Excerpt /// Well Dressed \\\ 5 minutes

/ Well Dressed \

10-minutes, color/b&w super-8 film, 2006

This experimental documentary meditates on the space between two bodies and explores three key bodies in transition: the erotic "cruising" body, the transgender body, and the pregnant body. In depicting moments of change or redefinition for these physical bodies, Well Dressed imagines unexpected points of convergence.

/ Text \

I am certain, trust me.I am lying in the park. Sitting up, I quickly realize that I am in the middle of a cruising ground. He watches me from the bottom of the hill as I pretend to remain oblivious to his casual flirtation. With each question, he arrives closer and closer to my body...

Integrating devices of narrative, fantasy, documentary, and the confessional, Well Dressed is a series of provocations. Each gesture points to failures and fantasies-- the failed sexual cruise between the young queer body and an older male, the fantasy of sex between the gender queer body and the biological male, a friendship between a transitioned FTM and a pre-op FTM, the queering of maternity, and the return to the fetus and newborn. These scenes recontextualize narratives of sex, birth, and becoming.

In Well Dressed, I center on the representation of bodies in transition, specifically transgender bodies and pregnant bodies. I choose these, among others, as points of exchange as the trans body is often compelled to explain itself, while the pregnant body is more often presumed to be an obvious gender. This film troubles that conclusion through unexpected intimacies. It dwells in the space between such bodies, interrogating ideas of proximity and identification within moments of contact. Between those bodies another space of potential is formed. Fears, hopes, and desires project onto the aspired body. We reach toward this person in front of us, for they harbor a feeling of completion. I could be this, I could inhabit this body someday, or at least a part of it. This film meditates on the instability that these unattainable hopes and failed expectations can provide.