Narcissister, a Truly Kinky Artist

From Art Journal 79, no. 1 (Spring 2020)

Drawing on the myth of Narcissus and the transgressive perversity it inspires, New York–based performance artist Narcissister embraces narcissism as an aesthetic and political strategy. The artist, whose training includes classical dance and the fine arts, lives in a darkly humorous world that consists of racialized dolls, mannequins, autoerotic sex play, and remarkable yet anticlimactic performances of constructed archetypes. She is known for wearing an expressionless Barbie mask, wigs, and a kinky-haired merkin, all while concealing her “real” identity. Her live and video works feature a mix of titillating yet disturbing displays of penetration and versions of “the pullout method,” which she performs on herself. In her art, edgy self-sex acts commingle with a multiplicity of characters and fictions typically considered taboo—kitschy soft-porn archetypes, topsy-turvy dolls, and mammies—to unsettle liberal ideas concerning multiracialism, feminist praxis, and virtuosity. Her recent art features dolls with crudely assembled body parts à la Hans Bellmer and Cindy Sherman, cut-up masks of various skin tones, dysfunctional and ill-fitting costumes, and oversize props that often thwart the artist’s seamless execution of a choreographed step or cue. Specifically, her art extends formal strategies developed by Lorraine O’Grady, Carolee Schneemann, Adrian Piper, and Kara Walker to transform stereotypical imaginings of the female body and long-standing social and aesthetic debates about the right and wrong ways to picture and perform racial and gender identity.

Narcissister’s solo performances contain all the makings of psychosexual disorder, from multiple identities to kinky sex to self-objectification. Formally, she alters conventions of burlesque, African American concert dance, feminist craft (quilt making and collage), and camp (she hand makes her props and costumes from discarded materials). Thematically, she combines the visual histories of black subjugation with sexual transgression to highlight how these two phenomena, enmeshed since the eighteenth century, remain entangled in the early twenty-first century amid renewed interests concerning racial reconciliation and the promise of multiracial feminism.¹ In so doing, she challenges the reparative expectations of art, activism, and multiculturalism in the post–civil rights era.² A self-identified “sister” of African American and Moroccan descent, Narcissister burlesques her own mixed-race heritage to stage self-objectification as the limit of multiracial promise.³

In name, the artist plays with the polysemy of the word “sister,” exercising the language of racial and gender affinity to redefine how we imagine community and solidarity in the early twenty-first century. She combines self-loving absorption with the idea of “sisterhood, especially among women of color.”⁴ By tethering narcissism to the history and memory of racial subjection, her otherness—her aesthetic and corporeal alterity in terms of phenotype and athleticism—operates on two levels. Narcissister’s onanistic acts of incomplete performance upend normative notions of mastery, on the one hand, and black women’s reproductive labor in the past and present, on the other. Inserting and expelling items from her genitalia is one way the artist plays with these concepts vis-à-vis the boundaries of blackness and the body.

Because of her self-sex radicalism and transgressive deployments of the body in performance, scholars and critics have lauded Narcissister’s artworks as radical acts of redress and self-love. Ariel Osterweis and Barbara Browning consider her performances to be acts of reclamation and self-care that counteract images of black women as degraded subjects.⁵ Arts and culture critic Priscilla Frank has called the artist a “queer feminist superhero,” while art critic Katie Cercone has likened Narcissister to a postracial feminist icon.⁶ From these angles, the artist’s creative endeavors recover the racialized, gendered self—restoring the historically subjugated body to some sense of wholeness and strength—through narcissistic sexual play. In my view, Narcissister’s performance art gestures beyond the body to question the limits of racial and gender identification as they have been thought within identity-based art and its histories. The constellation of her background in African American concert dance, her training in black feminist craft and performance, and her participation in exhibitions comprising solely artists of African descent is especially important here, as is her use of masks and various racial and sexual stereotypes typically ascribed to black women’s bodies. Bridging her own complex racial and ethnic heritage with her artistic influences and practice, the artist unsettles narcissism’s sexually perverse origins to focus on how pathologies of race, and specifically blackness, continue to energize our liberal imagination. Her work also underscores the myriad ways in which the visual economy of race and phenotype is also inherently sexual and libidinal.

The myth of Narcissus is the basis for the prevailing analysis of narcissism, which Sigmund Freud characterized in 1914 as a sexual perversion wherein romantic attraction is directed exclusively toward one’s self.⁷ This self-centering, typically understood as an extreme, pathological form of self-desire, is thought to lead to self-affirmation and reassurance: narcissists love the self-image they project onto others, and when others reflect the projected image back, the narcissist’s sense of self is affirmed. In this exchange, narcissists are reassured both of their existence and of the boundaries of their ego, a reflexive process that blurs all distinctions between reality and fantasy.

