INTRODUCTION

Nancy//the World: Prologue is Abigail Jacqueline Jones’ debut full-length solo fringe theatre show, and is currently in the early stages of development. The show is designed to provide an accessible, performative introduction to The Giantess Speaks — or Nancy//the World, as it was then still known — as an overarching multidisciplinary project, and provide the artist with a platform to share the preliminary outcomes of the academic research efforts underpinning it. Drawing from Abigail’s previous experience of devising and performing “giantess therapy sessions” from past live pieces A Session With Dr Cushing and Nancy & Dora, in each of which the artist performed a monologue to a miniature figure stood on top of a plinth portraying an urban skyscraper, Nancy//the World: Prologue takes this theme one step further by seeing the artist, once again reprising the character of “Nancy,” engaging in a counselling session with an entire miniature city. 

Nancy//the World: Prologue portrays Nancy as a “size-shifter,” able to grow and shrink on command, towering over a half-destroyed Midtown Manhattan with one of her 1,250-foot high heels still embedded in the rubble left in her destructive wake. We see her discussing, as though the ruined city itself were her counsellor or psychotherapist, her trauma-rooted motivations for unleashing such violent devastation upon the metropolis beneath her sprawling body, and her desire to keep inflicting death and destruction upon humanity. Anxiously observing the world around her growing ever more hostile to her own needs as a queer, disabled, neurodivergent outcast, and growing increasingly more violent and destructive towards the planet’s most vulnerable populations and natural ecosystems, Nancy intimates to the city beneath her that she had felt a desperate urge to let her rage consume her for a while now. A compulsion to mutate her body into something so enormously sublime, omnipotent and indestructible that it could annihilate all traces of humanity’s destructiveness from the face of the Earth. Even if that meant martyring herself, or eradicating most of human civilisation, in the process...

The SCRREW Manifesto saw Abigail first attempt to truly crystallise the rebellious personality, the radical revolutionary politics, and the overt divergent eroticism of her reinterpretation of Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman’s “monster” Nancy Archer, and to unite all three of these elements of her being within a single embodied character performing on stage. Taking the form of a fifteen-minute, semi-staged monologue, The SCRREW Manifesto sees Nancy attempt to convince her audience to join her revolutionary activist group — the Sisterhood for the Chemical and Radioactive Radical Enlargement of Women, or SCRREW for short — and to join her in consuming a superhuman growth serum that will transform them all into an army of omnipotent queer goddesses, powerful enough to annihilate the imperialistic and exploitative militaristic, governmental and economic infrastructures of the late-capitalist West, and clear the path for a more harmonious and less brutally oppressive civilisation to take root in its place. 

Interwoven amongst all the rhetoric of rebellion, destruction and rebirth present throughout the piece, The SCRREW Manifesto slowly begins to expose the complex and decidedly dark underpinnings of Nancy’s politics: the deep-cut trauma of growing up with a severely, divergent or “deviant” body which cannot be bound to the strict confines of binary gender or sexual social categorisations, in a world that is viciously hostile to physiological, psychological or behavioural abnormality. Describing the trauma of trying to survive as an ambiguously sexed, female-identifying neurodivergent queer girl in the misogynistic, queerphobic, ableist, anxious, anti-social world of 20th-century America as being akin to “piercing, penetrating psychological icepicks twisting… through your flesh and carving away at screeching bone, draining you of every single crimson drop of happiness and joy and light and life and heart and fucking soul, tearing you asunder from the inside out,” Nancy reveals that her intense, lion-hearted lust to rage against the destructive American political and economic machine is driven by an inescapable fear that she may have to destroy it before it destroys her.

The SCRREW Manifesto was originally performed during Nuclear Armageddon Ain’t Nothin’ But Foreplay, a special edition of live-art cabaret Runt of the Litter curated and hosted by the artist in November 2023 in order to commemorate Transgender Awareness Week. The artist performed an earlier, work-in-progress version of the piece at SCRATCH, a night of experimental theatrical performance hosted by Bang Average Theatre at Staffordshire Street Gallery, south London. 

A SESSION WITH DR CUSHING

Originally performed during BUOYED, a group exhibition at Bermondsey Project Space, February 2023

A Session with Doctor Cushing is a tale of difference and emotional distance, a melancholy yet hopeful exploration of the disconnection that can often develop between queer and/or neurodivergent people and the world of interpersonal relationships, driven by experiences of social isolation, anxiety, dysphoria and discomfort throughout one’s formative years. This particular piece was Abigail’s second performative examination of the character of Nancy Archer, the first being her 2021 short story and performance series Anguish of the Fifty-Foot Woman, described in more detail here.

