Acting Disgracefully

Carta Monir is a trans woman (“I never know what to lead with!” she tells me), an artist, a writer, and a pornographic performer. Her Instagram offers varied delights: comics, zines, x-rays of her herniated disks, photos of herself with fish hooks in her cheeks, photos of herself with her eyes sewn shut. It’s these latter selections that first drew me to her page.

Carta’s work marries the worlds of kink and performance art, drawing from a rich queer lineage that traces back decades (Ron Athey comes to mind). For her, these S/M scenes “create the most exaggerated, scariest version” of what she’s afraid of and “plays it out in a safe context” — like a haunted house, she says, or a play space.

In our next issue, Carta writes about her time as an artist-in-residence at the Tom of Finland Foundation and her thoughts on co-founder Durk Dehner’s history of wearing Nazi regalia. This week, we chatted about live performance, endurance, disability, and identity. —Asya Sağnak

ASYA SAĞNAK When did you start performing? 

CARTA MONIR The first time I did something that I would call a live performance was November 2022. It was while I was at the Tom of Finland residency. I had met Mistress Odette, my collaborator, earlier that summer; we worked together and immediately hit it off. Even before that, though, my recorded work has taken a more documentarian aspect. Even if it’s private, or just for an audience of the two people who are helping me film, I’m still trying to frame it as a performance.

AS It’s performance all the way down! I’m wondering about what your relationship with your audience is like, whether it’s two of them behind a camera or hundreds through a screen.

CM Definitely. When I make video, it feels very similar to when I used to make comics. It’s something that I do on my own — I’m quite surprised when people tell me that they like it because I don’t really have a sense of how many people are interacting with it or how it might affect them. 

With live performance, too, I was surprised by how an audience reacted to me. Between my first performance and my second performance, I refined the way that I — sort of — coached the audience. During the first performance, they were more raucous: they wanted to clap, make comments, shout. It was nice, but it disrupted my focus and made me realize that I wanted something different. So when I gave the second performance, I gave the speech that you’d give at a graduation: “don’t clap until the end,” you know. Just because I want people to feel like they have access to the very personal, vulnerable, small aspects of my reactions — and I think that can almost be obscured if an audience is looking for the bigger things. Getting my mouth stapled shut looks really impressive, but that’s not where the real pain of the performance is. I don’t want people to clap for that. That’s almost just like putting on my gloves, or something — that’s just introductory.

AS I’d love to hear more about that — about what’s most visible in a performance against what you think might be the emotional core of a performance.

CM I want an audience to see the build. That’s very interesting to me. I want them to see me struggling with my endurance and feel the fraying at the edges of my endurance, to get a sense of the point at which I’m losing my ability to remain composed or losing my dignity, so to speak. I don’t want to do things that look big and aren’t. 

AS If there’s a sense of catharsis, you want it to be earned.

CM Yes!

AS To me, so much of this practice is about playing with the boundaries between public and private life. When we’re in public, there’s an expectation that we’re holding ourselves up as individuals, as citizens, as subjects. Your performances try to undo that and strip away those layers one by one — peeling back “dignity,” as you put it.

CM I’m definitely interested in blurring those lines. I do have strong boundaries between what I do publicly and what I do in my private life — I’m not someone who wants to turn my intimate relationships into art or content. I don’t want to expose the people in my life to a broader audience non-consensually. But I am interested in taking my own deep feelings, whatever those are, and exposing them. Something as simple as crying, which I have trouble doing in front of intimate loved ones, can be hugely vulnerable and significant in front of an audience 

I think it’s partly because I was raised to not show that kind of emotion. There were things that we didn’t talk about, things that we didn’t show. I guess just through being openly trans and gay, I’m already acting disgracefully by that standard. I end up wanting to really push that and dig into my own discomfort. Disability adds a wrinkle on top of it all: because of internalized ableism, I sometimes feel like people are made uncomfortable just by seeing my body. So I really leaned into showing everything about my body as a reaction to the kind of values that I had internalized. 

AS You think of yourself as an endurance performer. Why endurance?

