INTRODUCTION
Supported by funding from Arts Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice grant series, and by creative mentorship from the 2022-23 edition of the Emergent programme — an annual programme organised by Gateshead’s BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and London-based disability arts organisation Shape Arts, which is aimed at supporting the UK’s most promising emerging disabled artists — since late 2023, Abigail has begun to develop an expansive multidisciplinary creative research project titled The Giantess Speaks.
Diving into the misunderstood, highly stigmatised world of niche kinks and divergent “erotic affinities” – certain somatic, imaginative, ritualistic, or aesthetic fantasy hyperfixations or special interests which may or may not be sexual in nature, but which commonly elicit emotional reactions and sensations often associated with intense desire and connection – The Giantess Speaks explores the phenomenon of queer, transgender, female, disabled, and neurodivergent folks who use their kinks and erotic affinities to explore their relationships with their divergent bodies and brains, and their relationship with the ableist, patriarchal and queerphobic world in which we live. The project celebrates the potential of the divergent erotic imagination to serve as a subversive, revolutionary tool of healing, transgression and protest for the marginalised body. Furthermore, it seeks to bring the communities that have amassed around niche erotic affinities on ephemeral corners of the Internet out of the shadows and into wider consciousness.
The Giantess Speaks specifically focuses on exploring these phenomena through performing ethnographic investigations into what has, in recent years, become known as the “size community” — a highly queer, highly diverse, heavily misunderstood community consisting of individuals whose divergent affinities, whether sexual in nature or not, surround fantasies of being “giants,” “giantesses,” or “tinies,” of “size-shifting,” and/or of body expansion or inflation. The size community is a quintessential example of a community centred around an identifiably interconnected taxonomic group of erotic affinities, which has provided a safe haven for many different marginalised individuals and groups to safely explore their relationships with their identities, bodies, and personal traumas. It is also a space that has become, in recent years, a valuable sanctuary in which Abigail has herself been able to process her own traumas surrounding sexuality and gender identity.
Appearing throughout The Giantess Speaks’ artistic, literary, and performative outputs is an alter-ego Abigail specifically created as a creative framing device for her current research work — “Nancy.” Inspired originally by the 1993 HBO remake of 1958 B-movie Attack of the 50-ft Woman, “Nancy” reimagines the film’s titular monster Nancy Archer — a monstrous feminine figure representing the extreme repression and lack of independence afforded of neurodivergent women in a patriarchal, ableist world, portrayed in the 1993 remake by autistic actress Daryl Hannah — as a proudly queer, neurodivergent riot-grrrl giantess hellbent on destroying social, political, and environmental systems upholding misogyny, queerphobia and ableism. Through the media of live theatre, ritualistic participatory performance art, and experimental fiction, The Giantess Speaks tells the tale of a woman actively attempting to turn herself into an omnipotent giant goddess whose deviant body can fatally disrupt and destroy entire oppressive socio-political systems single-handedly. No longer needing to rely upon the deus-ex-machina of an extraterrestrial encounter to turn her into her oppressors’ worst nightmare — as Attack of the 50-ft Woman’s Nancy Archer did — this brand new re-imagining of the iconic character is able to mutate her misfit queer body into a sublime, sapphic harbinger of utopian potentialities using nothing but her own scientific genius and pure, irrepressible moxie — and have herself a lot of fun in the process…
“After all, nuclear armageddon ain’t nothin’ but foreplay…”
The Giantess Speaks is currently in the research and development stage. A long-term endeavour, the project will eventually be realised in a number of connected creative and academic outcomes over the coming years. These include the collation of an ethnographic research archive incorporating research interview extracts and other collected ephemera derived from size community spaces — which the Wellcome Collection have agreed to accept into their library archives upon project completion — and a one-woman stage show. It will conclude completely in 2028 with the publication of a book featuring an original piece of long-form fiction, interview extracts, academic essays, and original graphic artworks.
