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Jéssica Cristopherry, or the Secret of the Glamour of Divas
Márcia Rosa*
When outlining guidelines for an international conference on female sexuality, Lacan observed that such a congress would be “far from imposing upon us the threat of Tiresias’s fate” (Lacan, 1960/1998:737). Tiresias, it seems worth recalling, is the wandering seer whose speech reveals to Oedipus his hitherto unknown jouissance.
Legend has it that, upon separating two copulating snakes and killing the female, Tiresias was transformed into a woman. Seven years later, repeating the act, he was transformed into a man. Famous for his sexual transformations, he was invited to settle a dispute between Zeus and Hera over whether man or woman enjoyed greater pleasure in love. By revealing that, “if the jouissance of love were composed of ten parts, the woman would have nine and the man only one” (Grimal, 1990:439), Tiresias enraged Hera, who blinded him. Zeus, however, consoled him with the gift of prophecy and the privilege of living for seven human generations.
By introducing a cut into a copulation and killing the female, Tiresias encountered his destiny. Lacan nevertheless warns analysts that they may touch upon copulation — between man and woman, it is marked by the “there is no” — and may kill the female, that is, bring female sexuality into the field of language, without suffering Tiresias’s fate.
It is precisely this touching upon the feminine, sexual transformation and the feminine masquerade that leads us to the documentary Jéssica Cristopherry[1], produced in Salvador in 2012 by Ronei Jorge, Rodrigo Luna and actress and writer Paula Lice, with cinematography by Jerónimo Soffer and sound edition by Napoleão Cunha.
Some traces of Paula’s childhood suggest that scenes such as urinating standing up and the glamour of Broadway show-biz divas captivated her, leading her to give childhood characters the name Jéssica Cristopherry. As an adult, she retrieves and brings to life her fantasy of feminisation in the underground and cult world of sexual transformism.
The documentary follows Paula as she transforms into a drag queen with the help of the Spicy Girls, famous sexual transformists in Salvador: Carolina Vargas, Gina d’Mascar, Rainha Lou Lou, Valérie O’Hara and Mitta Lux. As Jéssica Cristopherry, Paula performs her show — her fifteen minutes of glory, as Andy Warhol might put it — to the sound of “Out Here on My Own”, the theme of Fame.
The nearly sixty-minute film, in which the drag queens accompany Paula in constructing Jéssica through lessons and accounts of how each created her own drag character, evokes another comment by Lacan: for the analyst, “it is not enough for him to sustain the function of Tiresias. He must also, as Apollinaire says, have breasts” (Lacan, 1964/1988:255).
In Apollinaire’s surrealist play, Tiresias’s breasts are two rubber balloons that metaphorize a gesture of liberation. Of semblants of the phallus, we might say. We thus have a field of artifices, constructed appearances and semblants of the phallus — stagings with symbolic value that address the real at stake: the real of castration, sexual difference and procreation, whether natural or assisted.
Jéssica Cristopherry brings sexual transformation onto the stage less to discuss gender differences and modes of jouissance than to celebrate the force of art. As theatre director Rodrigo Dourado indicates in the film, transformism emerges less as a sexual question — already given by the fact that the drag queen being constructed is originally a woman! — than as the construction of an artistic character.
The glamour of the transformist divas thus confronts us with a culture of excess and exaggeration as semblants, as possible treatments for the feminine continent, which remains in some sense obscure, or better put, noir.
By recording in sexual transformation something “larger than life”, the directors make their focus clear: to pay homage to sexual transformation as an art, to pay homage to art! It is art, above all, that is at stake in Jéssica Cristopherry.
Bravo! It is well worth watching!
* Psychoanalyst member of AMP–EBP. Practices psychoanalisys in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
Bibliographical References
APOLLINAIRE, Guillaume. The Breasts of Tiresias. São Paulo: Ed. Max Limonard Ltda, 1985.
GRIMAL, Pierre [1912] & Kershaw, Stephen. “Tiresias”. In: A concise dictionary of classical mythology. Basil Blackwell ED., Oxford, England, Cambridge, Mass., USA, England, 1990.
LACAN, Jacques. “Guidelines for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality”. In: Écrits. Rio de Janeiro: JZE, 1998.
LACAN, Jacques. (1964) The Seminar, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Rio de Janeiro: JZE, 1988.
[1] The documentary was produced by Movioca Content House + Buh!Filmes, with the collaboration of Domínio Público, UHU Filmes and Pequena Sala de Ideias, with support from the Government of the State of Bahia through the Demanda Espontânea/2011 public call. A short version is available on YouTube.