Beginning in the 1970s, narcissism became the nexus of a disparaging form of aesthetic criticism levied at feminist performance artists who used their own bodies in their live and video art. As Lucy Lippard observed at the time: “Men can use beautiful sexy women as neutral objects or surfaces but when women use their own faces and bodies, they are immediately accused of narcissism. . . . Because women are considered sex objects, it is taken for granted that any woman who presents her nude body in public is doing so because she thinks she is beautiful. She is a narcissist, and [Vito] Acconci, with his less romantic image and pimply back, is an artist.”⁸ Lippard’s comments underscore the uneasy tension between feminism and self-display with which women artists at the time were forced to contend. To counter this tension and the art world’s gender disparities, women artists and their critics claimed performance as well as narcissism as self-affirming sources of creative agency and representation.

For Amelia Jones, narcissism is a radical practice—when enacted by marginalized subjects, namely women artists, queer artists, and artists of color—that breaks down the self-other, mind-body split unique to prevailing conceptions of modern subject formation in the West. These binaries often characterize culture and the mind as masculine, and nature and the body as feminine. Self-centeredness shatters this reductive view; in so doing, Jones explains, it becomes empowering. Rather than eclipsing women artists and the images and subjectivities they create, it elevates them, thereby expanding our understanding of feminism and art’s engagement with social life.⁹

Just as self-centered performance frustrates the art world’s predominantly white, male, object-driven structures, Narcissister’s art is expansive, crossing the boundaries between entertainment, lowbrow dance, and fine art. “My interest in keeping my project broad and able to exist in many different scenes,” she admitted in a 2014 interview with Joseph Keckler, “is unfortunately quite a liability. The feedback . . . from curators,” she continued, “is that my artwork is too entertainment-flavored to be viable for them, and I don’t have objects to sell. And the entertainment people often feel my work is too arty, too opaque in its meaning and standpoint, and too erotic for many ‘entertainment platforms.’”¹⁰ To further explore the possibilities of identity-based art and performance, Narcissister turned to burlesque. While completing the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2004–5, Narcissister found vibrancy in burlesque. However, the burlesque scene was limited to representations of white femininity and womanhood. “They still all basically wanted to be Marilyn Monroe,” the artist remembers.¹¹ She, on the other hand, craved something more versatile to accommodate nonnormative approaches to racial performance and eroticism. So she began disrupting the conventions of burlesque with handstands, reverse stripteases, and her masked dancing body. Narcissister’s live and video works, however, do not build to sexual release or satisfaction, nor do they reveal or redress unknowable truths about sex, or race for that matter; they are essentially plastic and anticlimactic.¹²

Instead, the ways in which Narcissister flips in and out of costumes, multiracial masks, and abject sexual scenarios congeal into a kind of race play, a form of kinky sex that at once relishes yet exceeds erotic fetishism and fulfillment. Race play is a type of sexual fetish in which participants experience pleasure from re-creating racist and xenophobic situations drawn from history, such as Nazi-Jew interrogations, master-slave relationships, and public displays in which white interlocutors grease up and sell black bodies on the auction block.¹³ Another dimension of race play is becoming aroused by the use of racist epithets and physical force to demean one’s partner. It is a kind of psychological theater that gains appeal from its associations with any combination of the following: the desire to abandon responsibility, the desire to be humiliated, self-hatred, the impulse to redress childhood trauma, or even to find or mimic spiritual connection. From the point of view of race play, Narcissister’s work complicates staid understandings of blackness and the body in contemporary art and performance studies.

In contemporary art history and performance studies literature, uses of the body such as Narcissister’s are typically read as a way to heal racial pain and injury. This understanding of performance assumes that it “offers a substitute for something else that preexists it,” making the performing body a proxy “for an elusive entity that it is not but that it must vainly aspire both to embody and to replace,” in Joseph R. Roach’s interpretation.¹⁴ Performance, therefore, functions as a process of substitution, of standing in for something preexistent, lost, or elusive. In this process, the performing body is an effigy, Robin Bernstein tells us, “as it bears and brings forth collectively remembered, meaningful gestures, and thus surrogates for that which a community has lost.”¹⁵

