No Innocent Bystanders: Nando Messias & Cassils Confront Hate Crimes

by: Oriana Fox , November 10, 2025

Imagine you are witnessing an assault, one that is based in hate; what would you do? Do you take your phone out to call the police or to film the altercation? Would you intervene more assertively, potentially putting yourself at risk? Or do you turn away for the sake of self-preservation because you, too, are vulnerable, have dependents, or need to get to work that day?

These are the questions that I was prompted to ask of myself as a result of being touched by two works of performance art that I know only through documentation. Both works were devised and performed, respectively, circa 2015, by artists geographically separated by thousands of miles. Yet, poignantly, the performances are remarkably similar in their aesthetic/activist responses to hate crimes. The artists, Nando Messias (b. 1973 in Brazil, lives in the UK) and Cassils (b. 1975 in Canada, lives in the USA), each embody different iterations of trans/non-binary gender, and both expertly employ their bodies via careful choreography to expose the realities of public scrutiny, phobia and policing that manifest violently in the public sphere.

Messias’ The Sissy’s Progress hyperbolises the artist’s embodiment of the ‘sissy,’ the effeminate male, courageously reclaiming this identity in a confrontational public intervention. For The Powers That Be (2015/16), Cassils uses fight choreography to play out the part of a survivor in an attack by an invisible foe, nude and outdoors, illuminated by the headlights of parked cars, their stereos supplying a curated soundtrack of noise, music, current events reportage, and other soundbites related to the politics of identity.

Both Messias’ and Cassils’ performances are self-portrayals that wilfully assert their vulnerability, paradoxically, as acts of courage. The performances centre on the artist’s own corporeality and gendered appearance, resulting in the production of self-constructed images of the artist themselves, albeit ones captured by others. As such, they each enact a highly social implementation of the self-portrait that exalts their audiences to grapple with their own complicity in the face of violence, entreating active, ethical responses.

In this critical reflection, I compare these two works to demonstrate that, despite the centrality of the individual artist, both underscore that the most potent and efficacious response to our increasingly disturbing and volatile context is collective. It strikes me as significant that, contemporaneously with the touring of these two performances, the field of vulnerability studies has gained greater momentum. Aptly, both emphasise the interrelation between vulnerability and resistance and, in fact, show how they are inextricably bound, not diametrically opposed.

Echoing Judith Butler, ‘I consider the undoing of this binary a feminist task’ (2016: 25). It is a feminist task because showing how vulnerability and resistance work together opposes masculinist notions of individualism and self-mastery and also negates paternalism as the default political strategy to safeguard the vulnerable. Cassils and Messias each mobilise vulnerability for the purpose of resistance, in parallel with bodies who amass in the streets to protest injustice—as Butler articulates it, ‘all public assembly is haunted by the police and the prison’ (Butler 2016: 20). Significantly, in explicating the conceptualisation of vulnerability anew, Butler highlights the hazards trans folks face in the public realm, and likewise the risks women take walking the streets alone at night (2016: 26).

By virtue of their status as artworks, both performances—staged for live audiences—are separate from, but adjacent to, more straightforwardly activist street protests, and the risky everyday acts of walking the streets, faced by racialised, migrant, and visibly non-binary and trans individuals. Taking to the streets, whether it is to assemble en masse in protest, to simply lead one’s life as an othered individual, or indeed, to move through a choreographed piece of live art, highlights what is controversial about harnessing vulnerability as resistance, i.e. they are each profoundly risky if not potentially self-destructive. To focus on the works’ self-harming aspects, or the respective artists’ vulnerability, might serve to undermine their agency and defiance in staging the works. Recognising vulnerability as both an ‘existential condition’ and ‘socially induced’—we are all susceptible to illness/injury and due to a lack of social, legal, material and infrastructural support certain lives are disproportionately exposed to suffering and precarity—necessitates specific forms of activism/politics (Butler 2016: 25). I will discuss these here via an analysis of these two performance pieces that bring the double movement of vulnerability and resistance to the fore.

Nando Messias’ Sissy’s Progress

Sissy’s Progress is the second in a trilogy of works devised, created and performed by Messias, reflecting on their experience of being attacked in the streets by a gang of young men near their home in East London in 2005 for being visibly male-bodied and effeminate. In its first iteration in July 2014, the performance commences with a series of theatrical moves in Toynbee hall, the headquarters of ArtsAdmin, and then moved into the streets, which was ‘imperative’ and in keeping with Messias’ stated intention to ‘fram[e] the daily violence suffered by queer subjects; a violence that often remains invisible to those who are not its main targets’ (2018a: 5). Quite literally, it took place in the very same neighbourhood of Whitechapel where Messias was attacked, and where they continue to live and work; in fact, the performance began with a moment of silence in the precise location of the attack. Messias’ face was made up with lipstick and mascara and framed by glamorous, dangling rhinestone earrings, their long black hair tied up in an elegant bun and framed by a crown-like red headband strewn with stars. Dressed ‘to the nines’ in a hyper-flamboyant, eye-popping red silk ballgown that revealed their sleek upper body, Messias’ couture made no attempt to hide their lack of a bosom, with a bouffant short skirt hemmed to just above their mid-thigh and flowing down at the back and sides to frame their slender, long legs; their feet clad in red-leather, open-toed stiletto heels. Fixed to the crimson strap of the dress, which tied in a bow at the back of Messias’ neck, were an array of helium-filled balloons in a rainbow of colours, framing their face like a carnival float, and drawing even more attention to the artist as they walked, with a spring in their swivel-hipped step. With an inviting smile on their face, Messias directly engaged unsuspecting passersby, or anyone seated in the street-adjacent windows of local restaurants and cafes, maintaining direct eye contact as they triumphantly strutted through the streets. In later iterations, as it toured various UK locations, Messias wore a pale cerulean blue ballgown, paired with a matching fur stole and long white gloves, which they showcased with the iconic gesture of a royal wave.

