Hypersexualization

This series uses photography, installation, and performance to create a "hypersexualized" milieu. It critiques the constitutive lack in masculinity and the fantasy of a “full” phallic signifier—a core mechanism of male identity. Informed by my a-romantic, a-sexual, and a-gender identity, the work confronts a trauma-rooted, male-centric sexual order that perpetuates the fiction of phallic power, creating oppression. This project thus builds spaces for those who see the phallus’s hollow authority to connect and collectively dismantle this rigid regime.I reinterpret Jacques Lacan's semiotic insights: men often try to mask theirfeelings of lack by fantasizing about a “ful!” phallic signifier. This forms a basicmechanism in male sexual identity. Within the current gender system, I identify as aromantic, asexual, and agenderand do not naturally experience the emergence of erotic desire. This identity isflowy, sparkly, and effervescent, yet set against a male-centric, vortex-likesexual order it has little countervailing force. This male-centered sexual order is, at its core, a reenactment of trauma. Itcompels us to sustain the fiction that the phallic signifier necessarily andsecurely signifies power, as if it were never marked by lack. It is precisely thiscompulsory regime of signification that governs a sexual order idling in place-born of a compensatory drive to redress an originary lack, yet giving rise toconcrete structures of oppression. Therefore, we urgently need to build a new milieu, one that enables those whorecognize that the phallus holds no symbolic authority to connect. Through suchconnection and sustained grappling with erotic capital, we aim to loosen andultimately dismantle the rigid, entrenched order.