Rather than affirmative self-love or redress, Narcissister’s antiredemptive enactment of self-sex bridges race play with Freud’s pleasure principle, the instinctual search for pleasure and avoidance of pain to satisfy biological and psychological needs.¹⁶ Freud locates pleasure and pain on a spectrum, and Narcissister’s self-effacing, abject sex acts are situated at the point where pleasure and pain meet. But her practice of racialized BDSM (shorthand for bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, sadism/masochism) changes the terms of pleasure and pain as they relate to power—domination and submission—and histories of racial and sexual subjection. Narcissister’s race play exceeds any attempt to redress the trauma of racial subjugation in the past and present. Her brand of self-objectification undercuts social mores about sexual agency with enactments of self-inflicted discomfort, stalled orgasms, and bodily harm. In so doing, her art foregrounds a relation between racialized female sexuality and freakery that is distinctly irreverent and kinks up normative ideas about racial kinship and art’s liberatory potential. Moreover, latent within the artist’s race play is a social critique of the art world. The curious thing about race play is that in the broader fetish community, people of color pursue it, but more often than not the consumer base is white, not unlike in the art world.

Thus, instead of using senseless perversion or affirmative enactments of narcissism, Narcissister transmogrifies self-loving absorption by adding a little kink to the mix. She strips, flips upside down, spreads her legs to reveal multiracial doll heads nestled in her crotch, and plays with herself, frenetically rubbing the masks and heads attached to her body and inserting and pulling items from her mouth, vagina, and anus. She moves quickly and gracefully. One blink and you might miss something, like a swift costume change or the climax we might expect from such a titillating display. Furthermore, Narcissister’s conceptions and deployments of racialized stereotypes within and beyond the body contest black female subjectivity in light of her own racial identifications as a “sister”—a woman of color. Kink in this context spans curly wigs and merkins; sociocultural entanglements of race, gender, and sexuality; and crude forms of self-sex. The artist’s cleverly suggestive moniker and kinky enactments of race play and self-objectification, as a result, recalibrate narcissism with regard to how racialized identities function in American public life.

In Every Woman (2008/9), Narcissister’s best-known work, the artist reorders the striptease form by performing it in reverse. At the start of the video version of the piece, red curtains with gold lining and black tassels part to reveal a nude Narcissister facing away from viewers as the camera zooms to compress the frame and focus on the artist’s backside. Behind an eerie Barbie mask that conceals her identity, the artist revolves on a rotating platform similar to the kind circus performers use, making her nude body, brown-toned Barbie face, and kinky-haired merkin visible from all angles. To Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman” (1978), she pulls clothing and accessories from her mouth, from between her legs, and from the oversized, kinky Afro wig she wears. Rather than serving as a revealing image of the artist, Narcissister’s masking devices ensure that she is never fully exposed and that she instead presents an artificial construction. We experience the flipside of Chaka Khan’s lyrics, “Anything you want done baby/I do it naturally.”¹⁷

Just as Every Woman reverses the norms of burlesque, the work also contests the fictions and fantasies associated with black women’s sexual desires and performance. The Afro wig and pop song function as signifiers that recall the self-objectifying racial fictions of the blaxploitation film genre and racialized pornography of the 1970s and 1980s, the Golden and Silver Eras of erotic film, respectively. During this time, blaxploitation and erotic films trafficked in exaggerated depictions of black women doing “it”—sex and sexuality—both exotically and “naturally,” as Chaka Khan sings. The voluptuous, lustful black woman kicking ass in a huge, weapon-storing Afro and low-cut, impossibly tight clothing is a recognizable and recurring stereotype in the former (Pam Grier as Coffy, in the 1973 film of the same name, for example). In the latter genre, lascivious black women who possess special “skills” and enjoy being racially subjugated in the sex act evince such fantasies. Narcissister’s simulations of self-sex in Every Woman and elsewhere, however, do not lead to self-affirming ecstasy; instead the orgasm is routinely displaced, frustrated, or quite literally fabricated in her work. Rather than mastery, incompletion—of sex, race, and reproduction as well as dance-based virtuosity and fully knowable identities—is the acme of Narcissister’s art, albeit counterintuitively.¹⁸ Her choreographed failures to climax, which appear as various forms of reversals and refusals across her practice, overturn early twenty-first-century ideas about identity performance and multiracial futures. Narcissister’s Afro wig and choice of Khan’s late disco tune in Every Woman are particularly important here because they elucidate how kink—from myths about black women’s hair to their sexual prowess—circumscribes black female embodiment in our putatively multiracial era.