Messias’ presence was also made audible prior to them stepping forward or turning a corner, due to their being accompanied by a 5-piece marching band, replete with a tuba-player, saxophonist, trumpeter, trombonist and drummer, all visibly male and dressed in black tuxedos. Although the band followed a good ten feet behind the main event that was Messias, its rendition of a medley of songs, fittingly culminating in ‘When the Saints Go Marching in,’ attracted all the more attention to the artist-as-spectacle, announcing their impossible-to-ignore presence. Indeed, as Messias put it when describing their motivations to make the work: ‘there is no escaping being visible, I cannot hide, that is part of my condition as an individual’ (Fox 2018b). Therefore, instead of attempting to fit in or make their differences disappear, Messias made the ‘political choice’ to ‘to turn the volume up, to be more myself … to become hyper-visible’ (Fox 2018b). The band’s lively presence pointedly, literally, contributed to this amplification.

In the process of developing the piece, Messias went into the studio with a view to understanding why they had been attacked and what they could do to process and eventually speak back to that violence, feeling a responsibility to do so (Messias 2018a: 3). In my interview with the artist, they explained that while it was possible to remove the feminine make-up, clothes, perfume, and accessories from their body in order to conform in the public realm and thereby evade the negative attention of onlookers, what they could not—and eventually adamantly refused to—change, was their walk. Messias’ interdisciplinary artwork habitually involves dance, thus their initial self-protective impulse was to attempt to move in different ways, to defy their propensity to walk with a feminine gait. However, they realised that ‘to walk like a man’ would mean to attempt to be someone else, and to do to their own body what those young men who had assaulted them had tried to do to them (Fox 2018). Messias’ wording— ‘doing to myself, to my own body what that group of young men did to me’—speaks powerfully to the nuances of gender identity and performativity and to the collective and often, disturbingly, violent ways that gender norms are enforced. To walk ‘like a man,’ for Messias, is to take on someone else’s manner of moving and behaving, i.e. to play-act in everyday life as if it were theatre, which would be exhausting, disingenuous, and demeaning.

Extrapolating from this, one can revisit and better understand Butler’s theorisations of gender performativity, thereby differentiating between such theatrical comportment and Messias’ innate and integral way of being in the world without recourse to essentialist claims. Butler themself explains that their ‘early formulation’ that ‘gender is performative’ has been misinterpreted in two diametrically opposed ways: firstly, that gender is consciously ‘radically’ chosen, and secondly, that we are ‘utterly determined by gender norms’ (2016: 17). Butler instead asserts both that gender norms maintain a recalcitrant hold on us, ‘they act on us,’ and that we in turn act, repeating gender norms, potentially failing or deviating whilst (re)iterating them— ‘which is not the same as transcending all norms’ because this is not possible (2016: 18). Being acted on and acting are ineluctably intertwined, and this is profoundly linked to our ‘unwilled receptivity, susceptibility, and vulnerability’ (Ibid.). Messias was assigned male at birth, a naming that acted on them ‘prior to [their] capacity to reproduce [gender] norms in ways [they] might choose’ (Butler 2016: 17). Because ‘we are all obliged to reproduce [gender norms]’ and due to their very iterability or citationality and our bodily receptivity/‘susceptibility,’ ‘something queer can happen,’ as exemplified in Messias’ way of being in the world ‘breaking those citational chains of gender normativity’ (Butler 2016: 18); thus also showing that ‘finding a queer way and becoming an agent are somehow linked’ (Butler 2016: 19).

Messias’ account of their motivations for Sissy’s Progress relays a dynamic that likewise relates to Butler’s assertions on the ‘intersubjective and infrastructural conditions of a liveable life’ (2016: 25). That is, in addition to being recognised under certain signs prior to the acquisition of language, being pronounced male at birth Messias eventually had other names thrust upon them, and additional restrictions on and allowances for their behaviour as they grew up. In our conversation, Messias recounted longing to learn the feminine form of ballet, including pointe technique, but being barred from doing so; being admonished by their father for sitting with their legs crossed like a woman; and, by contrast, being allowed by their mother to play dress-up with her make-up and shoes. The assaults of adulthood, exemplified by the 2005 attack which hospitalised them, as well as subsequent verbal and physical bullying, disturbingly mirrored the cautionary prohibitions of their childhood, and epitomise the ‘social and material conditions of our lives’ (Butler 2016: 19). These are the external forces that mould an individual in ways that are delimiting and freeing in turn; some conditions metaphorically and literally do ‘to my own body what those young men did to me’ while others are permissive if not empowering. As Butler asserts: ‘[w]e hardly seek to overcome [such conditions altogether], but we do seek to make them more just, more equal, and more enabling’ (Butler 2016: 19). Embracing the playground slur sissy was one such defiant act of reclamation, as was Messias’ choice to return to the study of ballet on their own terms as an adult, and to employ feminine choreography as a leitmotif in their oeuvre to date. Additionally, and importantly, the development and touring of Sissy’s Progress were supported through crowd-funding by Messias’ fans, family, and peers, a grant from The Arts Council of England and production support from Dance Art Foundation and ArtsAdmin, organisations which have been under threat in the UK context, depleted by the austerity which characterised the Conservative party’s lengthy twenty-first century rule, again speaking poignantly to the necessity of material support to live and flourish as an artist. In Messias’ case, making Sissy’s Progress enabled, or more aptly emboldened, them to flourish not only in art but also in life by enacting confrontational self-exposure.