Current research partners include curator, independent publisher and author of Deviant Desires: A Tour of the Erotic Edge Katharine Gates; performance artist, sex educator and former sex worker Annie Sprinkle; and human sexuality scholars at UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, and the Center for Positive Sexuality. Further research support is provided by staff at the Wellcome Collection, and by lecturers and researchers at Goldsmiths College and Queen Mary’s College, London. Performance and production mentoring is provuded by Frankie Thompson (CAttS, Body Show), Siân Docksey (Pole Yourself Together), Laurie Luxe (Fool’s Moon, Voices of Evil), Ida Sanguine (Black Cat Cabaret), Kaytlin Bailey (Whore’s Eye View), and Everleigh Brenner (BRAVE FACE).
The project significantly expands upon a short story the artist originally wrote and performed live as part of a small solo art exhibition, titled Anguish of the Fifty-Foot Woman, held in August 2021 at the ArtWorks Project Space in Walthamstow, east London. The artist produced and published a zine featuring this short story under her 50-ft Press imprint, which has been accepted into the library collections of the Wellcome Collection and the University of Lincoln.
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Drawing from the experiences of queer, trans, disabled, and neurodivergent individuals who have used their divergent erotic affinities to help cope with the effects of, come to terms with, and even eventually feel empowered by, various social, political, psychological and physiological marginalisations, ‘The Giantess Speaks’ posits that divergent erotic affinities are far more complex and multifaceted in nature than dominant narratives — viewing them strictly through the lens of kink, fetish or deviant sexuality — allege them to be. In order to explore the myriad ways in which queer, trans, disabled, and neurodivergent folks use their divergent erotic affinities and imaginations to process their experiences of marginalisation and difference, The Giantess Speaks specifically focuses on exploring these phenomena through performing ethnographic investigations into what has, in recent years, become known as the “size community” — a highly queer, highly diverse, heavily misunderstood community consisting of individuals whose divergent affinities, whether sexual in nature or not, surround fantasies of being “giants,” “giantesses,” or “tinies,” of “size-shifting,” and/or of body expansion or inflation. The size community is a quintessential example of a community centred around an identifiably interconnected taxonomic group of erotic affinities, which has provided a safe haven for many different marginalised individuals and groups to safely explore their relationships with their identities, bodies, and personal traumas. It is also a space that has become, in recent years, a valuable sanctuary in which Abigail has herself been able to process her own traumas surrounding sexuality and gender identity.
Divergent erotic communities and the (typically online) spaces they congregate within enable interpersonal connection with others who share similar niche affinities and kinks, and celebrate forms of creativity rejected by dominant mainstream cultural territories. For the size community, these include spaces like DeviantArt, Discord, and the Twitter hashtags #SizeTwitter and #SFWGt (amongst others), private blogs, community specific websites and forums such as GiantessCity, CoiledFist, and Sizechangebooru, as well as the annual in-person convention SizeCon. Often sharing commonalities with autistic “special interests,” or subjects of persistent hyperfocus amongst individuals with other neurodivergent diagnoses such as ADHD, in the intense, often ritualistic way they manifest, divergent erotic affinities can provide those who experience them with emotional comfort or safety, satisfy certain sensory-seeking needs, or simply provide alternative ways of imagining or processing emotional stimuli. Similarly, for many queer folks, divergent erotic affinities can form as significant an intersection of one’s gender, sexual, or romantic identity as any other. In the context of the size community, for example, a person might well as closely identify with the label of “tiny” or “giant,” amongst a whole host of other such common size descriptors, as they might with the labels of “gay,” “lesbian,” “bi/pansexual,” or “straight;” of “asexual” or “allosexual;” or of “transgender,” “non-binary,” or “cisgender.” Comprehending these complexities is key to understanding the relationships individual members of divergent erotic communities have with their erotic hyperfixations, and the role their hyperfixations play in informing their broader identities and processing their marginalised embodied experiences.
