Transfiguration: Body Horror and Euphoria
A Conversation with Artist, Dorian Keeffe
I looked at him from across the gallery, chatting with the other attendees and glowing. Years worth of paintings draped the walls: portraits of friends new and old, identities new and old, and wounds new and old. They were all a testament to the trying, but resilient past few years of Dorian’s life where they began to medically transition and now identify as transmasc. I met Dorian slightly before they started this journey, and looking at him now in his element: a gallery surrounded by their art and friends, made me feel sentimental in a way that’s difficult to articulate.
One of my favorite pieces at the gallery opening at 13 Forest
in Arlington, MA was Dorian’s piece, Transfigure, (a cropped version is shown at the top of this page). A nod, like many of Dorian’s paintings to the parable from The Bible of the Transfiguration of Jesus, where Jesus becomes radiant, glowing, upon a high mountain as his followers and apostles look on in amazement.
In Christian teachings, the Transfiguration marks a key moment where human nature encounters the divine. The mountain serves as the meeting place of the temporal and the eternal, with Jesus standing at the center, bridging heaven and earth.
When I met Dorian in 2022, I had just started my own hormone therapy as part of my cancer treatment. I wasn’t taking testosterone, but I was getting lupron shots to shut down my ovaries. Lupron is often used in transmasc hormone replacement therapy (HRT). And I was taking a tamoxifen pill daily to rid my body of estrogen. I often joked with Dorian that I was becoming genderless.
It was said as a joke, but at the time it was also a serious sentiment I felt in the waning hours of the morning, when I would wake up profusely sweating-my hair a thin layer of fuzz atop my head, my body unrecognizable after chemo and surgery. And now the hormones that I had grown accustomed to all my life had fled. I was confused, frustrated, and felt like I was on a train that I couldn’t get off. I had always been into horror movies since I was a little girl, but I had never related to the body horror sub-genre like I do now, post cancer treatment.
Often the trans representation we encounter in the media focuses on the pain of being trans: discrimination, gender dysphoria, familial rifts, societal pressure…
But euphoria is also a part of the trans experience: learning to love yourself, finding your family, transcending societal expectations, becoming who you have always wanted to be. To Dorian, the pleasure and pain of being trans exist as two sides of the same coin.
“For me body horror is a transformation. Either you’re transformed into a corpse against your will, or you’re transformed into something monstrous”
Dorian tells me as we sit at my kitchen table. For a young trans person going through puberty, your body changes against your will and you’re left on the other side with someone unfamiliar and uncomfortable.
“I felt like my bones were changing in a way that was wrong, and I couldn’t put them back ever again. That was very acutely horror to me. I think about werewolf movies as being very trans, or The Fly or The Thing. Your body is changing and it’s horrific and you’re not in control, you can’t do anything about it.”
“Now I’m in full control of my second puberty, to an excruciatingly medical degree, and my body is changing just as much, if not faster than my first puberty, but now it’s changing into something familiar finally.”
“People want to see gender transition as horror. You hear from conservative people all the time that I’m mutilating my body, I’m doing irreparable damage to my body, especially now that I’m going into top-surgery soon. They don’t get that the damage had already happened to my body, and now I’m starting a radical healing process.”
See Dorian Keeffe’s work in All at Once an Exhibition at 13 Forest Gallery
On View until November 15th
I hope you enjoyed the third week of OCTOVERTURE. Each week of October I’ll post a new article collaborating with brilliant creators in the occult and horror space.
Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an update! Next week, for the final week of the series(!!) I’ll be speaking with Director, Kristen Semedo on her latest short horror film Vermin.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to A Body That Enjoys Itself to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.