Live performance (45 mins) performed within installation, featuring 9 pen-and-ink illustrations (approx. 70x100cm each) by the artist.

Following on from the Joan Carpenter Club’s performance intervention at the East India Club in March 2019 — about which more can be read here — ‘Joanie’ made her debut appearance as a full character during my BA Fine Art Degree Show in June of that year, starring as the host, storyteller and anti-hero in this piece of DIY immersive theatre. Performed within a mysterious, Gothic, candle-lit dining room — the sort of intimidating place one might imagine a secret society of powerful, elite and influential gentlemen might meet to discuss the fate of us mere, common mortals over a glass of Port and some spit-roasted pig — The Worst Fate a Man could Ever Suffer was intended to provide a gory little origin story for the persona of Joan Carpenter. A twist on the story of Jack the Ripper and the Whitechapel Murders of 1888, small, intimate audiences seated around a central table, covered in Victorian lanterns and tea-lights leaking liquid wax all over blood-red Paisley tablecloths were transported through a tantalisingly bloody tale of subterfuge, violence and anti-patriarchal vengeance: a thoroughly immersive piece of character gothic horror storytelling, delivered in surrounds littered with large-scale ink drawings and revolting pieces of “evidence” scavenged from the various crime scenes explored, which help to detail the gruesome events that transpire throughout its plot.

The Worst Fate a Man could Ever Suffer is a story inspired by discourses surrounding transfeminine folks’ relationship with gender binaries and gendered hierarchies - or rather, surrounding how so many cis people remain confused about or antagonistic towards male-to-female transition whilst trying to examing their motivations and psyche through a deeply cissexist, patriarchal lens. Taking cues from transfemme biologist Julia Serano’s iconic 2003 book/trans-feminist manifesto Whipping Girl as well as from Victorian tales of gothic horror and criminal mystery — from the Whitechapel Murders of Jack the Ripper, to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and the peculiar terror of Jekyll and Hyde — The Worst Fate tells the story of one man’s obsession with discovering the individual behind a slate of midnight mutilations rocking London to the core: powerful men discovered suspended from the hands of Big Ben’s clock faces, bleeding out from cots left outside Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital’s maternity ward, or suspended from webs of human hair above the backstreets of the City, each having suffered what an enthralled and terror-stricken public can only describe as “the worst fate a man could ever suffer.” In other, more accurate words, the transformation of a male body into a female one via genital reassignment surgery.

Discovering the truth following a chance encounter in the night, our protagonist follows the mysterious “Mutilator” to her secret hideout, lurking in a forbidding subterranean chamber in the heart of the City. Here, he meets Joan Carpenter herself: leader of the Joan Carpenter Club, a secret, shadow-dwelling gang of women intent on bringing down the country’s patriarchal institutions and the socio-political systems they sustain, through infiltration, subversion and extreme violence. Intent on punishing London’s most powerful men for their sins against woman-kind, ‘Joanie’ has been tracking them down in the depths of night, turning penises into vaginas with a few deft cuts from a scalpel, and “condemning” them to live out the rest of their lives as women: to experience life from the lower rung of Patriarchy’s ladder, and see how it feels.

As it turns out, though, our protagonist does not see this as being a particularly terrible fate. “He” is, in fact, a trans woman. She tries to convince Joan to perform the operation on her, desperately debating her on the matter, trying all she can to convince the woman with the knife that she sees no difference in status between male and female, and will fight to the death alongside her to ensure the rest of the world eventually feels likewise. In the end, Joan relents, and her Club gains a new member.

A reaction to common, transphobic rhetoric framing the act of transitioning gender as being an act of bodily mutilation, of trans women being considered to be failed men who shun superior masculinity in favour of inferior femininity, for they cannot cope with the pressures or responsibilities of the former, and of trans women being walking stereotypes who willingly sell out cis women in their fight for equality by willingly adopting a highly feminine-coded appearance and passivity (as opposed to having such things forced upon them, in order not to be seen and treated as men, or considered fake), The Worst Fate a Man could Ever Suffer tells a common story shared amongst trans individuals: of traumatic youth; of confusion at and hatred of the behaviours of same-sex peers; of wishing to both adopt a more personally satisfactory physical form without being beholden to the strict stereotypes or behaviours of either binary gender, and supporting the fight against gender norms and stereotypes on behalf of all people - male or female, trans or cis, binary or non-binary - for that very reason; and the joy at undergoing a medical procedure, in physical transition, most people still cannot comprehend our wish to undergo, and cannot help but try to deny us as they cannot but view it through their own, distinctly cisgender lens, with horror.

Each of the nine illustrations hung around the walls of the space relate in some way to the story being told through the performance - as do the jar of water from the River Thames, and the ball of hair, seen upon the two plinths. The space remained accessible between performances, with little, if any, indication of the story the illustrations or props were designed to help tell. Mystifying and uncomfortably macabre in the Artist’s absence, despite the obvious Gothic Horror influences in the tale the Artist narrated during performances the space was made somehow less intimidating by the Artist’s presence, the manner in which her tale clarified the meaning of the set’s component parts, and her interactions with each audience.

IMAGE GALLERY