A Session with Doctor Cushing saw the artist borrowing character cues far more heavily from her original source material than she would in any subsequent performance, actively adopting the personality and mannerisms of Nancy exactly as she was portrayed in the 1993 HBO remake of Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman in this early character performance experiment. Although performed to an entirely original script, the piece, in fact, saw Abigail mimic a scene from this 1993 adaptation; during this specific scene, which takes place soon after the incident that led to her experiencing her supernatural growth, a now-giant Nancy is being given a counselling session by her comparatively tiny long-time psychotherapist, Doctor Theodora Cushing. During this scene, we see the two women discuss Nancy’s newfound confidence and sense of self-worth, which had previously been eroded to nothing by the belittling, chauvinistic, gaslighting behaviours of the various patriarchs in her life. In addition, throughout the scene we see Nancy playing with a spool of heavy-duty pylon cable as though it were a stim toy, in possible reference to the fact that the actress playing her in this adaptation — Daryl Hannah — is an autistic woman, whose on-camera performance may therefore have been informed by her own experience of psychotherapeutic clinical settings.

Inspired by this scene, A Session with Doctor Cushing imagines an unconventional therapy session between Nancy (played by the artist) and a plinth-top figurine representing the eponymous psychotherapist, conducted sat atop a thousand-foot skyscraper at four a.m.: the only time and place Nancy feels comfortable enough to creep from hiding and explore the (silent, empty) metropolis around her. Playing with a toy car throughout the session in the same way the character Daryl Hannah portrayed in 1993’s Attack played with her pylon cable spool — to soothe her nerves and distract herself as she bore her soul to the doctor — Nancy discusses her fear of harming others with her giant body, and her extreme fawn complex in the face of interpersonal conflict. She furthermore discusses her lifelong fear of being perceived, or seen, or sensed, or spoken to by other people, which has only exacerbated since her transformation into a giantess, as well as the comfort and understanding she has begun to derive from becoming able to interpret human behaviours in macrocosm.

Guiding Doctor Cushing through the slowly awakening cityscape as dawn approaches, Nancy describes how she has begun to find that the chaos of bodies in motion, the confusing complexity of human emotions, and the instability and passion of interpersonal relationships she struggled to comprehend as a normal-sized neurodivergent woman viewing the social world from within, has become much more coherent to her following her growth into a giantess. Suddenly able to view the city as a whole, as a singular organic corpus from high above — a vantage point from which its human residents look like nothing more than tiny blood cells ebbing and flowing through the city’s arteries and capillaries — Nancy describes the specific, predictable patterns through which the sum of humanity’s collective actions function to sustain the life and soul of their metropolitan macro-organisms.

NANCY & DORA (WIP)

Performed at Live Art Club, VSSL Deptford, July 2023

Nancy & Dora was the first time Abigail had attempted to portray Nancy Archer and Dora Cushing — the giantess and her therapist from 1993’s Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman — as an extremely tall, queer, ambiguously sexed, neurodivergent teenage high-school dropout having wicked dreams of destroying the misogynistic, queerphobic, ableist world that had tried so hard to destroy her, and her closest friend, the young, repressed sapphic trainee guidance counsellor who convinced her to drop out in the first place, having wished she’d once had the guts to do just that and pursue a life of rebellious queer separatism herself. In this piece, we see Nancy once again deep in conversation with Dora — represented by a figurine stood atop a plinth again, as in A Session With Doctor Cushing — venting about the repression, bullying and complex trauma she has suffered throughout her young life resulting from her anatomical inability to conform to gendered or sexed norms. Describing being made to feel like “a monster” throughout her childhood and adolescence — “gigantic and genderless and wrong… something uncategorisable, uncanny, something threatening, whose body deserved societal control and condemnation for daring to be different” — Nancy recounts her dysphoria-inducing efforts to mask her femininity and present as male throughout her high-school years, and her previous attempts to use her physical size advantage to out-bully her bullies in middle school.  She subsequently confesses to Dora her ultimate science-fiction fantasy of revenge against the oppressive social systems that had eternally sought to break her. To become more than the mere “reflection of biopolitical terror” she had always been growing up as a dramatically outsized, un-genderable, behaviourally and neurologically divergent child, but transform herself into an extremely real and present threat to the social and biopolitical infrastructures that had determined her body fit for such severe oppression.