Messias’ act of bravado finds antecedents in the bold, bodily defiance of the ancient Cynics studied by Foucault, and from whom derive the theorisations of parrhesia, a form of truth-telling so confrontational it risks the life of the practitioner. Cynic parrhesia, as Foucault defines it, is ‘scandalous behaviour that calls into question standards of decency, institutional rules, etc.’ (1983: 120-1). As I have discussed at length elsewhere, the actions of the Cynic Diogenes of Sinope are key to the theorisations of parrhesia and criticality more generally, and fittingly, are also the focus of a brief essay by art critic Thomas McEvilley who posits Diogenes to be the ultimate performance artist avant le lettre (Fox forthcoming, intro.). Diogenes lived in destitute poverty and acted in scandalous ways that made him stand out in 4^th century BCE due to his ‘complete and immediate reversal of all familiar values’ (McEvilley 1983: 58). His actions are therefore comparable to—though of course distinct from—much more recent acts of performance art; as McEvilley puts it: ‘exhibit[ing] every action to public inspection … [t]hrusting at the cracks of communal psychology’ to eke out ‘personal freedom’ (1983: 58). Both Foucault and McEvilley are fascinated with Diogenes because of the ways he defied shame, attracted humiliation and took great risks to highlight the arbitrary nature of societal rules and norms. Messias, like Diogenes, risks themself to live with integrity, evade conformity and live freely, whilst reflecting their contemporary concerns and context, using public performance to highlight sissyphobia, based as it is on cisheteropatriarchal—i.e. not arbitrary—norms.

Significantly, Diogenes, as McEvilley describes, once shaved half his head and attended a party where his odd appearance attracted the negative attention of three men who physically accosted him (59). The next day ‘bruised and battered’ Diogenes confrontationally walked through his city with the assailants’ names written on a slate that hung from his neck, a move that strikes me as uncannily similar to Messias’ defiant neighbourhood stroll millennia later, in addition to the way in which the roughly contemporaneous hashtag/movement #MeToo often consists of ‘naming and shaming’ (McEvilley 1983: 59).^[1] Messias’ attention-seeking stroll and hashtag-fuelled public shaming, respectively, like Diogenes’ act of defiance toward his aggressors, leave the practitioners open to additional vitriol, attack and abuse. In other words, it enacts controversial ethics because it is potentially self-destructive. Crucial to this point, and also to why Foucault found Cynic parrhesia so compelling, is the fact that risk and courage, vulnerability and resistance, are inseparably inverted or transvaluated. By opting to ‘turn the volume up,’ Messias was wilful and defiant but also subject to grave danger. Foucault describes the Cynic life, exemplified by Diogenes, who was known to lead ‘a dog’s life,’ as ‘a life which barks, a diacritical (diakritikos) life, that is to say, a life which can fight’ (2012: 243). Chiming with this, Messias describes ‘the sissy body’ as ‘a violent body, not in the sense that it perpetrates violence, but confrontational in the sense that it is not willing to comply because it is not able to comply’ (Fox 2024). Because Messias’ body defies the contemporary norms of gender, they necessarily lead a ‘life which can fight.’ In fact, when I asked them whether they carry out other forms of activism outside of their practice as an artist, they asserted that just going outside every day is an act of defiance and quotidian political activism (Fox 2024).

Sissy’s Progress is intended to put a frame around such everyday activism by theatricalising it for an audience. Before Messias goes outside with the band and audience in tow to do just that, the artist sets the stage, as it were, in more ways than one. Inside the theatre venue, Messias emphasises their ‘naked maleness, and the femininity of [their] movement and gesture,’ i.e. their nonbinary, effeminate embodiment, and also, crucially, to ‘evidenc[e] the material vulnerability of [their] body’ (Messias 2016: 288). Ironically, an attendee later commented to Messias that they ‘appeared more naked outside fully dressed than inside with no clothes on’ (Messias 2016: 288). As such, the theatre provides a safer space in which Messias can live out their fantasies of getting ready to go to the ball and of wearing the kind of elegant dress that the female dancers in Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal company wear. The tuxedoed band members assist Messias in getting dressed, living out these dreams in an awkward homage; being a body that does not fit the fairytale, nor, at least until very recently, the world of contemporary dance theatre, Messias theatricalises this by being literally upside down with heels in the air while the band members dress them.^[2] Once dressed and upright, Messias falls into the men’s arms, as if fainting, as they stand in a row. Being carried by a line of men in tuxedos brings to mind Madonna in the video for ‘Material Girl,’ or her predecessor Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Messias is the non-conformist ‘belle of the ball,’ surrounded by competing black-tie clad suitors, another dream unconsciously played out by Messias, rendering such tropes ‘more enabling’ (Butler 2016: 19).^[3] Once the threshold is crossed between inside and outside, however, the band members eventually take on a different ‘play acting’ role. At the culmination of the procession, they surround Messias, rushing in toward them but without touching. Messias cowers, though unharmed, falls again as if fainting or being shoved, though no one pushes them. The band members are menacing without inflicting any harm. But in one final act of humiliation and genuine violence, the band leader throws a bucket of water at our protagonist, drenching them, before he and the rest of the band depart so that Messias must lead their audience-followers on their own, no longer triumphant—put ‘in their place’—retreating back to the theatre. This theatricalised violence mirrors not only the genuine assault that inspired the piece, but evokes the real threats entailed in reenacting it in the streets. Being trailed by a brass band and the cluster of audience members did afford the artist some protection. Messias explained that as additional safeguarding measures, they had rehearsed with a group beforehand and obtained permission from venues such as pubs and cafes along the route, so that they all could enter for protection should the need arise. During the run-through and the many subsequent stagings of the piece, Messias has been palpably and understandably nervous despite their brave-faced stance and these safety precautions. During the very first rehearsal, when they turned the first street corner, they were confronted by a group of men who immediately started ‘laughing and pointing and walking toward [them] in an aggressive way’ (Fox 2018b). Fortunately, when the band also turned the corner moments later, the jeering men retreated, realising, as Messias put it: ‘my gang was bigger than their gang’ (Ibid.). The protection of the crowd was nonetheless limited; one of the audience members presented Messias with a crushed can, evidence of a projectile hurled menacingly their way, though fortunately misaimed. The risks for the artist, their collaborators, and the procession of audience members, therefore, were not necessarily lessened so much as shared. As Messias puts it, ‘audience members are placed in my uncomfortable shoes. They too become vulnerable’ (2016, 289). Furthermore, in one reflexive/theoretical account of the piece, Messias likens Sissy’s Progress to a procession, that is, ‘a participant’s journey,’ citing this fitting definition by feminist author Rebecca Solnit: ‘everyone here is spectacle and spectator; all on this journey together’ (Solnit 2001: 215; Messias 2018b: 193).

