#also regrettably. gender envy

[thepunkmuppet]

rewatching solve it squad… i can’t with keith and his slutty belly out on full display why is he everything

[pomefioredove]

Just read the whole "Yuu gets sold off by Crowley" stories and OMLLL THEYRE SO GOOD XDDD Any chance you could do more on it like if Niege won or if the parents heard about it and also decided to adopt Yuu and Grim?? Maybe the other staff adopting her too or more on Crewel's adoption please???

requests for the crewel ending are in high demand I see...

parts 1 | 2 | 3 | kalim | 'bad' ending | RSA ending

summary: a crewel ending type of post: short fic, mostly speculation characters: crewel ft. other staff additional info: platonic, reader is gender neutral, reader is yuu, definitely pre-book seven, parents being cringe

If Crewel were allowed to beat Crowley to death with one of his designer handbags, he would have.

...Unfortunately, with the adoption paperwork fees (...and a need for more designer handbags), he regrettably still needs this job.

And he'd like to keep an eye on you while you're still here, too.

The animosity between Crowley and the rest of the staff is unspoken, shared through passing glances and dry remarks at meetings, and though the matter is "settled", in Crowley's own words, no one seems keen on letting it go anytime soon.

The students who participated in the bidding war are subject to months worth of extra homework, harder exams, and worse studying hours from Crewel himself. To teach them a little responsibility, he says.

You, at least, are exempt from his radical new lesson plan. You have enough on your plate as it is.

After all, as soon as the legal proceedings are through and your identity as an autonomous human being in Twisted Wonderland is secured, the "fun" begins.

Your uniforms are tailored and rightly fit, you're given a proper meal plan, even Ramshackle is decorated with a few of Crewel's personal touches. A throw rug here and there, a fresh coat of paint, anything to cover up the rotting interior and turning it into something worthy of envy.

"...Given that Grim doesn't start shedding everywhere," Crewel had said. "Ugh, pets."

The rest of the staff are just as helpful, citing your recent experience with the bidding war as reason to take it easier on you for a while (or for the rest of the semester, really). Trein gives you less homework, Sam "accidentally" doesn't ring you up a few items...

It starts to feel more like the entirety of the staff has adopted you.

Not that you mind, of course. This is the closest thing you've had to family since... well, since coming here.

There's just the one thing, though.

"I don't know why you waste your time with those untrained pups. Honestly. The idea of their tacky shoes touching the rugs in here..." Crewel sighs. His eyes turn to you. "You know, I hear Vil Schoenheit has been looking for someone to take to his next shoot..."

Ashton chuffs. "Don't be ridiculous, they need someone who's strong enough to take care of them! Kingscholar is a real star once he gets motivated,"

"Please tell me I didn't just hear that," Crewel massages his temples. "And might I add, I'm their father, not you. I give the blessing. You're more like the unwelcome uncle crashing the family barbeque."

Grim nudges you with his elbow, muttering a quick yikes before darting out of the kitchen. You groan in embarrassment. "Guys..."

"I'm just thinking about what's best for them," Ashton says, puffing out his chest. "They're at an age where they're going to start thinking about dating, and we want them to make good choices."

"Guys,"

"Exactly. Schoenheit is a perfect gentleman, a master in my class, and has the style to back him up. Kingscholar can demonstrate occasional intelligence, but he's still another housecat," he shudders. "The shedding..."

A tired voice from the doorway interrupts their tense back-and-forth, much to your relief.

"Goodness, the two of you, at this again?" Trein scoffs, taking a seat at the table. "This conversation is highly inappropriate. You shouldn't be controlling the poor thing's romantic prospects, if they even have them. When the time comes, the choice will be theirs to make."

Crewel huffs, rolling his eyes and leaning against the table. Ashton kicks his feet. And neither utter another word.

"Good," Trein says, then clears his throat. "Ahem. But that's not to say that we can't offer our guidance. That Vanrouge did quite well on the last History of Magic exam..."

You groan.

[theinvisiblemuseum]

Timothée Chalamet on the bones and all premiere in Rome 💀 I want to eat (or at least chew gently if allowed) on his entire ensemble. It is so perfect how does he. I can't.

