I Love Every Person's Insides

The trans electronic pop star SOPHIE only recently gained physical form.

Since 2013, she has made her name as an affiliate of the label and collective PC Music, a London-based group of electronic producers and vocalists. For most of her career, SOPHIE was ferociously anonymous. Her face, name, past, and identity remained hidden. But in 2017, she materialized, and since then her art has begged to be understood in the context of her now public transness.

Investigating SOPHIE thus allows us to ask: How can transness be represented, embodied, and manifested in art? This question takes on special significance in an aesthetic landscape where transness has entered the art of the Academy and the museum, from prestige films (Tom Hooper’s “The Danish Girl”) to literature (Maggie Nelson’s “The Argonauts”), where trans identity and definition is explored from within the confines of high art. SOPHIE’s art reveals another, richer possibility for trans aesthetics, a possibility rooted in low art.

The archetypal case of low art is that global phenomenon of banality called pop music. The theorist Theodor Adorno accuses pop music of the most grievous aesthetic sin: “standardization.” Pop music consists of a spare set of eternally repeated clichés, tropes, and structures. The pop song is a formula, devoid of originality and creativity. It is a realm where, to quote Adorno, “nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced.”

Understanding pop music as formulaic rests on a notion that high art exists for beauty and low art exists for pleasure. Beauty is understood as beyond human needs and desires and impulses. If beauty is a Cezanne nude — any art lover would surely be horrified at the notion of a museum goer ever being sexually aroused by such a work — then pleasure is pornography: biological, weak-willed, and mechanical. Low art, made purely for pleasure, relies on the mechanical formulas of standardization designed to please the consumer.

As a site of pure pleasure, pop music is assumed to have no political purpose, even as transness asserts itself in the world of high art. Why is pleasure discarded so? The philosopher and poet Audre Lorde has one suggestion: The erasure of pleasure is a symptom of a racist, patriarchal system of gender. In this system, one that emphasizes the rational male mind over the irrational female body, pleasure becomes a fugitive state, a dangerous source of resistance to formations of power that seek to control and own bodies.

Transess is that most radical assertion that gender will never be enough, that the entire project of gender ought to be destroyed. Transness is transgressive. Gender is a schema that is forced upon bodies against their will. The reduction of femme bodies to sexual objects on every street corner, the policing of the male body, the forcing of the intersex body into one or the other. Transness is the resistance against such incidents of enforced engendering. It is an assertion that what matters is not what others see, but how one feels.

SOPHIE embraces this most radical potential of transness: the evasion, escape, destruction of gender. This power of transness, this freedom it brings, is found in the pleasure offered by low art.

While SOPHIE’s art undeniably showcases profound creativity (her sonic landscapes are wholly self-constructed, emptied of any kind of familiarity), it uncannily locates itself within the pleasure project of pop music. As her track “BIPP” promises, “I can make you feel better.”

Take the penultimate track on SOPHIE’s debut album, “Immaterial.” The song is unabashedly a pop song. The thudding bass, the auto-tuned vocals, and the punching chorus are all designed to ensure the listener’s complete and utter absorption in the song, in pure pleasure. Out of this banality of pop, SOPHIE constructs a secret haven, a hidden home for all those whose gender has become their prison. For in pleasure, the gendered body becomes concerned not with the judging gaze of its audience, but with itself. Pleasure allows for, in Lorde’s words, the sensation of “It feels right to me.”

When the gaze of others is thus rejected, what can gender do but dissipate? When you lose yourself — lose yourself! — in “Immaterial,” in the sheer pleasure it revitalizes, can you not feel wisps of the self drifting away? The pure pleasure that SOPHIE provides allows one to transcend concerns with how others see one, how one fits within the schemas into which they have been thrown against their will. In transcending the schemas of gender, the body becomes putty for hormone supplements and corrective surgery. In this way, the embrace of pleasure as “It feels right to me” manifests paradoxically as a dematerialization. The given body is surrendered, rejected, escaped, and one drifts, immaterial, to the heavens.

SOPHIE’s aesthetics are built on such dematerialization. Her use of vocal and visual avatars, her disappearances and anonymity, her commitment to decentering herself from her art — these features do more than speak to any personal aversion to publicity. They demonstrate a commitment to a trans aesthetics that proclaims: “With no name and with no type of story, Where do I live? Tell me, where do I exist?” This desire for immateriality, an identity utterly unmoored from the weight of gender, rests on the ultimate power of pleasure as that most isolating and releasing promise of transness.

In SOPHIE’s low art, the promise of Auntie Walker is fulfilled: Freedom from the forces of race, gender, the body, is in fact possible. SOPHIE grants us that freedom in a trans aesthetics of immateriality. This aesthetic is an embrace of the singular moment on that grimy, sweaty dance floor, where the world falls away and what remains is a single urge, flesh and bones and heavy gender burning away like mist under a strobe light.

And in that ugly space, we live out SOPHIE’s words:

“I can be anything I want.”

—Contributing writer Nicholas P. Whittaker’s column, "Low End Theory,” digs deep into the archive of bad, taboo, and ugly art, seeking political liberation in the low.