It is precisely the ways in which this piece implicates the audience and engages their own imaginations as well as their own vulnerability that push the work beyond merely pointing to the problem, leaning towards collective forms of amelioration, if not solutions. Locating points of connection between Sissy’s Progress and Cassils’ The Powers That Be brings such collective politics into sharper relief.

Cassils’ The Powers That Be

Illuminated only by the headlights of parked cars in a darkened lot, the naked body of Cassils is under duress, their facial expression pained, their body tensed in a crouched stance, one arm outstretched upwards as if pinned back, their other splayed against the side of their head. Their body stutters while the sounds of the car radios fill the space, a mixture of static, then a smooth, easy-listening track suddenly switches to a more rhythmic, recognisable punk song. Out of synch with the sound which changes ad infinitum, Cassils’ body launches into movement, their elbow jerking back repeatedly attempting to hit their invisible assailant, but missing, striking only the air. After several rapid-fire attempts, the increased torque of their limb forces their body to flip around and fall to the ground. Landing on their back, Cassils lets out an audible grunt, their arms and fists block their face in a gesture of self-protection, but their unseen assailant seems to pummel them, forcing them to pull backwards and away, one leg suspended in the air, the other kicking repeatedly. The audience, who are seated around the spectacle, some filming with their phones, wear facial expressions of rapt attention. Cassils has their arms pressed to the ground, against which their entire body struggles for release, eventually succeeding in rotating again; now they are face down, pushing upward. Eventually finding their footing again, they prance around the delineated performance space like a boxer dancing around the ring, similarly fending off blows. They are pushed up against a wall in one moment, as if being strangled, and the next thrown with force onto the hood of a car. Somehow gaining traction, they pounce like a wrestler onto their opponent and roll across the floor. They kick and punch their way free, a momentary stream of offensive, retaliatory moves lands them back to the floor, wriggling around and convulsing like a tantrumming child. I think back to my youthful WrestleMania fandom and the fact that I’ve always rooted for the underdog, but in this altercation in which the balance of power is continuously changing, I am not certain who that is. However, I root for the artist nonetheless. Eventually, Cassils is back in the crouched starting position, arm upward. This time, both hands pushed to either side of their head as if trying to pull it clean out of its socket, their facial and neck muscles tensed, veins bulging. The fight continues; this is a durational performance, a feat of endurance and skill. Towards the end, Cassils seems to be the victor as they punch at the floor repeatedly, their continual yelps testifying to their exertion. The lights and the soundtrack emanating from the cars are extinguished. Still, Cassils’ thumping blows and cries continue unabated, eventually quieting to gasping sighs of exhaustion, and finally the crowd’s applause.

I describe the event as if I were there to witness it, but I watch the premiere performance of The Powers That Be, which took place in Kuopio, Finland, part of the 2015 ANTI Contemporary Art Festival, via official documentation. Further recordings exist because Cassils invited the audience to film with their phones. There was more to the sound design than I convey above, insofar as it also included excerpts from local talk radio from both sides of the Finnish-Russian context, contextualising the piece in relation to contemporaneous state-sanctioned homophobia. The second iteration one year later at The Broad in Los Angeles, which had its own site-specific soundscape, was also documented in this collaborative way, and recontextualised within a six-screen video installation, each recording given its own hanging LCD screen oriented according to how the audience-member or official videographer held their phone or camera, the screens placed to surround the viewer who is now physically in Cassils’ position. Being able to look closely retrospectively, to pause and rewatch with the small gesture of my fingers on a trackpad, as opposed to being there for the full sensory experience or the subsequent, highly curated installation, I am uncertain if the associations that enter my mind would have come to me at the scene or in the gallery. Equally, the existence of copious documentation means that my access to this is precisely as planned; re-witnessing these staged acts is intended to trigger associations both to the mediated portrayal of violence within popular culture and to real-life incidents of violence to which I have access because they were filmed as the only recourse to action the witnesses had.

