Queerly Comprehensible: The Nonbinary Art of Kris Grey

Abstract: This essay argues that nonbinary artist Kris Grey deploys a genderqueer aesthetic to undo taxonomy. Their ceramic sculpture and performance art cross and diffuse binaries through reversals, implosions, conversations, and invitations. I contextualize Grey’s art within the work of other contemporary artists who have creatively investigated and engineered gender, sex, and sexuality. Following Vittorio Gallese, I argue that Grey’s embodied images haptically share nonbinary physicality with audiences. Through centrifugal and centripetal reconfigurations, they make new experiences visible, imaginable, and available. Following Caroline Walker Bynum, I argue that by queerly foregrounding the nonbinary underpinning of a master aesthetic discourse, Grey shows the seemingly unfamiliar nonbinary body to be affectively comprehensible.