Throughout her research process, Abigail has conducted several research interviews with members of the size community she has discovered online – most of whom are queer, transgender, neurodivergent or disabled, or some combination thereof – and has devoted significant time to exploring their spaces, culminating in her being invited to attend and perform at the 2025 edition of SizeCon: an annual convention, held in Portland, Oregon, centred entirely around celebrating the size kink community. Her research subjects have included a queer woman diagnosed with the sensory-perceptive neurological disorder Alice-in-Wonderland Syndrome, which affects individuals’ abilities to consistently perceive the scale of their own body or of objects surrounding them, who has found sanctuary in exploring the debilitating sensations of “size-shifting” she experiences through writing erotic size fiction. They have included a trans woman who had once used role-playing in size spaces to overcome their fears that their physical largeness or tallness, or dominant personality, was incongruent with sex-essentialist ideals of womanhood and the female body. They have included a transmasculine non-binary person who, having become frustrated at the lack of contemporary cultural artifacts relating to their hyper-specific interests in giants and fae from Irish mythology, had therefore devoted themself to creating the contemporary creative interpretations they felt as though these mythologies lacked; and they have included a cisgender woman of Mexican-American heritage, who began to create art depicting relationships between gentle giant Latino men and tiny Latina women both as a way of coping with grief after experiencing the death of a parent, and of ensuring she could find non-white bodies like her own represented in size community art spaces.
Abigail’s research process has also involved a great deal of introspection upon her own experiences as an autistic trans woman who is herself a part of the size community, self-identifying as a “giantess” in such spaces. Examining the commonalities between her own experiences of coming-out as a transgender woman and socially/medically transitioning, unmasking her autistic behavioural traits, and publicly “unmasking” her own fantasies of being a giantess and of using her imagined sublime body to disrupt oppressive socio-political systems, throughout The Giantess Speaks Abigail has sought to forge a narrative linking together these three processes as she and many others within the size community – and other divergent erotic communities like it – have personally experienced them, destigmatising and developing our social understanding of divergent erotic identity in the process.
PERFORMANCES
NANCY//THE WORLD: PROLOGUE
Currently in development
Work-in-Progress performance held during ASSEMBLE Festival, Streatham Space Project, May 2024
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
First performed at Nuclear Armageddon Ain’t Nothin’ But Foreplay: RUNT Transgender Awareness Week Takeover, Oslo House, November 2023
Work-in-Progress performance at Bang Average Theatre’s SCRATCH, Staffordshire Street Gallery, September 2023
“While it seems unfair to have a favourite act, Abigail Jacqueline Jones as her alter-ego Nancy Motherfucking Archer, ‘the Seven-Foot Slut with the Seven-Figure IQ,’ really raised the temperature with her bloodthirsty, call-to-arms monologue. Pulse-raising stuff, hilarious but densely thought-provoking (Jones’s larger project, Nancy//the World, ‘examines queer perspectives on monstrous, abject, grotesque and sublime bodies as harbingers of liberation and utopia’), this is very much NOT ‘Live at the Apollo!’”
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
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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.
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Abigail first interviewed Elle in November 2023. During their almost three-hour-long conversation, the pair discussed Elle’s somesthetic (or sensory-perceptive) experiences of size-shifting and size dysmorphia in the context of AiWS, and her use of erotic fantasy as a way of managing these often disorienting sensations she experiences as a result. Also discussed were Elle’s early experiences with exploring size-kink content online as a teenager living through the era of Web 1.0 forums such as alt.sex.stories, and her eventual embrace of her queerness, kinkiness and expansive divergent erotic imagination — and the online and offline communities surrounding each — as an adult in her thirties.
Elle’s (NSFW) blog can be found online at www.ellelargesse.com. You can read more about Elle’s experiences of living with AiWS and embracing her size kink specifically by reading her essay Size Dysmorphia: A Size-Shifter Origin Story, published on the same website.
To read a full transcript of our conversation (coming soon), or to purchase the zine documenting the interview pictured above, click the buttons below.
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.