I have endeavoured to accurately articulate the postures, gestures, and movement of Cassils’ masterful fight choreography, but my description falls short of fully conveying the tension and pressure their body struggles under, forcing me to question the value of representation when it comes to physical violence. My words are a copy of a copy, reflecting faked violence, not violence itself, getting further away from the act itself with every re-mimesis. Perhaps fittingly, the first crouching stance Cassils takes with their arm extended reminds me of Myron’s seminal 4^th century BCE discus thrower, poised just prior to the moment of release, impossibly still with muscles taut. It’s an iconic pose that captures a male athlete in the nude, as was the norm of that era. Greek athletes performed naked as a tribute to the gods, to show off their physical prowess and to intimidate their competitors. Whilst Cassils’ physique conveys both athleticism and masculinity, it also fails to conform to the hegemonic expression of either. It is notably quivering, cowering and contorted in defensive ways, and not male, possessing secondary sex characteristics that convey femaleness. As such, Cassils’ nudity in The Powers That Be serves corresponding aims to Messias’ in Sissy’s Progress: making plain Cassils’ gendered physique and comportment that are, as Messias might articulate it, ‘misaligned’ with their female genitals. As Cassils has stated, they use their body to intentionally cause confusion: ‘to question who passes as male and the policing of who is male and what is masculine’ (Steinbock 2018: 113). Cassils has also explained that in response to this, their images have been censored: ‘some websites removed the image [and] realised that my “pecs” might in fact be “tits” (Ibid.). As such, Cassils’ body has commonalities with Messias’/the sissy body: it is ‘a violent body,’ a ‘confrontational’ body. But, unlike Messias’ it is one that perpetrates (a staged approximation of) violence—it literally fights back. Therefore, Cassils’ life, like Messias’ and Diogenes’s before them, is ‘a life which barks … a life which can fight’ (Foucault 2012: 243). In tandem, Cassils’ naked flesh also shows ‘the material vulnerability of [their] body,’ to cite Messias’ fitting words yet again. In this way, The Powers That Be, like Sissy’s Progress, speaks to the inseparability of vulnerability and courage and to the power of visibility as resistance. Additionally, it also touches on the re-iterability of gender; Cassils’ masculinity, in common with all masculinities, whether or not they are backed up by biological sex, is a counterfeit with no original, a repetition, not unlike the Roman copy of Myron’s sculpture, which itself comes from a canonical tradition that endlessly builds on minuscule shifts in repeated androcentric tropes.

Contemplating The Powers That Be in relation to Messias’ act of metaphorically ‘turning the volume up’ through the exaggeration of their gender expression, motivates me to question if Cassils’ self-presentation in the work is an analogous act of hyper-visibility. The fact that their starting pose reminds me of Myron’s sculpture speaks to their attainment of an archetypal masculinity. Having a muscled, athletic and agile physique in peak condition is one iconic and hard-won way to be read as masculine. Cassils embraces this for The Powers That Be, and it is key to their lived ethos as well—not only from having been very ill as a child, but also due to their then-long-standing day job as a personal trainer, not to mention their penchant for enacting strenuous, durational performance art. Furthermore, Cassils’ prior work Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture (2011-13), which entailed piling on 23 pounds of muscle by engaging in a relentless weightlifting and diet routine, including six weeks of steroids, was to some extent an exercise—no pun intended—in ‘turning up the volume’ on their masculinity. Cuts also succeeded as an artwork in bringing Cassils’ work more noticeably into the public eye, with the artist producing a blog for HuffPost’s Gay Voices section commenting on the experience. In response to the blog, the artist received a litany of transphobic, homophobic, and misogynist comments and threats (Steinbock 2018: 113). Cassils also shared with me that in the final weeks of the training regime for Cuts, they were not only ‘passing more,’ but quicker to respond to others with aggression (Fox 2018c: 218). Significantly, the phrase ‘passing more’ speaks to being inconspicuous rather than visible. White masculinity is the default, ‘unmarked’ category in our context and, as such, to some extent undermines the possibility for it to be hyper-visible in the same manner as femininity, save when its expression is carried out by trans, AFAB, or intersexed bodies. Queer disruptions therefore also make Cassils’ masculinity more visible, just as Messias’ feminine clothes and accessories make their features seem more masculine.

At the culmination of Cuts, Cassils collaborated with fashion photographer Robin Black to produce a series of ‘pin-up’-style portraits entitled Lady Face, Man Body (2011), which emphasise the artist’s nonbinary embodiment. The contrast between their made-up face, with bright red lipstick, and their jock-strap clad body blaringly amplifies their trans in-betweenness, an act of ‘turning the volume up’ equivalent to Messias’ self-presentation in Sissy’s Progress. Although for Cassils, such acts might appear less risky than those carried out publicly by Messias, having taken place primarily within the construct and confines of art and its contexts, because Cassils’s efforts are materialised in their flesh, the lines between art and life are necessarily blurred. In life, their masculinity can enable them to pass or to be perceived as a lesbian, i.e. misgendering them, as Cassils candidly reported to me (2018c: 218). This partly explains why they fight without any clothes in The Powers That Be, aiming to be unmistakably, hyper-visibly nonbinary, which renders them ‘at once assertive and exposed’ (Butler, 2004: 20; Messias 2018: 4). Not only Cassils’ sculpted physique, but also its presentation in a scene of physical prowess and violence pointedly speaks to their propensity to relish hypermasculinity. Their repeated engagement with diverse training regimes and physical feats for their work strikes me as akin to the way Messias’ performances provide an excuse to fulfil long-held fantasies. Furthermore, returning to Butler’s insights, Cassils’ work is not ‘seek[ing] to overcome [material and social conditions altogether], but [they] do seek to make them more just, more equal, and more enabling’ (2016: 19).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, since Cassils’ corporeality, identity and body of work are at once ‘assertive and exposed,’ their projects, post Cuts, have predominantly addressed and/or employed violence. This is in part because the artist has been deeply touched by violence, not only due to their first-hand exposure to online trolling, but because they face the existential threat of rising anti-trans hate crimes. Just as surviving a physical attack first-hand gave urgency to Messias’ desire to respond ethically to violence, and to consider who else is subject to it, Cassils equally felt an obligation to rally against the impending sense of danger in their parallel context. I cite Butler on this point, significantly, a passage from which Messias also quotes:

