Sister Chapman with HereIn

Film still from i’ve known i was a barren woman since i was born, 2020, film, 24 min. 13 sec.

[Image description: A light-skinned woman sits outside, cradling a tan rabbit stuffed animal in her arms. She has long blond hair and is wearing a pink dress with white flowers. Behind her stands a light-skinned woman, who rests her left hand on the seated woman’s shoulder. The standing woman has shoulder-length silver hair and wears a white blouse and jeans. Both look at the viewer with neutral expressions on their faces.]

HereIn talks with Sister Chapman about relationships, intimacy, and the unexpected influence of country music videos in her recent work. Originally from Texas, Chapman has lived and worked in San Diego since 2017.

HereIn: Sister, what is most interesting to you these days? 

Sister Chapman: Well, I think my practice has changed quite a bit since I entered graduate school at UCSD. I started off as more of a performance artist, but now I primarily write (poetry, fiction, essays) and make experimental film/video work. There’s this misconception that my work is about gender. My work is no more or less gendered than any other artist, and I’m not really playing around with or challenging gender in a critical way. Thematically, I’m interested in intimacy, desire, and relationships of power, particularly on a micro-level, a one-to-one interaction, framed through a transfeminine lens. I think about representations of trans women specifically, what desire and intimacy looks like from our perspective. I feel like the depictions of trans bodies, both in mainstream media and pornography, are incredibly harmful and/or reductive, and ultimately one-sided. I have conversations with a lot of cis men who are interested in trans women, but they don’t understand the fabricated nature of the images that they are consuming. I would say that, more often than not, these cis men are not being intentionally harmful, but they don’t understand the performative nature of those things. I’m not sure they grasp that the depictions of trans women that they enjoy consuming are constructed specifically for that reason. For them. It’s an unrealistic standard, but, unlike our cis counterparts, we don’t exist in other areas of their lives to contradict those images, so they take them at face value. We aren’t mothers, sisters, daughters, girlfriends, wives, partners to them, and because of that, it’s hard for them to conceptualize us as real people and have real relationships with us. In works like Casting, I like to agitate those issues by centering my own desire.

The camera doesn’t care about your desire, 2020, video, 53 sec.

[Video description: A light-skinned woman, her face out of the frame, sits in a green and brown chair against a light pink cloth backdrop. She wears a short, sleeveless white dress. She uncrosses and recrosses her legs nine times, and each time the camera briefly zooms in on a small, round mirror placed to obscure her genitals. The video has no sound.]

I recently made a piece in which I re-performed that scene from the 1992 film Basic Instinct, in which Sharon Stone is flashing her genitals during an interview at the police station. Rather than give the viewer what is expected, the genital reveal, I have a mirror that obscures my genitals and also implicates the viewer. Even though you aren’t actually seeing yourself in the mirror, you can imagine your face in the mirror, and you are also responsible for what you imagine is behind the mirror. I could have a vulva or a penis or something else entirely. That’s such a huge fixation that cis people have with trans and nonbinary bodies. I like to antagonize that desire and curiosity a little bit through my moving image work. Refusal is a foundational component of a lot of my work. I reveal a lot in my writing and film/video work, but I also hold things back because there needs to be room for a viewer to project and then have to sit with the complications of their own projections. Someone can feel like they really know me because of how intimate my work is, but they’re really just seeing something of themselves reflected back. 

i’ve known i was a barren woman since i was born, 2020, film, 24 min. 13 sec.

[Video description: The film is shot in landscapes and neighborhoods suggesting the Southern United States, as well as at Sister’s family residence. It features soft colors and a slow, meditative pace. Alternating with images of the natural and built environment are scenes of Sister and her mother. Both have light skin, while Sister has blond hair and her mother’s hair is silver. Her mother brushes her hair; Sister and her mother stand outside, Sister holds a rabbit stuffed animal and her mother rests a hand on her shoulder; Sister holds an umbrella while her mother sprays water from a hose like rain. They sit at a table, Sister’s mother peels oranges while Sister stitches their peels together to form a kind of quilt. Other scenes include Sister taking a bath; looking in the mirror; slipping off her dress; and laying on a bed with her arms crossed over her breasts. In one scene, she cuts a grapefruit in half, grinds salt onto it, and puts each half in her bra, where she squeezes them until the juices run down her torso. Interspersed throughout the film are old photos of interior and exterior spaces projected so that Sister, wearing only underwear, walks into them, becoming part of the image.There is a low buzzing sound throughout the film.]