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In this recorded conversation, conducted with Abigail in September 2023, Katharine discusses the origins of Deviant Desires — in particular the research process that went into creating both the original 2000 edition and the book’s dramatically reworked 2017 reissue, which involved tracking down and interviewing the leading figures of several niche kink communities — and the desktop publishing phenomenon of the 1990s, which triggered the printing and dissemination of numerous niche erotic magazines proudly portraying kinks that had never previously been represented in print or the public consciousness, prompting several new divergent kink communities to coalesce into being, and providing a paper trail of uncommon erotic practices and their practitioners for Katharine to follow. Furthermore, Katharine discusses her experiences visiting and speaking at SizeCon — an annual convention for Giant(ess)/tiny and body expansion kinksters, held just outside New York City — and how her personal explorations of her own sexuality, gender presentation and neurodivergence helped inform her research practice and interest in unusual kinks.
More information about Katharine’s Kinkmap project and the 2017 reissue of Deviant Desires can be found at www.kinkmap.com. Information about Katharine’s earlier work as proprietor of Key Gallery and of art publishing house Gates of Heck can be found at www.gatesofheck.com.
To read a full transcript of our conversation (coming soon), or to purchase the zine documenting the interview pictured above, click the buttons below.
A CONVERSATION WITH MISS KANEDA
Miss Kaneda is a transfemme giantess, crush, footwear and femdom fetish content creator and erotic novelist based in Massachusetts. Active within online kink communities for over two decades, adopting feminine personas in virtual space for much of this time, Miss Kaneda — real name, Kylie — began hormonally transitioning in 2020, having begun to find the courage to publicly present as a woman in the real world around half a decade prior. She credits the exploration of gender identity and divergent sexual expression she was able to perform online as her giantess dominatrix alter-ego as being absolutely crucial to her eventual discovery, and embrace, of her transgender identity.
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Presenting publicly as a woman for the very first time at the inaugural edition of SizeCon, held in 2016 in a photographic studio in New York City, the size kink community provided Kylie with what she considered the perfect environment in which to experiment with gender identity and presentation: an extraordinarily queer-friendly space that actively celebrated difference and divergence of sexual and gender expression. Although she is not as active as once she was in online kink and fetish spaces, having discovered her sexuality to have altered somewhat under the effects of feminising HRT regimens, she has maintained her close connection to the size kink community — attending and performing at SizeCon each year it has run.
Our conversation together explored the intersections between Kylie’s experiences of exploring her transgender identity and her evolving relationship with the size community. We discussed her shifting relationship with violent eroticised fantasies, gendered power dynamics and the subversive dichotomy of female dominance/male submission, and her own favoured sexual and romantic rituals, fantasies and forms of expression between her post-transition queer, polyamorous relationships and the more traditionally amatonormative, heterosexual relationships she pursued before coming out as a trans woman.
Miss Kaneda’s (very NSFW) blog, including an archive of her short stories and novels, can be found at www.misskaneda.wordpress.com.
A CONVERSATION WITH MATTHEW HUNTLEY
Matthew Huntley is a professional fine artist and illustrator based in Indiana, specialising in oil painting. He is also a current member of the staff team responsible for organising and producing SizeCon, and he runs monthly social events, creative challenges and art critique sessions on Discord as the SizeCon community’s resident artist. Primarily inspired by the Baroque and Academic traditions of figurative painting, and by late-20th-century cartoons and video games such as Gundam and the Powerpuff Girls, Matthew’s art explores subversions of traditional masculinity, femininity and binary gender roles — and of the cultural class divisions between what is considered to be “high art” and the DIY, pulp-fiction aesthetics of niche science-fiction subcultures completely unrepresented in mainstream culture or in fine-art spaces. The highly technical paintings comprising his ongoing Vigilant Lioness series depict giant female heroines protecting humanity from a series of monsters which, in the tradition of Japanese kaiju arising due to genetic mutations caused by nuclear detonations, were created as a result of genetic mutations caused by anthropogenic environmental pollution.