paradoxically, our responsibility is heightened once we have been subjected to the violence of others … Only once we have experienced that [capacity-undermining form of] violence are we compelled ethically to ask how we will respond to violent injury … [W]ill we be furthering or impeding violence by virtue of the response we make? (Butler 2004: 16; Messias 2016: 285).

Perhaps ironically, for both artists, the existential condition they share as visibly nonbinary individuals has meant using their respective pieces to call out harm in highly risky, verging on self-destructive, ways. As Cassils explains, the choreography for The Powers That Be ‘guarantees injuries:’

trying to hit something that’s not there, you have to put force outwards and inwards at the same time. It’s very easy to hurt yourself… Rushing forward and stopping so much like that, you bruise your brain against the inside of your skull. (Frank 2016)

Because their skilled movements for the piece are so dangerous, it has been, and will only ever be, performed twice. Paradoxically, such self-destructive, critical acts also function as self/communal care: it is what the artist needed to do to assert themself in a trans-hostile world. It is also ironic that violence would be the very medium employed, albeit in a pacifist manner, to address and critique that volatile context.

Cassils’ other works enlisting violence to contest violence, alongside the apathy and inaction in our responses to it, include Indistinguishable Fire (2015) and Becoming an Image (2012 to present). The former, in which the artist enacts a full body burn utilising the expertise of cinematic stunt techniques, entailed equal, if not more daunting, stakes than The Powers That Be, and was likewise therefore limited to two iterations. For Becoming an Image, Cassils pounds a one-tonne block of clay in total darkness illuminated by the flashes of a photographer’s bulb. Afterwards, Cassils casts the remaining contorted hunk of clay in bronze, forever freezing its fist-imprinted form. In 2017—aptly contemporaneous with the tearing down of US monuments to the confederacy—the artist joined with members of the local LGBTQ+ community to push this nearly 2-tonne monument through the streets of Omaha, Nebraska, visiting ‘sites of trauma, violence, celebration, resistance, and resilience’ (Cassils.net). This 4-hour durational group procession/performance entitled Monument Push parallels the ‘participant’s journey’ and street-reclamation aspects of Messias’ Sissy’s Progress. As such, it not only foreshadows the more collectively oriented works Cassils goes on to create in its wake but also underscores the ways that The Powers That Be already implicates others. Despite centring the artist’s individual corporeality, it aims to ‘be bigger than just [Cassils’] body … bigger than [their] own subjectivity’ (Cassils, cited in Frank 2016).

One need only listen to the soundscape of the Los Angeles rendition of The Powers that Be (2016) to understand Cassils’ stated intention to be inclusive and open the work’s meaning up to the interpretation of diverse audiences. The audio, a collaboration with media artist Kadut Kuhne, samples various audio clips, including reportage of violence against gender-nonconforming people, Black Lives Matter protests, police shootings, the right to choose, and electoral politics. All this is interspersed with static fuzz and snippets from top 40 hits of decades gone by—reflecting what one might hear flipping through radio stations at the time of night when the performance was staged. This potent mix speaks to the turbulent socio-political context from which the piece was born, in which tensions around the politics of identity, social justice, and bodily autonomy were coming to a head. It coincided with the escalating momentum of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, and with the so-called ‘Transgender Tipping Point,’ along with the attendant backlashes.^[4] Additionally, at this time, Republican-controlled US state legislators passed laws to inhibit women’s reproductive freedoms. Increased atomisation, right-wing populism, and toxic anti-immigrant sentiment were taking hold in the electorates of the US, UK and beyond. Cassils’ second performance of The Powers That Be invites its audience to ask, who and what is the artist fighting, and how do we attend to this violence?