I reference art history in a lot of my works, various artists and pieces, but I also like to play with my own family archive and the broader cultural archive. I want there to be an entry point for as many viewers as possible, and of course those entry points frame how a viewer sees the work. Another trans person who is familiar with our history may recognize certain things in my work that someone else wouldn’t, or my mother is going to get references to our family that no one else would. In i’ve known i was a barren woman since i was born, I’m combining all of these things. There are scenes from our family photo album, images of artists like Candy Darling, Greer Lankton, Maya Deren, and Patty Chang that we are re-performing, and even images of the Texas landscape that my father has taken over the years. I’m thinking about matrilineage and using these different kinds of footage to situate my work within a context that looks at the various types of culture that have informed my embodiment and performance of womanhood. I think something that’s especially important to speak about is the ways in which my gender is related to class and race. I’m not just a trans woman, I’m a white trans woman from the Southern United States. My parents come from working-class backgrounds, they’re teachers so they are sort of middle class now, and I grew up around a lot of working-class people. So that really shapes the way I perform my womanhood. In that film, I’m trying to play up these Southern, white cultural tropes.

HereIn: What are some of those tropes?

Chapman: Signifiers of rural America like the kind of clothing we’re wearing and the big red barn on my parents’ property. The film is stylized in a very specific way to situate it within a specific sociopolitical positioning, but also geographically. I don’t think people imagine I’m in Southern California when they watch that film. And while I’m not making any overt references, a lot of my visual vocabulary has been informed by country music videos. When I was growing up, my mom would turn on the country music channel on tv while we were getting ready to go to school in the morning. So we’d be eating breakfast and watching Faith Hill or Shania Twain. I’ve been really influenced by a lot of female country singers and their music videos. 

HereIn: You grew up in a Southern culture, a cultural sphere with things like country music videos, which is a space that is not particularly known for being supportive of transgender people. How do you feel that impacted you?

Chapman: Even though those weren’t necessarily spaces for me, in a weird way— and of course country music is problematic and I don’t love everything involved in it— I do think that I kind of first learned what a kind of feminism might look like through watching country music videos. There are more normative values rolled into them, of course, but there’s actually a lot about autonomy and female power that these female musicians sing about. There’s a lot of romanticism, but it’s a romanticism of a really particular kind. I also think that so much of country music— granted, the genre has shifted over the years and I don’t purport to be an expert on country music— but so much of it is these unabashed love songs, these women singing about love. I think that really influenced the way that I write, and also how I look at relationships and men.

HereIn: Now that you’re saying that, it makes a lot of sense. I think in your work you so deftly tease out much of the problematic nature of the kind of relational dynamics you’re exploring, but it also feels like there is this openness to love and intimacy, and a willingness to expose oneself and make oneself vulnerable. That is present in what you’re talking about with these unabashed love songs. 

Chapman: Yeah. You know, I don’t think I really hold very many Southern values because I am aware of the complicated history of those things, but I’m aware of how they trickle into my aesthetic and have helped shape my perspective. In a way I think it’s similar to early drag culture, which was really invested in golden-era Hollywood starlets as this blueprint for womanhood. I think there are still ways in which I look to some of those female country figures for strength or even just pleasure. Those women revel in being a woman, it’s something pleasurable. Sometimes, if I’m having a tough time, I’ll put on an old country album that my mom used to listen to. It just feels comforting. And so with i’ve known i was a barren woman since i was born, I wanted to be in conversation with a lot of these artists I really love but I also wanted that sense of place, because that feels important to me. That film is a step forward for my work in thinking about space and environment being intrinsically linked to our performance of self. Considering the ways in which these macro-structures influence our relationships on the micro-level. 