Narcissister’s art coincides with but nevertheless refutes current American public discourse that valorizes multiracialism—one of the greatest hopes and myths of the early twenty-first century. Writing on how US news media link multiracial identity to contemporary racial norms, policy preferences, and cultural trends, communication studies scholar Catherine R. Squires observes, “Promoting tolerance and cross-racial intimacy at the dawn of the twenty-first century is much better than the hysteria over race mixing that ushered in the twentieth. . . . That the mainstream press is declaring a consensus that interracial marriage is a social good is no small change.”¹⁹ The American public’s embrace of interracial coupling represents a move away from centuries-old angst about race mixing to promote tolerance, affirmative coalitional politics, and celebrations of cross-racial intimacy as social goods. According to Squires, multiracial bodies are now seen as harbingers of racial harmony rather than racial degradation, and this development is “evidence of some progress.”²⁰ These putatively progressive concepts are punctuated by the gains and failures of Barack Obama’s 2006–8 presidential campaign and his 2009–17 occupation of the White House, important years for Narcissister’s artistic development. Yet while representations of hybridity and multiplicity recur throughout her oeuvre, she repeatedly distorts idealized images of the mixed-race figure by performing its shortcomings.

The Dollhouse (2011), also known as Upside Down, exemplifies the artist’s transformations of both narcissism and multiracialism. The Dollhouse has been performed at various lengths and at a variety of venues, from the Box, a neoburlesque nightclub in New York City, to America’s Got Talent, a prime-time television variety show that airs on NBC.²¹ As a result, Narcissister has garnered a cult following that spans queer club culture, experimental film and performance, television, and the high-art world. At times preceded by a video set to eerie nursery music that features the artist’s hands playing with a topsy-turvy doll in a multilevel wooden dollhouse, the live performance work opens with Narcissister wearing a brown-toned mask, a brown bob-style wig with bangs, and a red sailor dress. She is cloaked in a floor-length blue velvet hooded cape reminiscent of Cinderella, with long white gloves covering her hands and forearms. A large dollhouse prop is positioned upstage and center.

To the lyrics of “At the Crossroads,” a song about a girl coming of age from the 1967 Hollywood musical Doctor Dolittle, Narcissister twirls, raises her gloved hands to the sky, and slowly kneels as if praying. Narcissister’s gestures mirror the lyrics of the song: “Here I stand at the crossroads of life/Childhood behind me/The future to come/And alone/Nothing planned at the crossroads of life.”²² She reaches far to the left and brings her hands to cover her masked eyes, her upper body contracting and releasing in an action that resembles crying. She yearns for something: romantic love and certainty about the future.

Then the music switches to a spare disco interlude, and Narcissister turns to face upstage. She pulls her hood down to reveal another brown-faced mask attached to the back of her head. Her dress also has a dual identity, red with a sailor collar in the front, and a blue and brown paisley print in the back. She bends and disrobes before her two-headed “self” skips and prances across the stage, eventually transitioning into another costume change that takes place while she is upside down. Foreboding music signals that something strange is afoot, and Narcissister delivers on cue as she bows her head to the floor and slowly rises into a headstand, pointing her feet. She pauses and then splits her legs dramatically to reveal a brown dress and a third head—white with a black bob and bangs—popping up between her thighs. Her legs are now arms and her white knee-high stockings are now gloves. She spirals her torso, places her feet behind the doll head, and contracts her torso front and side. To stand, Narcissister rolls out of a backbend, thrusts her pelvis to the audience, plays with her third “self,” and jumps up into a series of quick hip rolls.

The score changes to “Upside Down,” Diana Ross’s 1980 pop disco hit about a woman’s disorienting, self-effacing experience of romantic love, and Narcissister performs a dizzying sequence of acrobatic choreography.²³ She flips in and out of handstands, strips topless, and turns to face the audience. Suddenly aware of her exposure, she covers her bare chest with her skirt as the music changes to a synth version of “At the Crossroads.” She scurries upstage and kneels as “Just the Two of Us” (1980), a more promising love song than “Upside Down,” blasts through the speakers.²⁴ Her feet walk up the dollhouse prop, and she is once again in a handstand, this time with her back facing the audience. Her skirt tumbles to the floor to reveal a black and gold embroidered dress and yet another white mask erect between her legs. Flipped upside down and inside out, she is now a two-sided, four-headed, topsy-turvy doll, a toy made popular in the United States during the antebellum and postbellum periods.

