxtaposes their experiences of gender-reassignment surgery and cancer surgery. But beyond detailing the routine indignities that trans and genderqueer people confront, the show takes those challenges much further, into a complicated and complicating series of musings, both textual and visual, about the narratives that bind us to gender.
Joynt eventually had a hysterectomy, and was sent to recover from the procedure in the maternity ward; he said he “never felt more invaded and prodded and exposed” than when various medical personnel came in to examine him and his body as a curiosity. In a video that loops alongside Bryson’s narrative, Joynt says he understands “the need for women-specific medical spaces.” But that hardly mitigated his own need to not be treated as a freak show, or to not have to negotiate a space where the forms only offered “Ms.” as a category for self-identification. As is common for trans people faced with a medical-industrial complex that, for the most part, remains resistant to meeting their needs, Joynt found himself both an object of scrutiny and an educator (the forms, he pointed out, could be easily doctored to remove gendered salutations).
Bryson and Joynt challenge such narratives conceptually while acknowledging the physical realities of their experiences—Joynt, after all, did go through surgery, and Bryson does have an idea of how she wants her body to look. “Resisterectomy” locates gender not as a finite end but as a more fraught series of questions, and it’s essential viewing for anyone interested to see where those might go.
Through 12/8 Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry 929 E. 60thgraycenter.uchicago.edu free