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In 2015, as an undergraduate student at the Herron School of Art & Design in Indianapolis, Matthew began to develop Vigilant Lioness, an ongoing series of oil paintings, poster-painted illustrations and comics. Rooted deeply in science-fiction and superhero aesthetic traditions, the series features a collective of giant female heroines brought into existence by an intrepid group of rogue military scientists, who stole secret genetic modification technologies they had been working on for DARPA — the US Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency — in order to engineer a team of vigilantes tasked with saving the human race from the apocalyptic consequences of its own actions, known only as Lioness.
Over the years since Vigilant Lioness was first conceived, Matthew has exhibited his work at exhibitions and conventions across the United States, and in publications such as Infected By Art and Studio Visit Magazine. In 2020, a successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign allowed Matthew to publish a book detailing the development of the series to date, and the artistic process behind the creation of each painting within it.
During our conversation together, conducted in February 2024, Matthew and I discussed the subversive appropriation of oil painting as a “traditional” high-art medium, in order to create detailed artworks distinctly divorced from the (often highly gatekept) aesthetics, histories and artistic canons — and the baggage of upper-class cultural pretences — associated with it. We discussed our experiences of art school as relative creative contemporaries working in very different media, focusing on the difficulties Matthew faced as an artist obsessed with traditionally skilled, highly process-based and labour-intensive methods of making art — which typically involve producing numerous maquettes, models, preliminary sketches and studies, and conducting several photoshoots, per painting produced — in the context of contemporary art-school spaces which have largely moved away from prescriptively teaching such skills and processes over the last four decades, instead taking a far more conceptual, fluid, and ultimately laissez-faire approach to arts education.
All of Matthew’s Vigilant Lioness paintings can be viewed on his website, www.matthewjhuntley.com.
Image credit: Way Cooler Than Sea Monkeys (2024) by Matthew Huntley.
Image credit: Mankind’s Biggest Hero Isn’t A Man (2018) by Matthew Huntley.
A CONVERSATION WITH JOYCE JULEP
Joyce Julep is a professional erotica author and erotic role-player, who produces short stories and novels featuring giantess fantasy themes for commission. Publishing her works primarily on sites such as DeviantArt and erotica platform Giantess World, as well as maintaining a large following for her exclusive or early-access content on both Patreon and adult subscription service SubscribeStar, Joyce has fostered enough of a following to be able to live purely off of the income she has made as a size content creator.
Subverting many common tropes within giantess writing focused on depicting "giant/growing woman and tiny/shrinking man” dynamics, typically in ways designed to serve a cis-het male gaze, Joyce’s literature is infused with a distinctive self-awareness and queerness despite its typically heterosexual focus. Her novels in particular delve deep into exploring the fragility of contemporary masculinity and the male ego, expertly deploying the inversion of gendered social power dynamics practically inherent to giantess erotica as a genre in order to manifest both social and internalised crises of emasculsation — to render inexorably visible patriarchal masculinity’s existential fear of slipping down the gendered social hierarchy — and comment upon or satirise these anxieties.
A CONVERSATION WITH SCOTT GRILDRIG
Scott Grildrig is a prominent author of “giantess fetish” fiction who has been active within size kink community spaces since the late 1980s, during which time the only way of finding niche kink art or literature, or of seeking community with others who shared an uncommon erotic affinity, was through print media: in the case of giantess kinksters, through tangentially relevant pornographic magazines targeting a much broader audience, such as iconic fetish magazine Leg Show, or through smaller DIY publications such as Giantess, originally published in 1988. One of the earliest size content creators to emerge on the early Internet, in July 1993 Grildrig published a short story called Janice in the City — a simple “giantess rampage” story about a woman inexplicably growing to skyscraper-size and destroying swathes of a city loosely based on Los Angeles — to the USENET board alt.sex.stories in response to a fellow user’s request for erotic literature featuring giant women. One of the absolute progenitors of size kink fiction as we know it today, over the thirty-plus years since Janice in the City’s initial release Grildrig has consistently been one of the most prolific and well-known creators of kinky giantess fiction, establishing several of the signature styles and literary tropes commonplace within modern size literature, and comedically subverting them in turn.