Thought to have originated as an act of resistance and a product of black female slave labor in the antebellum South, the topsy-turvy doll became a symbol of miscegenation. It simultaneously emblematized racial fusion, cross-racial intimacy, racial hierarchy, and sexual violence.²⁵ The two halves share a waist and a skirt, and when the doll is flipped, either the white or black end is visible, a playful act of appearance and disappearance that Narcissister deploys in The Dollhouse. These actions contain within them the idea of racial flip-flops, the promise or threat of total racial transformation—white to black and vice versa—at the expense of racial concealment. As Robin Bernstein explains, “If one side of the topsy-turvy doll is exposed, the other side lurks, waiting, beneath the skirts.”²⁶ Though the flip of the skirt invites play, “The thing determines that [the doll’s black and white] poles never interact, and that one character always obliterates the other,” making racial union both contingent yet impossible—a kinky entanglement.²⁷

Against this backdrop, Narcissister’s The Dollhouse bridges interracial desire with popular American film, music, and material culture. Her embodied version of the topsy-turvy doll ultimately refuses racial integration, keeping the masks adjacent yet separate and apart. In so doing she joins the failure to achieve self-realization through sexual ecstasy with racialized imperatives to biologically reproduce. Her body and movements not only highlight how coupling and futurity energize the American racial imaginary in the post–civil rights era; they also challenge the myth of happy “coexistence” in a society where racial others are inexorably dominated, enslaved, and violated. Narcissister’s mixed-race, sexual, dancing body is the doll—the thing—that prevents the two poles and four faces from coming together. There is no racial harmony here, and it is on and through her body that racial union, or miscegenation, is foiled.

With The Dollhouse, Narcissister crudely choreographs fantasies of miscegenation in order to thwart them, and her refutation of cross-racial intimacy is made clear in the piece’s final minutes. The artist climbs on top of the dollhouse and proceeds to strip down to a sexy black singlet. Standing, she contorts her body, bending forward and backward to allow the faces on each end and side of her to alternately gaze at each other. Her hands caress her many doll heads, and she throws back her actual head to register momentary pleasure. The unsuccessful union of the paired faces on Narcissister’s front and back, however, attenuates this moment. They are stuck in intimate contact but separated by the artist’s body, a fraught yet fixed estrangement that prevents them from realizing the physical embrace, or self-affirming climax, for which they long.

The end sequence caricatures the mythos of self-love and self-discovery that organizes prevailing visions of postracial, postfeminist futures, a facet of the artist’s performance that typically eludes her critics. In Katie Cercone’s review of The Dollhouse, Narcissister “is the integrated self. . . . She is swiveling, wheeling; a beguiling icon of a raceless, genderless, classless future feminism to come.”²⁸ This assessment echoes the reparative undercurrents of civil rights and feminist discourse, which Cercone extends to a postracial, postgender, postclass future. But Narcissister’s autoeroticism defies this logic. While she is temporarily excited by the myriad options available to her, the frenetic costume changes, acrobatics, vaudevillian trickery, and multiracial dummy faces do not culminate in anything resembling integration, racial utopia, or a satisfying sexual union. Neither she nor the desires of her plastic, multiracial doppelgängers, personified by the lyrics “Just the two of us/We can make it if we try,” are fulfilled.²⁹ She also brings to life the historically disturbing topsy-turvy doll, demonstrating its current symbolic relevance.

In animating the two-headed doll and flipping between racial poles, Narcissister disorders our sense of what is real and what is not in terms of pleasure and the body’s racially and sexually expressive potential. This act of subversion also satirizes twenty-first-century sensibilities regarding multiracial figures as evidence of national progress. From these vantage points, The Dollhouse eschews common understandings of multiracialism, which uphold heterosex and romantic intimacy as sites where racial conflict, even estrangement, can be suspended or dissolved.³⁰ In Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism, critical theorist Jared Sexton explains how multiracialism and normative sexuality structure contemporary social relations.³¹ Despite being heralded as the post–civil rights answer to racial strife, multiracialism, according to Sexton, reinforces anti-black sentiment and sexual norms by evoking long-standing tenets of each while purporting to do away with them. Those who promote multiracialism as a cornerstone of progressive social change misrecognize the violent legacies of slavery and its afterlives to which race mixing is tethered, namely the sexual violence endured by slaves at the hands of slave owners. Historically, in the US context, offspring from interracial sexual reproduction assume the lower status of the black, typically maternal, parent. Hypodescent—the automatic assignment of racial status—is the basis of the one-drop rule (“one drop” of black blood), a social and legal principle that evolved during the nineteenth century and was codified into law in the twentieth. Racial classification based on blood quantum gave rise to phenomena such as racial passing, racial purity, and moral panic over maintaining that purity in the antebellum and postbellum periods.