When outlining guidelines for an international conference on female sexuality, Lacan observed that such a congress would be “far from imposing upon us the threat of Tiresias’s fate” (Lacan, 1960/1998:737). Tiresias, it seems worth recalling, is the wandering seer whose speech reveals to Oedipus his hitherto unknown jouissance.
Legend has it that, upon separating two copulating snakes and killing the female, Tiresias was transformed into a woman. Seven years later, repeating the act, he was transformed into a man. Famous for his sexual transformations, he was invited to settle a dispute between Zeus and Hera over whether man or woman enjoyed greater pleasure in love. By revealing that, “if the jouissance of love were composed of ten parts, the woman would have nine and the man only one” (Grimal, 1990:439), Tiresias enraged Hera, who blinded him. Zeus, however, consoled him with the gift of prophecy and the privilege of living for seven human generations.
By introducing a cut into a copulation and killing the female, Tiresias encountered his destiny. Lacan nevertheless warns analysts that they may touch upon copulation — between man and woman, it is marked by the “there is no” — and may kill the female, that is, bring female sexuality into the field of language, without suffering Tiresias’s fate.
It is precisely this touching upon the feminine, sexual transformation and the feminine masquerade that leads us to the documentary Jéssica Cristopherry[1], produced in Salvador in 2012 by Ronei Jorge, Rodrigo Luna and actress and writer Paula Lice, with cinematography by Jerónimo Soffer and sound edition by Napoleão Cunha.
Some traces of Paula’s childhood suggest that scenes such as urinating standing up and the glamour of Broadway show-biz divas captivated her, leading her to give childhood characters the name Jéssica Cristopherry. As an adult, she retrieves and brings to life her fantasy of feminisation in the underground and cult world of sexual transformism.
The documentary follows Paula as she transforms into a drag queen with the help of the Spicy Girls, famous sexual transformists in Salvador: Carolina Vargas, Gina d’Mascar, Rainha Lou Lou, Valérie O’Hara and Mitta Lux. As Jéssica Cristopherry, Paula performs her show — her fifteen minutes of glory, as Andy Warhol might put it — to the sound of “Out Here on My Own”, the theme of Fame.
The nearly sixty-minute film, in which the drag queens accompany Paula in constructing Jéssica through lessons and accounts of how each created her own drag character, evokes another comment by Lacan: for the analyst, “it is not enough for him to sustain the function of Tiresias. He must also, as Apollinaire says, have breasts” (Lacan, 1964/1988:255).
In Apollinaire’s surrealist play, Tiresias’s breasts are two rubber balloons that metaphorize a gesture of liberation. Of semblants of the phallus, we might say. We thus have a field of artifices, constructed appearances and semblants of the phallus — stagings with symbolic value that address the real at stake: the real of castration, sexual difference and procreation, whether natural or assisted.
Jéssica Cristopherry brings sexual transformation onto the stage less to discuss gender differences and modes of jouissance than to celebrate the force of art. As theatre director Rodrigo Dourado indicates in the film, transformism emerges less as a sexual question — already given by the fact that the drag queen being constructed is originally a woman! — than as the construction of an artistic character.
The glamour of the transformist divas thus confronts us with a culture of excess and exaggeration as semblants, as possible treatments for the feminine continent, which remains in some sense obscure, or better put, noir.
By recording in sexual transformation something “larger than life”, the directors make their focus clear: to pay homage to sexual transformation as an art, to pay homage to art! It is art, above all, that is at stake in Jéssica Cristopherry.
Bravo! It is well worth watching!
* Psychoanalyst member of AMP–EBP. Practices psychoanalisys in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
Bibliographical References
APOLLINAIRE, Guillaume. The Breasts of Tiresias. São Paulo: Ed. Max Limonard Ltda, 1985.
GRIMAL, Pierre [1912] & Kershaw, Stephen. “Tiresias”. In: A concise dictionary of classical mythology. Basil Blackwell ED., Oxford, England, Cambridge, Mass., USA, England, 1990.
LACAN, Jacques. “Guidelines for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality”. In: Écrits. Rio de Janeiro: JZE, 1998.
LACAN, Jacques. (1964) The Seminar, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Rio de Janeiro: JZE, 1988.
[1] The documentary was produced by Movioca Content House + Buh!Filmes, with the collaboration of Domínio Público, UHU Filmes and Pequena Sala de Ideias, with support from the Government of the State of Bahia through the Demanda Espontânea/2011 public call. A short version is available on YouTube.