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Grildrig has collaborated with several other artists and writers within the size community, providing literary accompaniments for their visual art projects, or on occasion collaborating on stories. Having been present within size community space through several different shifts from online platform to online platform — from the aforementioned alt.sex.stories, to the IRC chatroom #!!giantess, to niche online forums such as GiantessCity and larger, more mainstream social media and art-sharing websites such as DeviantArt, Discord and Twitter more recently — his knowledge and personal experience of size community space and its evolution is invaluable to constructing an understanding of what this community is, and how it emerged in the first place. Stories such as IRC URC, published in 1997 and featuring actual users of #!!giantess as characters, and characters such as “Kathy the Giantess Wife” and “Mitzi the Ditz” (inspired by pre-Internet giantess model Kathy Castro, and by a character created by early-1990s size artist Cat, respectively) serve to document a time period in the size community’s early history that has sadly otherwise gone unarchived.
A full list of Grildrig’s size stories can be found on his DeviantArt page here.
Image credit: Biggest Baddest Besties Forever by Aphrodite, from Grildrig’s short story Janice & Pam: Fourth Wall.
Conversations To Be Transcribed
TinySuperVicki — Bisexual, cisgender Latina Giant/tiny community artist based in Houston, Texas. Conducted via Zoom in January 2024
Chris “Chwani” Nial — Gay, cisgender white man, Giant/tiny kinkster and SizeCon Showrunner based in Vermont. Conducted via Zoom in January 2024
Silly — Queer, white, AuDHD, transmasc non-binary Giant/tiny kinkster, community writer and artist, and founder of the #SFWGt social media tag with a particular interest in giants in mythology. Conducted via Zoom in March 2024.
Aphrodite — White cis woman size community writer/artist based in the English East Midlands, known for creating graphic giantess rampage/destruction scenes in erotic literature and graphic art. Conducted via Zoom in April 2024.
SalemSage — White non-binary Giant/tiny kinkster and community writer based in England. Conducted via Zoom in April 2024.
Taedis — White genderfluid Giant/tiny kinkster, erotic author, and size community archivist based in New Hampshire. Conducted via Zoom in May 2024.
Aborigen — White, heterosexual, cisgender, self-diagnosed autistic giantess kinkster, community blogger and prolific erotica author based in the United States. Conducted via Zoom in June 2024.
Goddess Tina — Cisgender woman giantess kinkster, multidisciplinary size-kink content creator, and community figurehead based in France. Presents in-character as a vast “goddess” figure — usually ranging between being the size of several city blocks, to being several times larger than planets, stars, or even galaxies — throughout her online community interactions. Conducted in multiple parts via Discord, beginning in August 2024.
TruelySmol — Transmasc non-binary, autistic SFW Giant/tiny artist and community member based in the United States. Conducted via Discord in October 2024.
BaronGwyn — Heterosexual, cisgender inflation/expansion kinkster, SizeCon staff member, and size community “elder” based in California. Active member of online size kink spaces since the early 1990s. Conducted via Discord in October 2024.
RESEARCH AFTERWORD & UPDATE — AUGUST 2024
So far, I have conducted thirteen recorded research interviews as part of this project, and taken short testimonies from several other figures. I am currently working to edit interview transcriptions — almost all of which are over two hours long, and some of which are over three — and produce small fold-out zines based on these research interviews, similar to those I created in late-2023 for my conversations with Elle Largesse and Katharine Gates. Please be patient — this webpage, and The Giantess Speaks as an overarching endeavour, are both a one-person operation maintained by Abigail herself in between her day job!
If you would like to support me in continuing this research endeavour, please do consider supporting my work on Ko-fi! Any donations would mean the world to me — particularly as I am currently fundraising to ensure I can continue to have access to the critical mental health and disability access support that have allowed me to make this wild endeavour a reality.
GALLERY
Below are a small selection of documentary photographs captured during performances and shoots conducted as part of The Giantess Speaks, alongside images of graphic artworks, prints and publications produced for the project.