While we no longer live in a time when interracial marriage is illegal, or when tropes of mixed-race identity such as the tragic mulatto circulate widely, Narcissister’s topsy-turvy performance illustrates that anxieties concerning racial authenticity persist in the present.³² Most importantly, her use of multiple masks that visualize varying phenotypes highlights the uncertain promise of postracial integration. From life-size dolls to doppelgängers and embodying every woman, the artist overturns early twenty-first-century aspirations for racial and sexual transcendence as culturally compensatory exercises. The artist’s chosen props—dolls, masks, and double identities—further evince the undoing of a post-identity future through engaging Freud’s theories of the “double” and the uncanny.³³

Narcissister’s mobilization of the double and the uncanny puts race and gender at the center of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories by generating feelings of revulsion in response to things and notions of identity that are familiar, but slightly off. Additionally, doppelgängers in Western art and its histories have represented the divided self, allowing artists to explore myriad personas and express experiences of otherness and crisis.³⁴ Alternatively, dollhouses, dolls, and the gendered play they inspire are signs for human development and futurity. For Freud, the uncanny’s mixture of the familiar and the eerie confronts subjects with their own unconscious, repressed impulses.³⁵ Dolls, specifically, he explains, are imbued with living qualities, and as children, we treat dolls as if they are alive. Through interactions with such objects, children receive information about social relations and cultural norms concerning adulthood and domestic life. Narcissister upsets this progressive arc and assumptions about the ends of racial mixing and sex by reproducing not children, but rather kitsch and multiracial plastic masks that do not find themselves in blissful union. Furthermore, Narcissister’s self-objectification—performing as a masked dancing doll that both mirrors and animates the props and effigies she employs—troubles the boundary between black and white, person and thing, as well as the line between pleasure and pain.³⁶ In so doing, she refigures normative conceptions of identity, objecthood, and ultimately humanness by transposing narcissism from self-loving absorption to self-objectification.

Narcissister’s 2015 evening of live and video performance titled “Conditions of the White Mask” expands the scope of race play on offer in The Dollhouse. Included in Just Like a Woman, a festival copresented by the Abrons Arts Center in New York on October 24, 2015, “Conditions of the White Mask” circles back to the doll as an object of terror, racial intimacy, and pleasure. But rather than an outright refusal of cross-racial intimacy, “Conditions of the White Mask” sets in motion an intimate relation between whiteness and blackness that Ariane Cruz argues is vital to racialized women’s enactments of BDSM and erotic fantasy.³⁷

Baby Lady (Forever Young), the first of the evening’s live works, opens with Narcissister hiding under a suitcase that is dressed as a bassinet. The bassinet holds a white baby doll. Set to Alphaville’s “Forever Young” (1984), Baby Lady depicts the phases of (white) womanhood from birth to death.³⁸ Narcissister scuttles out from under the bassinet on her knees, cloaked in black and wearing a white Barbie mask. A blond, toddler-size girl doll in a white lace dress is attached to her face. Abruptly, Narcissister stands, turns, and pulls the doll down for a quick change. A bigger doll with crimped curls is fastened to her back, which now faces the audience. Next, she is an older version of the doll, wearing pigtails and a pink dress bloodstained in the back. Between character changes, she inserts dance moves—an arabesque turn, a chassé—gracefully transitioning from one phase of womanhood to the next. She plays softball in overalls. She marches down an imaginary aisle, first in a black graduation gown, then in a pink wedding dress and veil. “Next comes baby and the baby carriage,” as the saying goes, and this is where things get kinky.

She strips to breastfeed, and after placing the doll back in its buggy, she pushes it away and pulls two gray, braided pigtails from her anus. The gray pigtails replace the blonde ones as she slips into a different pink dress, circles the stage, and stops to “birth” a wrinkled mask from her vagina, which she fastens to her already masked face. She is now an elderly white woman, dropping her pigtail sideburns for the wrinkled face. To finish, she crawls back under the suitcase and reveals its contents to the audience—her gray-haired doppelgänger in a satinlined coffin—before resetting the suitcase to the bassinet.

Baby Lady’s depiction of the developmental phases of white womanhood sets the stage for the complementary set of works about sex, race, reproduction, and romantic love that follow. In each piece, Narcissister’s body subverts conventional narratives associated with human development and cross-racial intimacy. The first video of the evening, Man/Woman (2009), stars a frustrated white fanboy. “Photograph,” Def Leppard’s 1983 pop-metal rock ballad, plays in the background.³⁹ It is a song about a sex symbol akin to Marilyn Monroe who is just out of reach and whose visage is reproduced in pictures. Throughout, still and moving images of Marilyn Monroe, “the blonde bombshell,” populate the song’s music video. But Monroe is not the fanboy’s fantasy in Man/Woman. In his cramped, cluttered bedroom, the fanboy flips through Black Tail, an adult fetish magazine specializing in photographs of black women’s backsides. On his already porncovered wall he hangs a centerfold poster of his chosen piece: a curly blonde Narcissister in a dark-brown mask with matching breasts.