HereIn: One thing in this film I wanted to ask you about is working with your mother. Your scenes with her are so compelling and have a tangible tenderness. What was it like to craft and perform those scenes with her? 

Chapman: It was really great. She’s honestly a rockstar. Most of the people I show this film to have said, “Wow, your mom is the star of this film.” And I love that, I think it’s great. She was so easy to work with. From first grade through high school, she and I would work on my projects for various classes together, so in a way we’re used to working with each other in a creative capacity. She has a great sense of aesthetics, and most of the film is designed around her own aesthetic. More than that, she’s a great problem solver and is very innovative. The scenes where we’re peeling and sewing the oranges at the kitchen table, she came up with how to peel them so that they would be little squares that could be stitched into a quilt. She came up with that on the fly while we were doing the filming. I think in the future I will work with her again, though I don’t really have a project in mind. She’s a great actress, and I’d love to see her on film again.

Mending, 2016, video, 4 min. 

[Video description: A nude, light-skinned woman sits on the floor against a white backdrop. Her legs are tucked underneath her, while her upper torso, shoulders, and head are out of the frame. The video begins with seven unpeeled clementines on the floor to her left, and a pile of torn clementine rinds on her lap. As the video progresses, the woman picks up each clementine one at a time, wraps pieces of rind around it until it is covered, and places the newly-whole clementine on the floor to her right. The video gives the effect of a recording of the woman peeling clementines, played backward. The video has no sound.]

HereIn: So, oranges. They have come up in your work a number of times in the last couple of years. How are you using them? 

Chapman: Yeah, I’m the orange lady. They’ve become this kind of easter egg for me. I made a video work, called Mending, back in 2016, where I’m putting the orange skin back on the fruit. It’s a reference to Zoe Leonard’s Strange Fruit, which was an homage to David Wojnarowicz. But it’s also a reference to this encounter I had with a classmate back in the first grade. We were at a science museum and, I don’t know how it came up, but he was saying that girls didn’t have “oranges,” which was what he was using to refer to male genitalia. I didn’t know at the time that there were physiological differences between cis men and cis women. I was like, what are you talking about? I think that was one of my first moments of dysphoria as a kid. I was so confused and disoriented by that. So I use the orange as a way to say, “Well, girls do have oranges." Some of us do, at least. I think I’m also fascinated by the actual nature of the fruit itself. There’s a similarity between the skin and our skin, the segments of the orange are like little organs all packed up nicely, contained in different skins within it. There’s an embodied similarity between citrus fruit and the human body. Oranges are my favorite fruit. 

HereIn: What does this act of disassembling and then reassembling the orange mean for you? And in the most recent film, you’re reassembling it in a different state, where it retains its former embodied nature but becomes something new. 

Chapman: I think a lot of cis people still view what we, as trans and nonbinary people, do with gender-confirmation as us mutilating ourselves, which I don’t agree with. So it’s a little bit of a jab at that. For i’ve known i was a barren woman since i was born, in which we stitch orange peels into a quilt, I conceptualized it as us sitting there making a baby blanket for whenever I end up having kids, which is another kind of jab or joke. I’m probably the last woman in the line of my family, which is a weird thing to know. It’s kind of directly in contrast to Mending. The early video work is very romantic, like, “Oh I can fix this.” “This” being myself. But in the new work, the complexities of reality are more embraced. It’s still harkening back to Zoe Leonard, who is one of the biggest influences on my art practice. 

Casting, 2019, video, 2 min. 35 sec.

Click here for audio transcript.

[Video description: Two people sit facing each other in front of a red curtain, which hangs in front of a white wall. The man, who sits on the left, has sandy hair and light skin, and wears a backwards black baseball cap, glasses, and a blue t-shirt with white writing on it. The woman, who sits on the right, has light skin and long blonde hair, and is wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt and black pants. They both hold white pieces of paper, from which they alternately read lines.]