In what way do you like him? Just as a drawing example or on more levels?

this ask is very timely because i’m currently wearing a necklace i bought because of his bones & all premiere looks 💀

my infatuation with timothee chalamet, shockingly, comes first from his acting (what? i know) i was like. heavily obsessed w cmbyn when it first came out because of the performances and the cinematography & everything (i was also studying film at the time so my little new film major brain was going crazyyyy with that movie) and it sort of spiraled from there into a love of his acting, his fashion, & just like … him in general. i’m not the type of person to really be a fan of celebrities, i simply don’t care about the majority of them in any way aside from enjoying their art or fashion or whatever but timmy… i am a fan. i adore him. regrettably. LMAO. there’s also the gender envy to contend with, but i didn’t clock that one until more recently

he is very fun to draw tho, i will draw him foreverrrr

[warofroyalsrpg]

— ♔ In the past, people were born royal and for LÉONIE DIANE KÖNIG the TWENTY EIGHT-year-old PRINCESS of SWITZERLAND, that is a tradition SHE intends to keep. To others, SHE looks an awful lot like VICTORIA PEDRETTI and has/have been painted as MERCURIALLY DISTANT but behind closed doors, SHE is AMBITIOUS & EASILY BOTHERED but also PATIENT & CREATIVE. It has also been said they are NOT BETROTHED. (b/23/est/she+they)

Welcome Princess Léonie König, we hope you enjoy your stay and represent your country of Switzerland well! The fc of Victoria Pedretti and the country of Switzerland are now taken! Please check out the checklist and send in your account within twenty-four hours. Please check out the checklist and send in your account within twenty-four hours.

What is your character’s gender?: cis woman 

Are you filling a wanted connection? If so, which one?: darling gracie’s twin connection 

Please provide three headcanons about your character: 

Headcanon One: It would be easy for Léonie to feel guilty of her brother — she has ambition and goals, but all the same, she is no one without him by her side. She knows she’ll never take his place as crown heir unless something tragic happens, but it’s never crossed her mind. Of everyone succeeding and surpassing her, only Frédéric can do so without her gnashing her teeth and feeing her heart clench, green and envied. And so, she acts as his right hand. She keeps her chin up and temper even — she brings him down when his rage peaks. 

Headcanon Two: Perhaps it’s odd, to be so privileged and to wish for anonymity. She knows she wouldn’t be the same were she born under different circumstance, but she ponders the idea of a quiet life — one in a countryside, untouched by most all, one where she can paint and dream and do nothing with consequence. It’s a pipe dream, and she tries not to dwell on it. In moments alone, she draws in a sketchbook. She draws mornings and portraits, of herself in scapes that could never exist.

Headcanon Three: The idea of being married off to someone, perhaps a stranger, is somewhat unappealing. She knows it’s likely — she knows it should have happened by now. Some say she’s alone, but she doesn’t feel lonely. She has her brother, a handful of friends. It’s few but it’s enough.

 Please provide two or more connection ideas for your character: 

Connection One: i know i said Léonie is comfortable in being alone, but I’d love someone to challenge that thought. She’s stubborn and not easily swayed, but I’d love for her to realize having more friends — platonic, romantic or otherwise — isn’t a bad thing. 

Connection Two: hot girl art club hot GIRL ART CLUB — someone figures out there’s more to her than a quick tongue and well-versed at political diplomacy and negotiation. Maybe they make her realize it’s a better talent than she realizes. 

Please answer the following questions IC: 

What is one thing you are proud of/love about your country? 

“The edelweiss — it’s our national flower.” For a second, the corners of her mouth pull upwards, a small smile gracing the face of a woman who seems apathetic more often than not. “It’s soft and delicate, and it reminds me of winter and better times. My mother favored it and it’s always made me feel closer to her to like it as well.” Her fingers are clasping the stem of the fragile plant, and then she systematically begins pulling off its petals. Her nose wrinkles, her head tilts — “Regrettably, I do think it to be quite ugly.” 

What is the most important thing in your suitcase? 

It isn’t a question she’ll answer genuinely. She knows what it is entirely, easy, her little sketchbook and a set of watercolour paints. She doesn’t say it though. Instead, she shrugs. “I’m not sure anything is special enough for me to consider it important. Perhaps, a few photos of my home.” 

Who and/or what will you miss most from home? 

“The person I care for most came alongside me — Frédéric, clearly. How could you expect me to answer anything else? He’s my brother, my best friend.” It’s not a lie, and never could be. They were as close as a pair could be, and she never was dismayed by it.

[sharkselfies]

ok regrettably also i am gendering sam in this episode. somethin abt the flecks of snow in his hair and the fbi suit and the long coat... anyway i’ve officially done it, i’ve collected gender envy for all 3 members of team free will, where do i redeem this for my prize.