The white fanboy caresses the image of Narcissister and excitedly pulls out his Johnson to stroke and pleasure himself. In the act, he discovers a dark layer of skin and long pink nails underneath his own white “skin.” Then the live Narcissister emerges, turning out the props meant to signify the white fanboy’s person from the inside and arranging his clothing, hair, face, and chest on the bed. Wearing the mask, wig, and breasts from the poster along with a white strap-on over a pink G-string, the “real” Narcissister wildly rides the fanboy’s remnants—dildo and all—to no avail. His parts do not hold up under her rigorous grinding; they literally fall apart, thus failing to satisfy her. Feigning disappointment, in silence she discovers her image in two facing pages of Black Tail and masturbates using the fanboy’s now detached, silicone member, climaxing and leaving him behind.

In the next video, 18 Heads, Narcissister is a double-headed Marie Antoinette searching for her perfect complement. She tries on multiple heads that run the gamut from a green monster mask to the head of a woman carrying a basket of fruit on her head. Following the fate of the infamous queen of France, those that do not fit her standards are guillotined. Finally, Narcissister finds the perfect mate to complete her: a matching Marie Antoinette head of a slightly darker hue.

In the final piece of the evening, Unforgettable, the artist dances in a tuxedo to Nat King Cole’s eponymous ballad before stripping down to black lingerie.⁴⁰ Next, she stages what appears to be a romantic tale of boy-meets-girl using two pale-colored puppets; the male is dressed in a top hat and tuxedo jacket, the female in a silver blouse. Unlike in a traditional puppet show, where puppeteers’ arms bring characters to life among fabricated sets and curtains, Narcissister lies on her back and uses her legs and feet as the puppets’ base. In so doing, she transforms her scantily clad body and black-lace-covered legs into a table where the puppets dine and admire one another to the sounds of Rihanna’s “Birthday Cake.”⁴¹ To create a romantic atmosphere, the artist inserts a long-stem candle into her vagina. Other props such as fake wine glasses, a cake, and a smokeless sparkler candle complete the festive scene. In the end, the puppets smooch and embrace.

Taken together, the various events of “Conditions of the White Mask” reveal a great deal about the mores of contemporary identity discourse, womanhood, and cross-racial intimacy. They expose not only the sexual dimensions of race but also how multiracialism is imbued with heteronormative pronouncements such as love, romance, family, marriage, and reproductive futurity. “Conceptions of the multiracial cannot help but imply a production of race in the field of heterosexuality, nominating, more specifically, the reproductive sex act as the principal site of mediation for racial difference itself,” Jared Sexton explains.⁴² As a result, the fruits of amalgamation become part of a reformist schema in which the future multiracial child is recruited to recuperate a traumatic past marked by unique forms of racial terror and to pave the way for a racially transcendent future.

By contrast, Narcissister burlesques her own mixed-race heritage as well as public debates concerning the biopolitics of interracial intimacy and its transformative potential when, instead of babies, she pulls a wrinkled mask from her vagina and synthetic braids from her anus in Baby Lady. As Narcissister alternately assumes an identity as a table, as a candle stand, as sparkling entertainment for the doting puppets, and as a sex freak for the audience in Unforgettable, selfobjectification is the limit of multiracial promise for Narcissister. Thus, rather than “a deployment of sexual difference through which the seeming transgression of race mixing is resolved, first into the ‘romantic complexity’ of courtship and marriage, and then into the reproductive futurity of the ‘mixed-race’ child,” as Tavia Nyong’o observes, Narcissister performs reproduction without futurity.⁴³

Furthermore, “Conditions of the White Mask” deepens the artist’s conceptual engagement with feminist art’s contemporary currency by transmuting the expectations of the racialized virtuosic body explored in earlier works to embodied ambivalence toward both multiracialism and white womanhood. Instead of an imagined community of boundary-crossing hybrids who redeem the trauma of black subjugation in the past, present, and future, Narcissister’s performances against multiracial possibility result “in a representational space that is both black and, in a specific sense, negative,” as Nyong’o puts it.⁴⁴ This black, negative space “cannot spell out a set of instructions on how to conduct ourselves in the present, but can only instruct against the presumption that its stories lie at the ready to be told.”⁴⁵ To this end, Narcissister’s nonprocreative sex play short-circuits the rationales of both multiracial exceptionalism and the promotion of packaged family values vis-à-vis domestic coupling, two-parent households, and the nuclear family unit. This reveals two things: one is the true aspiration of multiracialism, which is the singularity of blackness as a social identity, a political organizing principle, and an object of desire, to paraphrase Sexton. The other is a refusal of the social and aesthetic norms concerning what is appropriate when it comes to racial representation and sex in the twenty-first century.⁴⁶