Naming The Unknown Assailants 

I contend that in Sissy’s Progress and The Powers That Be, each artist vies with the same invisible yet omnipresent foe, that of toxic or hegemonic masculinity. Hegemonic masculinity is the bar against which both of their respective bodies and gender identities are found wanting. The notion of ‘toxic masculinity’ is often misunderstood to imply that male aggression is a fixed, biological trait, instead of a product of socialisation. My argument, by contrast, is based on the premise that masculinity is toxic only when individuals are held to impossible or inflexible binary standards; the shame of not living up to masculine norms is all too often channelled into anger, anger that in turn becomes the basis of gender policing and hate crime. As feminist theorist bell hooks posits, anger is the one feeling that is acceptable for patriarchal men and boys to express, serving to distance them from femininity and effeminacy, associated as they are with weakness and vulnerability (2004: 42). Moreover, that both works combat toxic masculinity became clear due to insights gleaned from Messias’ essay reflecting on the Sissy series. In it, they describe encountering Jacob Epstein’s sculpture of Jacob and the Angel when seeking respite and inspiration at Tate Britain. Messias interprets the work in light of the biblical tale in which Jacob is given a new name after wrestling with a mysterious enemy, an angel, and recognising Epstein’s portrayal as a metaphor for the artist’s struggle for mastery over their materials (2018: 8). Considering this in relation to their work, Messias asks: ‘was violence my material?’ (2018: 9). If the answer is affirmative for Messias’ Sissy trilogy and beyond, it is equally the case for Cassils’ body of work. Messias goes on to speculate about the ambiguous identity of the angel/man, wondering if the sissy is the man they are wrestling with, followed by the statement: ‘“Man,” of course, can stand here for masculinity, hegemony, maleness, power. The assailant refuses to be named’ (2018: 9). This observation is uncannily relatable to The Powers That Be, providing hypothetical contours to Cassils’ unnamed combatant. To reiterate, hegemonic masculinity and the dynamic of ‘power over’ are the nemeses that both Cassils and Messias call out and fight. Disturbingly, the absence of Cassils’ opponent brings to mind the fact that Messias’ assailants never faced justice, as is dismayingly all too often the case. Due to the impact of trauma on memory, many survivors are unable to recall their attackers’ faces, let alone list their names as the Cynic Diogenes had done.

Cassils’ unknown assailant might also be the effect of shame itself, which has a propensity to be experienced without language, as a self-imposed, self-censoring form of violence, resulting in behavioural conformity. Fittingly, in Messias’ prior piece Sissy! (2009-11), There is a segment in which Messias is alone on stage, The Village People’s disco hit ‘Macho Man’ playing as they flamboyantly strut forward, like a model on a catwalk, only to be knocked backwards by an invisible force. This series of actions is repeated twice before Messias’ body falls to the ground from having been pushed. When they try to get back up, they are forced down yet again, foreshadowing violence in Sissy’s Progress and Cassils’ The Powers that be. I asked Messias about the decision to perform this segment on their own, unlike the majority of Sissy! in which their dance partner/collaborator, Biño Sauitzvy, plays their lover and nemesis in turn. Messias explained that this was intended to reiterate the internalisation of gendered norms, the pressure they have felt to ‘act like a man’, theatricalising their failed attempts ‘to do to [their] own body what those young men had done to them’ (Fox 2024). Coming full circle, it is in comparison to hegemonic masculinity that nonbinary embodiment is perceived as less than, resulting in the experience of shame that can internalise violence/conformity, as opposed to the overt stares, glares, threats, aggression, abuse or humiliation by others who socially reinforce norms.^[5] Shame, as opposed to humiliation, within the field of psychology is defined as occurring when one falls short of one’s own ideals, ideals which are determined by one’s ‘reference group’ (Dryden 1997, 13). Positing that gender-nonconforming individuals, who do not ascribe to the cis-heteronormative values and norms that are deployed to humiliate them, may still experience shame, is evidence of the sociality of our species and the fact that, as feminist theorist Sara Ahmed puts it, ‘the ideal is a proximate we’ (2004, 106). Furthermore, the influential psychologist Sylvan Tomkins posits that shame is ‘the most reflexive of affects in that the phenomenological distinction between subject and object is lost’ (Sedgwick and Frank 1995, 136). In the experience of shame, one sees oneself through the imagined gaze of the other. As such, disentangling one’s own values from those of one’s ‘reference group’/ ‘proximate we’/society at large is challenging if not impossible, just as it is impossible to completely discern who or what Cassils is fighting.

Speaking about The Powers that Be, Cassils asks: ‘Who could the body be when I am an oppressor?’ (Frank 2016). Messias’ interpretation of Epstein’s sculpture and the motivations behind their ‘Macho Man’ choreography hint at possible answers and provoke yet more questions. Does Cassils’ one-person fight represent the self-harm entailed in the experience of shame? Does their implied victory signify that nonconformity triumphs? Or does it cynically show that violence and aggression are cyclical? Is the portrayed struggle a metaphor for Cassils’ artistic labour as a self-defined ‘citizen artist,’ one who engages in ‘direct conversations around politics,’ with their exhaustion representing compassion fatigue (Steinbock 2018, 111)? Or is the assailant in fact the ‘proximate we,’ is it the we/us who in subtle ways collectively uphold gendered norms, or who remain passive in the face of their unjust, harmful and often violent consequences? To invoke Butler’s words yet again, how can we assist in making the ‘material and infrastructural conditions’ of our lives ‘more just, more equal, and more enabling?’ Since Messias and Cassils confront common enemies, this implies that the burden of taking action should also be shared.

Conclusion: No Innocent Bystanders

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. If one feels there is nothing ‘we’ can do—but who is that ‘we?’ —and nothing ‘they’ can do either—then one gets bored, cynical, apathetic … It is passivity that dulls feeling. (Sontag 2003: 79 & 90)

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag questions the power of photographs of violence to prompt action, positing that inaction can stem from a mix of emotions; not just apathy or complicity, but also, and perhaps especially, fear (2003: 79). I have tried to show that both The Powers That Be and Sissy’s Progress breed compassion and encourage action, evading the ‘passivity that dulls feeling.’ The works respectively bridge interpersonal divides among their audiences, inviting identification and action to fuel shared struggles despite centring the individual artist’s specific gender identities. Messias’ public intervention frames moments of confrontation not only for the audience but also for whoever happens to be present in the streets; the corporeal vulnerability of all those present is potentially placed in the line of fire alongside the artist’s, which means they must reckon with how to respond. Nothing could be more activating of an audience. In Cassils’ performance, by contrast, mediation is the primary focus, with spectators encouraged by the missing assailant and the multifarious soundtrack to fill in the blanks, as well as to film with their phones. These audience-activating choices also open a space for specific forms of agency on the part of the viewer, that of active questioning and imagination.