Nancy & Dora has not been performed since its initial WIP at Live Art Club in July 2023. Intended to serve as a stepping-stone between Abigail’s relatively verbatim portrayal of Daryl Hannah’s Nancy Archer from the 1993 remake of Attack in A Session With Doctor Cushing, and the eventual development and debut of her own reimagining of the character, the artist found the piece to be sadly ineffective as a stand-alone piece. The tone of Nancy & Dora would, however, inspire the development of her eventual follow-up — The SCRREW Manifesto — and several lines and full sections of its script would be repurposed for use in future written works by the artist.

RESEARCH CONVERSATIONS

Since September 2023, Abigail has been conducting and archiving a series of recorded conversations with a number of prominent figures, including writers, artists and content creators, associated with the “size community.” These conversations have been conducted partly for the purpose of furthering her academic research into the intersections between queerness, neurodivergence, disability, and divergent erotic expression, and partly to create a record of the faces and voices of all those who have made the size community what it is today.

Undertaken in a loose, relatively informal fashion, these recorded conversations comprise an extensive body of oral history depicting a highly stigmatised community consigned predominantly to the margins of the Internet, whose cultural corpus has historically been extremely ephemeral. It remains a community almost entirely consigned to online space, with in-person gatherings having historically been rare. Its niche, community-managed websites and forums have come and gone over the years, taking with them huge amounts of unarchived media as their servers went offline, and its community presences on more mainstream social media and art-sharing platforms are routinely destroyed, or threatened with destruction. A proudly kinky, sex-positive community at heart, the size community has been hit hard by the growing sanitisation and gentrification of the Internet, manifest through the effects of legislation such as FOSTA-SESTA, by mainstream social media platforms prohibiting “sexually explicit content” in order to placate advertising partners, or by digital payment providers such as PayPal or Stripe withdrawing support for transactions involving the exchange of adult goods or services. Through collecting these oral testimonies and transcripts, Abigail hopes to ensure that there remains a permanent, comprehensively archived record of the size community in its current form, and of as much of its history as can be retrieved, in order to foster a stronger understanding of this community and others like it within both public and academic space.

Abigail is currently working to transcribe and summarise all of the interviews she has conducted so far, totalling some twenty-plus hours of recordings. Details of some of these interviews can be found below. So far, Abigail has also created two zines documenting two of her earliest conversations from this project — those she conducted with author of Deviant Desires: A Tour of the Erotic Edge Katharine Gates, and with prominent size kink author and community figurehead Elle Largesse. These zines are both currently on sale through her online shop, and have both been acquired by the Wellcome Collection.

A CONVERSATION WITH ELLE LARGESSE

Elle Largesse — alternatively known as “MightyTinyGiant” — is a size-shifting bisexual/pansexual polyamorous kinky erotica writer and blogger, who began to participate in “Giant/tiny” size kink spaces online in late 2015.  The size community has since become a safe haven that has helped her cope with feelings of size dysmorphia triggered by her experiences of living with with Alice-in-Wonderland Syndrome (AiWS) — a rare neurological condition that produces, in those who live with it, an inability to consistently gauge the true scale of objects around them or of their own physical bodies — and learn to love her body and her queer sexuality. Alongside being a prolific publisher of erotic fiction, she is also a regular panelist and community event host at SizeCon Micro, an online convention for size kinksters of various flavours.

A CONVERSATION WITH KATHARINE GATES

Katharine Gates is a writer, anthropologist, publisher, artist and curator based just outside New York City. She is the author of Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex, which was originally published in 2000 by RE/Search Publications, and reissued by PowerHouse Books with the amended subtitle A Tour of the Erotic Edge in 2017. Katharine was also the curator of KINK: Geography of the Erotic Imagination, an exhibition hosted by the Museum of Sex, NYC, in 2006.

Katharine was the curator, owner and proprietor of Key Gallery, an avant-garde contemporary art gallery in Richmond, Virginia, from 1991-93. Between 1992 and 2008, she also operated an independent art book publishing house — Gates of Heck — which would publish works by renowned artists such as Annie Sprinkle, Charles Burns, Gary Panter, Joe Coleman and Art Spiegelman, amongst others. In addition to her work as a writer, publisher and gallerist, Katharine is the creator of the Kinkmap, an ongoing attempt to document as many niche kinks and fetishes as possible, and chart the various connections between them within a single graphic matrix. The Kinkmap has been reprinted in Human Sexuality, a college psychology textbook, and can also be found online.