Finally, Narcissister’s refusal to reveal her “real” identity, her use of parody and pastiche, and her performances of crude, anticlimactic sex transform egoloving self-absorption into something else altogether. In the story of Narcissus, the mythological antihero searches for a worthy object of desire, refusing all who court him. To Narcissus, his suitors fall short of his expectations, including Echo, who, cursed by Zeus’s wife Hera, is unable to speak her love for the ill-fated hunter. When she reveals her identity and attempts to embrace him, Narcissus rejects her, and she fades away, only her voice remaining.⁴⁷ Eventually, Narcissus “finds himself” when Nemesis lures him to gaze into a pool of water in a secluded, dark meadow. In his reflection he discovers the love object for which he has been longing: himself. Transfixed by his own image, Narcissus stares at his reflection until he realizes his love can never be reciprocated, whereupon he commits suicide.

Though arrogance and vanity ring true of narcissism, misrecognition, not mere self-loving absorption, leads Narcissus to choose himself as a love object. In endeavoring to consummate his joining of himself to his love-image, he forgets himself entirely, foregoes relations with others, and ends his life. In so doing, Narcissus eschews culturally determined forms of sociality by forestalling a self-affirming future conventionally secured through romantic love, coupling, and procreation. This antirelational thrust and short-circuiting of social norms are at the heart of Narcissister’s performance practice. But the artist’s irreverence propels narcissism and the concept of antirelationality into new territory.

Unlike Narcissus, the center of the artist’s affected narcissism is not a beautiful, white, male figure around which much of the literature on antirelationality has been organized. In queer theory, antirelationality emerges from queer, white, cis-masculine critiques of heteronormative injunctions that center on the child, whereby biological reproduction determines and evidences our output and social potential.⁴⁸ That is, our productivity is linked to our reproductive capacities, and political possibility is tied to building better futures for our children. For Lee Edelman, author of No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, the logic of “reproductive futurism” presupposes three things. It suggests: first, that the future has “unquestioned value and purpose”; second, that we can improve it; and, third, that the future is emblematized by the child.⁴⁹ As such, reproductive futurism renders unthinkable all alternatives to kinship and solidarity.

Critical race- and performance-studies scholars such as Amber Jamilla Musser, Roderick A. Ferguson, Tavia Nyong’o, and José Esteban Muñoz have found fault with this line of thinking, arguing that queerness is neither counter to hope nor solely the domain of white cis men. For these authors, racialized subjects, and black subjects in particular, are always already against or outside the norm. Because of these social conditions, minoritarian subjects cannot afford to turn away from the political possibility of communal world making. In this schema, queerness engenders utopian forms of being and belonging in the present that produce, according to Muñoz, “a type of affective excess that presents the enabling force of a forward-dawning futurity.”⁵⁰ Minoritarian subjects, in other words, not only need hope and alternative configurations of futurity; they forge these conditions in order to persist and thrive under and against oppressive forces.

Narcissister reconfigures narcissism’s associations with homoerotic desire and feminist navel-gazing and redirects the white male origins of antirelationality. Her art also moves beyond the need for hope and futurity into a world where dissociation and disaffection are preconditions of black female embodiment and being. The artist’s self-identification and kinky performances of race, gender, and sex make this provocative and necessary shift more complex. Neither her creative labors nor her brand of self-objectifying narcissism can be extricated from her ambivalent racial identification because they are both circumscribed and complicated by multiracialism’s problems and pitfalls. Narcissister’s donning of multiple selves, then, is more than mere performance meant to redress racial and gender wounding. Her performances draw our attention to the pornotropic fields—of vision and theory—that constrain her body and her artistic practice. The artist’s nonprocreative sex play upends prevailing ideas about our present and future by demonstrating how racialized bodies continue to function as ciphers for social and sexual relations. Her work foregrounds how a sexual act is always inevitably fraught with race and that self-objectification can constitute self-love and cross-racial intimacy, sometimes necessarily so. She is, to put it simply, a truly kinky artist.

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Tiffany E. Barber is a scholar, curator, and critic of twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual art, new media, and performance. Her work focuses on artists of the black diaspora working in the United States and the broader Atlantic world. She has published widely on African American art, fashion, dance, and technology. Barber is assistant professor of Africana studies at the University of Delaware.

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