[catsnuggler]

For the Apostate asks, 6, 9, 10, 11, and 12? (and the rest if you want the excuse!)

Sure, thanks for asking! For everyone else, here's the post in question. And I already asked myself, and answered, questions 1-5.

Under a read more due to length and subject matter. Frankly, I should have tagged all the other cult survivor stuff I spammed earlier. I think I'll do that this evening.

6. Favorite piece(s) of media that speaks to your experiences? Regrettably, I really don't know any media that does. I mean, I know of the Book of Mormon Musical, which is about missionaries sent to Africa ostensibly to save souls by feeding folks the gospel, only to see what they really need is, well, to be fed food, and the missionaries realize it's a scam and that they're helping nobody. But I'm only half-remembering a plot summary that I skimmed, I haven't, unfortunately, seen the play.

9. Whats one thing that makes you glad you left? Oof... that's a tough one. There are many things, and I have to peg it down to one? Alright, alright, I'll pick one: premarital sex. I haven't, erm, gone all the way with someone yet, but from what I have enjoyed... (contented, lovey-dovey sigh)

10. What do you love about the world? Compassion. It's something that people from all religions (or lack thereof) show others, and it's truly beautiful.

11. Has deconverting impacted your experience of gender or sexuality? Mostly "no", with a side of "yes". It turns out I'm genuinely a cishet guy, although it does feel good that, if that wasn't the case, I'm no longer in a religious community that would punish me for not being so. The homophobia and heteronormativity in Mormonism shun displays of affection between members of the same sex, and I've grown up touch-starved, tbh. The church didn't really help that. I'm not just talking about anything sexual, I mean there'd have to be a special occasion, like a loved one dying, to get a hug. Although, affection between members of the opposite sex who weren't married, nor openly dating and following Mormon standards while doing so, was also, to a much lesser extent, seen as suspect. Anyway, what I'm getting at is, since I've tossed Mormon judgment out the window, and have learned to flip the bird at homophobia, I don't care whether I'm seen as gay for giving a bro a hug. I'm also not as afraid of expressing a tender emotion for fear of like, idk what the right word would be, I guess it'd depend on the situation, but overall having my gender and/or sexuality questioned, because, again, I don't care now. I'm a lot more comfortable with who I am (in a relative sense), but like, I was a cishet guy before, and I still am.

12. What are some things that make you happy?

Oof... I need to answer this question for myself at least as much as I want to do it for you out of courtesy for you having asked it.

Alright, give me a moment. Hugs. Words of reassurance. Good food. Good conversation, whether light-hearted and carefree, or deep and soul-nourishing. The woods. I recognize there is a beauty in the desert, but the desert is harsh to me. I long for the greenery of the Pacific Coast, the region where I was born. Women; I don't just mean that in a shallow way. I owe so much to women. Women who have been understanding, women who have been forthright and stood their ground (for themselves, for me, and even some who stood their ground against me when I wasn't right), women who are intellectual, women who know how to put all the serious mental exercise shit to the side and just calm down and meditate (an ability I envy and need to work on developing). And, yes, women I'm attracted to. History. It doesn't always make me happy, to be sure. Sometimes, it makes me sad. Terribly sad. But I know the sad history is at least as important to know. Still, the history of humankind is not solely the history of misery. It brings joy to my heart to see joy and prosperity, after some fashion or another, in the past, especially if I'm feeling depressed. It's good to know things haven't always been bad, because that means they're not doomed to remain so. Cooking - and I do mean doing the cooking myself - brings me joy, solace, at least, if I'm free to cook at my own leisure, with no one looking over my shoulder. Actually, it's a great way for me to meditate. It can be stressful at times, of course, but to taste the final result when I've done a good job softens my heart.

[genderassignment]

Borderland Creatures: Lise Haller Baggesen & Iris Bernblum at Goldfinch

Installation view of I am the horse, Goldfinch, Chicago. Photo credit: Daniel Hojnacki. Left: Iris Bernblum. Pretty baby 3, 2018, spray paint on photo. Right: Iris Bernblum. Pour, 2018, paint on wall, dimensions variable.