As art theorist Julia Steinmetz’s writing on The Powers That Be elaborates, the work is intended to bring to mind iconic images of US race-based hate crimes such as the 1991 video of Rodney King being beaten by California police, or the infamous 1955 open casket image of the brutally maimed and murdered 14-year-old boy Emmett Till, who had been wrongly accused of whistling at a white woman (2016: 10). In this way the piece calls for what queer theorist Sally Munt calls ‘horizontal bonds’ across those who ‘are firmly rooted in a desire to gain rights of protection’ (2007: 4; Messias 2018a: 4). Disturbingly, the all too recent US historical practice of ‘postcards from a lynching,’ which Sontag also discusses, make plain the impossibility of controlling how images are read and what causes they might be requisitioned to serve; Emmett Till’s mother published her son’s image for the purpose of social justice whilst white supremacists no doubt mistakenly enjoy the gruesome spectacle as ‘proof’ of their superiority (2003: 72). Cassils’ piece speaks of these cross purposes, but problematises the latter subtly, specifically through the performance’s narrative arc. Cassils does more than demonstrate their capacity to withstand or fight back against potential haters, emphasising the way that power can change hands; they call instead for alternatives to retaliation or reversal.

At the start of the performance, Cassils appears to be the victim, but by the end, they seem to have usurped power as they pummel the invisible opponent on the ground. After taking part in a nonviolence and de-escalation training workshop, which I was inspired to do as part of the process of researching these works, I was forced to take note that even though Cassils’ becomes free from the grip of their invisible foe mid-performance, meaning there was in fact an opportunity to flee and thereby opt for nonviolence, they remained and kept fighting. Setting aside the objections that doing so would render it a shorter and less impressive performance, not to mention that it would diminish the focus on mediated violence as spectacle, as a result of nonviolence training, I now saw it as a metaphor for the oppressed becoming the oppressor, the power dynamic inverted but not radically challenged or transformed. Just as the solution to hate-based violence can never be surveillance or policing—forms of paternalism found woefully lacking as forms of protection, especially for the precariat—revenge, or the transformation of victim to aggressor, is not the remedy either. Acting out myriad scenarios in the nonviolence workshop, the knee-jerk reflex-like way that aggression is responded to in kind, proved how challenging it is to react otherwise, bringing me in touch with my own complicity and potential capacity for violence.

Paternalism and surveillance may seem like the obvious answers to the problem of hate-based assault in the public sphere and to vulnerability more generally. However, the root of the word paternalism is paternal, underscoring its links to hegemony, ‘power over’ and toxic masculinity, all of which these two performances respectively and actively contest. Therefore, the politics they elicit in response to the acts of violence they frame are necessarily feminist, critical, and grassroots, putting the onus on individuals with different horizons of experience to uphold a collective ethic that recognises the imbrication of vulnerability/exposure, and courage. Cassils and Messias both ask us to examine our own complicity and the ways we might more subtly assist in reifying constrictive, all too often violent, hegemonic gender norms via our sociality. Moreover, each artist literally demonstrates how to defy norms and, in showcasing the risks entailed, allows us to consider how we might do the same, even if it is with life-preserving caveats. By spotlighting their own identities, these two artists push the envelope while staying true to the facets of their gender that provide pleasure. By showcasing how they make dire constraints more enabling and liveable—candidly, nakedly showing the risks and rewards of such feats—they call on us to do the same.

Notes:

[1] While survivor and activist Turana Burke used the phrase ‘me too’ as early as 2006 on social media in the process of founding the grassroots movement to support and provide resources for survivors of sexual abuse and assault, the hashtag subsequently went viral in 2017 (Burke n.d.).

[2]Bausch’s dance company has had a trans woman dancer, Naomi Brito, since 2020. Messias unsuccessfully auditioned for the company a few times, just before and around the same time they created Sissy’s Progress.

[3] Messias confirmed to me that they had not consciously recreated these iconic pop cultural images, but they had always wanted to reenact them (Fox 2024).

[4] One key Amnesty International statistic that Cassils themself cites is: ‘worldwide hate crimes against trans and gender nonconforming people had risen 20% in 2012’ (Steinbock 2018: 116). 2013 saw the first high-profile US court case in which trans male student Coy Mathis won the right to use the bathroom of his gender, having been denied it by his Colorado high school. 2014 was dubbed the ‘transgender tipping point’ in Katy Steinmetz’s eponymous Time magazine cover story featuring Laverne Cox, star of the TV series Orange is the New Black; 2014 was also the year that Joey Soloway’s Prime series Transparent debuted. The backlash that ensued from this, alongside prior decades of feminist and social justice activism, including Trump’s election and his administration’s eventual repealing of the bathroom rights put in place in the Obama years, not to mention his overt misogyny and endorsement of hate crime, evidence not only the ways that progress all too often and regrettably proceeds in a one step forward, two steps back rate, but also that increased visibility for trans lives dishearteningly leaves them more vulnerable.

[5] It is tempting, although anachronistic, to propose that Trump, toxic masculinity personified, is Cassils’ invisible assailant; he had not yet become President at the time the piece was made, though his election campaign loomed large. Aptly, Cassils refers to him as ‘he who shall not be named’ (Steinbock 2018: 112).