For Casting, I transcribed the dialogue from a porn film featuring a trans woman and a cis man. I kept the man’s dialogue as it was, but I inserted my own sort of violent and nonsensical fantasy, to center my own desire as a trans woman. I found this guy on Grindr who agreed to do a taped reading of the script with me, and we just ran it a couple of times and then I spliced the footage together to make the video. I wanted him to be a bit uncomfortable, and the viewer as well. Trans women are the recipients of male desire, but they are so rarely in our desires. It’s not a real dialogue, and that is mirrored and flipped in this video. 

Something that I really enjoy in a lot of trans artists’ work that I’ve experienced is that there’s this common strategy of self-antagonism, this mock desire for violence. And it’s not a real desire, but I think we utilize that as a tactic to convey our reality to viewers. Because there’s so much sexual violence and physical violence that we endure, and there’s also this perception, which I mentioned earlier, that we want to mutilate ourselves. There are people like Zackary Drucker, who has used this self-antagonistic language in some of her earlier work. Or the singer Anhoni, who has that song “Cripple and the Starfish,” talking about cutting off her finger. Or even some of Juliana Huxtable’s poetry. There are a lot of trans artists who utilize this self-antagonism as a tactic to, I would say, elicit empathy from an audience. It forces them to think about us as people, because then you’re imagining this person eating my pancreas. Which is not as sexy as it sounds, I’m sure. 

I think it’s also this complicated thing of navigating womanhood. In my past, I mostly dated gay-identifying cis men, so cis men that didn’t have a sexual or romantic relationship to women. But after I transitioned I started getting attention from straight cis men and I totally wasn’t ready for that. When I was living life as a queer man, there was this mutual gaze because we were both in a marginalized position. It was more of a reparative objectification. That’s something the artist Gordon Hall talks about. So it was a way of recognizing and holding space for each other, through objectifying each other. But then that objectification felt really violent when it was applied to me by cis, heterosexual men, because they’ve never occupied the position of “other.” I’ve since refused to date exclusively heterosexual men who are cisgender. I will only date bisexual or pansexual cis men.

From my experience, cis heterosexual men don’t understand trans women, or they are still too concerned about the stigma of being with us and they have all these hang ups about their own sexuality. Ultimately, there’s nothing trans women can do to free cishet men from their own stigma. That’s something they’re going to have to work on, so I just decided to take myself out of that equation instead of focusing on that in my work, which I had done for a little bit. I started thinking, “What is something really radical I can do?” Well,  I can create positive representations of trans women. Representations of us in love and being loved and experiencing kindness and joy. That’s what most of my writing lately has been centered on. One of my best friends is a bisexual man and we talk all the time about how there’s so much queer media theses days, but so much of it is fucking tragic. There’s so much death in queer media, whether it’s homophobic/transphobic violence, or its set in the late 80s and early 90s in relationship to the AIDS epidemic. I want affirming media. I want that for myself and future queer and trans people. I think that we can acknowledge the difficulty of the past while looking forward to new possibilities. I want to make happy things, and hopeful things, and things that can appeal to a larger demographic, which is why I’ve shifted to filmmaking and writing, so that I can hopefully reach more people, specifically queer and trans youth. 

HereIn: There’s a question that’s a part of your work and a vital part of what is happening on a larger scale in our culture right now, but which doesn’t get asked enough. What do you think are the properties of the most powerful and rewarding kinds of intimacy? 

Chapman: For me, real intimacy is having closeness with someone but still recognizing the space between you as people. Recognizing that you can never really know what’s going on in someone else’s head, but being comfortable enough with that person that it doesn’t really matter. Just being able to exist in a space with someone and not having to perform, and also feeling like you can say whatever is on your mind without having to censor yourself. Or not having to be afraid to ask a question. There are various forms of communication, but I think, ultimately, for intimacy you just have to have a really strong sense of communication with another person. You develop your own language. You also have to be comfortable with discomfort. That’s really hard, but it’s a vital part of caring about anybody. Intimacy is holding those moments of tenderness and tension in one space.

This conversation has been edited by HereIn and the artist for length and clarity.