Gender Assignment Guest Blogger, Matt Morris

This is a story of biopower and biosociality…those bitches insisted on the history of companion species, a very mundane and ongoing sort of tale, one full of misunderstandings, achievements, crimes, and renewable hopes. (1)

To begin, rest assured that in my epigraph above, Donna Haraway writes ‘bitches’ in reference to dogs designed to service breeding and the interests of humans. However, it occurs to me how language demonstrates its potential to transmigrate across species (a system that is itself, language), and marks out a contentious zone in which femininity is denigrated, and the fact of our animal-ness is charged with a capacity for social abuse and enforced disparities across gender and race. Language is appropriated, and then reappropriated in common parlance, how one might clap back, confirming, ‘Yes, I’m that bitch.’ One wonders, and the wondering is overwhelming, at the intricacies of how language and organism and the institution of gender have been made to conspire in obfuscating life’s interdependencies. Haraway goes on to remind readers that to consider companion species is not only to account for pets, but also the plant- and animal-based foods we consume, cellular genetic modifications, products with less obvious origins among the living (horses, glue, etc.), and techno-hybrid aspects of contemporary life. The challenge to grasp either the particulars or scope of this paradigm is certainly an (intentional) effect of power. That artists Lise Haller Baggesen and Iris Bernblum succeed at finding starting points to contemplate these entanglements by revisiting the much-maligned genre of ‘horse art’ mostly relegated to the sphere of female adolescence is both novel and moving. In the years I’ve known both artists’ practices, I’ve come to trust that neither are squeamish around topics that are often avoided as much because of how easily they are dismissed as for how problematic they prove to be in their deconstruction. Motherhood, passé disco, unicorns, bucolic landscapes: both artists brave themes that even many other feminists avoid. Their exhibition I Am the Horse now on view at Goldfinch in Garfield Park proves to be écriture feminine (2) équestre par excellence.

If we reside in an oft-unacknowledged natureculture system, Baggesen and Bernblum’s art manifests naturecultureculture, at turns instinctively poetic, strategically conceptual, activist, collaborative, whimsical, and stark. Through paintings (on canvas, on photographs), photographic documentation of playful activations of sculptures (objects that are themselves also on view elsewhere in the space), projected video, drawing, and two audio soundtracks, both artists weave Borromean knots through Lacan’s imaginary and real.

(Why would I invoke such an old model of describing experience and consciousness as Lacan, when Baudrillard’s postulations decades ago of a madness of simulations detached from the real seem to be reaching new climaxes of surreal if not unbearable proportions in our present day? I’ll admit, I’m desperate to find means of surviving even thriving, and it’s in my personal bias that I find Lacan useful. It’s certainly a mere mirage of organization, but as with the ‘horse art’ I’m pondering here, it offers me some manageability with which to encounter immense entanglements with which I am otherwise inundated. I am struggling with being in the world, sometimes struggling to even face exhibition openings like this one about which I write. I’m searching for how to be—ethically, aesthetically, politically.)  

Lise Haller Baggesen. Refusenik on the beach, 2018, Photographic transparency, lightbox. Image courtesy of the artist

It’s in this present state that I feel such affinity for Baggesen’s Refuseniks, a series of costumes that propose hybridity for their wearers (across individuals, across species), by combining structural aspects of jockey shirts and horse blankets, often with multiplied arm holes and equine-shaped hoods. Refusenik (double wearable), 2017, is a melancholic confection draped in the gallery space, possessing all the pluralism of Rei Kawakubo and the lightly floral palette of Dirk Van Saene. In the accompanying photographs, we see these garments not only worn by people and horses alike, but also behaving architectonically, pitched into tents redolent of the Snoezelen-room-inspired immersive installations of Baggesen’s earlier work.

Make. Believe. Dress. Up. Pause to consider these words and phrases while observing Baggesen’s photographs of Refuseniks in the wild. The lightbox Refusenik on the Beach, 2018, shows a figure swimming offshore like an island-bound pony or a mermaid. These scenarios are acted out as conscious performative disengagements from dominant narratives that taxonomize and restrict across gender, age, and species. These works are efforts in conscious play, what psychoanalyst Ernst Kris termed ‘regression in the service of the ego,’ following on the pronouncement of becoming that names the exhibition. I am the horse.