CM I think the interesting tension for me is in finding where the limits are and trying to stay at that place as long as possible. I don’t feel that I have better endurance than other people. Like: I know people with much better pain tolerances than I have! I guess that’s what makes my work interesting; people come to it for the reactions, to see me try to endure and last in the face of something that feels unendurable. I think that kind of dynamic — of watching someone volunteer for a severely painful experience — might feel familiar to the people who are watching. I’m not a stoic. I don’t have that ability to stay put together. I think audiences can put themselves in my position, to some degree.

AS I like the phrase you just used: “enduring the unendurable.” I always wonder what draws people to watching that happen, as someone who is drawn to it myself. 

CM I think so much of kink is about literalizing our overwhelming feelings within a relatively safe container. 

AS Tell me more. Your understanding of this world is built around care, mutual care.

CM Absolutely. I think it’s important for people to understand that kink is — when done right — heavily negotiated. Although the fantasy of there being no limits, no safe word, can be very hot, that’s not how it works in real life. When I talk about a container, I’m talking about a negotiated space where the person on the receiving end has the ability to end it if they need to — without retaliation, consequence, or even annoyance from the top. 

Within that space, a lot of really intense, taboo things can happen. But people in kink talk about it as “play” — it’s a play space. A partner of mine calls it “opposite day,” you know; when you’re doing kink, you can really let the intrusive thoughts win. You can say incredibly fucked up things, you can do incredibly fucked up things. And as long as that’s happening in a kink context, it can end if it needs to. There’s a wonderful kind of exploratory power in that. 

So to give an example: If I’m struggling with internalized ableism, or feelings that my body is disgusting, or that my disability is a liability to those around me, I can ask, within a kink container, for a top to degrade me for my disability. If it happened in public with someone I didn’t know, it would just be an assault — really cruel and inappropriate and probably illegal. I think comparing it to a haunted house can help for people who haven’t experienced this kind of thing before: It’s a way for me to explore things that I’m afraid of in a specific and safe context. I can kind of create the most exaggerated, scariest version of what I’m afraid of and have it play out with someone I trust, with a very defined beginning and end point. It gives me the freedom to explore things that might otherwise just be stuck in my intrusive thoughts or remain unapproachable as fears.

AS In your piece for our next issue, you start with a seemingly conflicting list of your own identities — a list that might make it difficult for your art to be legible. I think we got a taste of that difficulty when the term “lesbian boyfriend” hit the mainstream a couple of months ago. There were all these seedy characters coming out of the woodwork to be like: What’s that? Is this new? How could a lesbian be a boyfriend? But I think those of us who live in these communities, who spend our lives here, who love and work here, know that rigid labels aren’t always representative of practice. Still, it makes a certain amount of sense that people would be rallying around identity for protection.

CM Absolutely. I think that sort of rigidity comes up when people haven’t experienced enough in-person community. When your exposure to community is online — and I don’t say this in a derogatory way — you have a limited sense of community. I think that the approach to identity can become almost like math if you haven’t been in big rooms of people and experienced something that would tell you otherwise. Going back forever, queer identity has been very fluid and shifting. It’s such a cliche to say that people should read Stone Butch Blues, but it’s helpful.

I think it would be good for people to see identity categories as broad and useful, but not  necessarily real or limiting. It can be useful to describe yourself as a lesbian because the word is a legible shorthand. But when you say that, you shouldn’t be locking yourself into a single understanding of what the word means. And I think in practice, that’s never how it actually is; it’s not productive in the long run to try and create super specific taxonomies of identity. It honestly reminds me so much of insurance codes. I’ll say that I’m a trans woman who is a faggot, and if my doctor asks me what my sexuality is, I’ll say I’m bisexual — because that it’s the easiest thing to say, because I know he’s asking about the types of bodies that I’m having sexual intercourse with. Saying all this doesn’t even encapsulate the breadth of the attraction I have — but, for example, it’s a way for me to explain why I felt comfortable at the Tom of Finland Foundation. I feel very connected to the historical identity of gay maleness, even though I never identified as a gay man before I came out. I’m also a leatherdyke. So it’s complicated, it’s subjective. Kink is a space of play, and this is part of what can be played with.