Installation view of I am the horse, Goldfinch, Chicago. Photo credit: Daniel Hojnacki

What’s regrettable and even misguided within the literature that expounds on the bonds between women and horses—and by this, I’m speaking of a body of discourse inclusive not only of psychoanalysis and other modern modes of theory production, but also more expansive treatments of mythology and lore—is that these relationships are nearly always supposed as a substitution for women oriented toward men. The method of using a virgin to attract a unicorn so it may be caught and its horn severed and used for its healing properties is all misdirection: it seems clear to me that this narrative mostly prepares young women to be penetrated by virile conquests. The unfounded rumors of Catherine the Great’s lust for equine copulation follows on her wresting control of the Russian empire from her mentally ill husband. In her case, her strength of will that surpassed the men with whom she was attached and surrounded had to be distorted into bestial proportions in order to maintain a culture organized around male domination. A nebula of dildonic hobby horses, penis envy, the introduction of women riding side-saddle as early as the 14th century as a means of protecting their virginity if not also their decency—horses gallop through all sorts of conceptualizations that would portray women’s sexuality as vulnerable and in need of protection, and also a site of lack, a cavity designed to be filled. It would seem that across the literature that characterizes women’s relationships to horses, men can’t help but recast these attachments as metaphoric pussy grabbing of a most intimate order, territorializing the horse’s body as a prosthetic extension of their own desire and dread and anger (read: misogyny) to control women and their object choices, erotic or otherwise. This is a consuming violence further materialized by the litany of ways that the unchecked, unexamined, privileged marker of ‘men’ is scripted with an entitlement to possess whatever the holder of that sign wishes to possess, to possess and then destroy, and the absolute conviction held within that position that any alternative narratives produced within the culture is metaphoric to them.

It is against this violence and the symbolic order that reifies it that Bernblum and Baggesen act. Upon entering the exhibition, Baggesen’s audio piece, Stallion, 2018, is played on white headphones beneath one of several lightbox photographs in the exhibition that show her piecework Refusenik garments used in tropical landscapes. The sound piece is a sort of audio guide, as if a didactic for a museum collection—a format for working that recurs across Baggesen’s oeuvre and shows how her research operates across writing and studio production. The audio speaks to The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries in Paris’ Musée de Cluny, noting possible symbols for virginity, chastity, and maternity within the textiles’ imagery, with frequent departures into lullaby-like singing and theoretical proposals such as: “’Our selves’ are not located within ‘ourselves’…but are a function of it and vice versa, and personhood is acquired, along with ‘soul,’ gradually and suddenly….” From the start, the logic of this exhibition proceeds counter to any linear theory of development in which a monolithic subject is constituted.

Iris Bernblum. Pretty baby 2, 2018, spray paint on photo. Image courtesy of the artist and Aspect/Ratio Gallery, Chicago

Also from the start, the titular horse in both artists’ projects is haunted by a spectral unicorn. In Bernblum’s Pretty baby 3, 2018, a mottled horse is photographed in black and white. Where a unicorn’s horn might emerge from its head, the artist has sprayed the print with a hazy, glowing pink paint. Is this the body from which her ten-foot-tall unicorn horn-cum-lightning rod Struck, 2016, was removed? While the image conjures fantasies both telepathic and amputating, the action of it as an object—the spray of paint that Bernblum repeats across numerous works—belongs to a nouveau réaliste mode of painting that recalls Niki de Saint Phalle’s Shooting Pictures of the 1960s. The pigment dispersions and drips in Bernblum’s paintings—on photographs, paper, and for Pour, 2018, down the gallery wall itself—are jouissance gestures held at an ambiguous point of rupture, appearing to spill forth, but understood as applied onto the bodies (of horses, of gallery-institution) depicted. This, I have come to feel, is the zone in which Bernblum and her audiences are held—threshold spaces, subtle but provocatively suspenseful, with all the erotic, energetic potential of bodies together pressing into the moment of her artwork. She commands an art herstory that swells from Benglis’ ejaculated spills and Judy Chicago’s spray-painted ‘flesh gates,’ ‘cunts,’ and ‘Great Ladies’ works. Here is one of the linkages between artistic praxis and the horse bodies that roam through the exhibition: these painterly forerunners pushed past pictorial illusionism into the expressive potential of material itself, understood simultaneously through being looked upon (imaginary) and acted with (real). So too, it would seem, do horses. History of science scholar Laurel Braitman notes in her research of how animals are thought about within human culture, "Horses and…unicorns—these are all borderland creatures; gateway animals to other worlds," she says. "They help us imagine wonderful other ways of being in the world,” of harnessing one’s own power and potential for transformation. (3)

Lise Haller Baggesen. Grown up Refusenik, Copenhagen, October 2017, 2017. Photographic transparency, lightbox. Image courtesy of the artist

The efforts of these two artists sensitize their audiences to the means by which such transformative tools are restricted from use by their situation into early periods of development that are made difficult to access, through stigmas of some sort of arrested adolescence and the assigned roles and responsibilities of adulthood. The assembled artworks, the excursions they document, and the desires they manifest act against capitalist time, the work shift of the laborer, the demands on the time of mothers and working mothers, the imposition of a before and after of sexual awakening. Baggesen’s Grown-up Refusenik, Copenhagen, October 2017, 2017, shows an upright figure standing beside a clear-eyed horse named Nellie. One sees a graying beard along the jawline of the figure, whose head is otherwise masked by a pink horse hood. If not for this fanciful headpiece, this image might recall the other tradition in horse art, the status-symbol equestrian portrait that came to prominence in the 16th–18th centuries of European painting. As it is, one is left to quietly rethink the conceptual divisions upon which our political, economic, and ideological systems depend. What if the hierarchies of speciesism are toppled, and with them, the metaphors that would organize all women’s attachments as preludes or parallels to their being dominated by men? What it the right-wing accelerationism’s tenuous reliance on regulated, linear time might be disrupted in order to gain access to modes of play and being that have been restricted to childhood? What if we breathe, as Bernblum’s two-channel video work breathes, or we make space to catch our breath amidst what feels like a world on fire? What if we explore unbridled, libidinal release that transgresses borderlands? Because, interestingly, Baggesen and Bernblum work into and from facets of écriture féminine that are not essentialist in defining a category of womanhood, but even, as Wittig proposes would “destroy the sexes as a sociological reality if we want to start to exist.” Optimistically, she invites forms of becoming beyond a binary: “To refuse to be a woman, however, does not mean that one has to become a man.” What if, in refusal, we become unicorns?

End Note: I’ve decided that for my series of contributions to Gender Assignment, I want to attach to each essay a selected perfume that I’ve worn through most or all of the drafting of these texts. This can be traced back to my use of perfume in my own art practice, as well as conversations around sensitivity and wellness related to scent that I’ve shared with my host and editor here, Mel Potter, as well as the artists and subjects of this and other forthcoming texts. For this first essay, I have written within a cloud of Mon Musc a Moi, released in 2015 by A Lab on Fire, designed by Dominique Ropion. This scent opens with quick bursts of bergamot and peach blossom before wrapping a sugary heliotrope-vanilla in wet-fur musks. The perfume house recently renamed the scent Messy SexyTM Just Rolled Out of Bed, and it strikes me that the former name possesses an introspection and reticence that is perhaps in keeping with this exhibition, while its updated moniker casts the scent into a narrative tinged with male-gazey sexual-objecthood that may be more salable, but belies some of the poetry of the scent.

Matt Morris is an artist, writer, and sometimes curator based in Chicago. He analyzes forms of attachment and intimacy through painting, perfume, photography, and institutional critique. He has presented artwork at Adds Donna, The Bike Room, Gallery 400, The Franklin, peregrineprogram, Queer Thoughts, Sector 2337, and Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago, IL; The Mary + Leigh Block Museum of Art in Evanston, IL; The Elmhurst Art Museum in Elmhurst, IL; Fjord and Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA; The Contemporary Arts Center, U·turn Art Space, Aisle, and semantics in Cincinnati, OH; Clough-Hanson Gallery and Beige in Memphis, TN; Permanent.Collection in Austin, TX; Cherry + Lucic in Portland, OR; The Poor Farm in Manawa, WI; with additional projects in Reims, France; Greencastle, IN; Lincoln, NE; and Baton Rouge, LA. Morris is a transplant from southern Louisiana who holds a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and earned an MFA in Art Theory + Practice from Northwestern University, as well as a Certificate in Gender + Sexuality Studies. In Summer 2017 he earned a Certification in Fairyology from Doreen Virtue, PhD. He is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a contributor to Artforum.com, ARTnews, Art Papers, Flash Art, Pelican Bomb, and Sculpture; and his writing appears in numerous exhibition catalogues and artist monographs.

1. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007. Print, p. 5.

2. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Écriture_féminine>

3.  Quoted in Davia Nelson and Niiki Silva’s “Why Do Girls Love Horses, Unicorns and Dolphins?” All Things Considered. National Public Radio, February 9, 2011. <https://www.npr.org/2011/02/09/133600424/why-do-girls-love-horses-unicorns-and-dolphins>