The Only Person Who Sounds Like Azealia Banks Is Azealia Banks

 

The year Azealia Banks finally decided to give up on living in Los Angeles, the wildfires were so apocalyptic that the whole sky turned blood orange. “I remember opening my door one morning to get an Amazon package,” she tells me one night in late January, “and there was, like, soot, falling on my tongue.” Her Californian friends were puzzled by her distress. This happens all the time, they promised, optimism superseding fact. Never mind that she couldn’t breathe, or go to the weed store without getting a funny look. “I was just like, ‘I need to move to the wettest part of the fucking country,’” she says. A drought is no place for a self-styled mermaid. So, Florida. Where everyone owns guns, and so everyone minds their business.
 
It seems strange and strangely fitting that Banks, who is as New York as they come, should feel at home in the heart of the American unconscious, what Joan Didion called the nation’s “psychic centre”. Shit gets weird in the most mystical American state. It’s like all the loucheness and weirdness of US culture drips down and gathers at its southernmost tip. Some credit the absurdism to the yearlong humid summers, others the wild diversity of 21 million people stuffed together on an electoral battleground, and still others the golden promise of laissez-faire living. Dysfunction is the governing logic, or illogic. Carl Hiaasen, our foremost chronicler of Florida’s “amiable depravity”, once referred to it as a “magnet for outlaws and scoundrels”.
 
And how else to describe Banks without first acknowledging her roguishness, her lawlessness, her aversion to convention? The rules have never seemed to apply, or even occur, to her. She works against trend, smuggling into hip hop her glitchy, rave-friendly sounds with such virtuosic ease that you forget to question how bizarre the songs really are. “I do have some house songs, but a lot of my category is technically electronic music, and people really do gloss over how great of a traditional rapper I am,” she says. “I’ve done everything. I’m singing opera on ‘JFK’. I’m doing dembow on ‘Salchichón’. I’m doing bossa nova with that cover of ‘Chega de Saudade’. I put out a fucking Christmas record. I just like music.”
 
Banks’s discography is playful and energetic and deeply original. It has the gilded sheen of invincibility. It’s brash, raunchy, intoxicatingly confident. She’s a technical wordsmith who foregrounds cleverness, and arranges her verses with a preternatural ear for nursery-rhyme assonance that doubles down on its often nonsensical, juvenile humour. On her latest single, “New Bottega” – which, last autumn, had everyone and their gay mother yelling “New Bottega, Prada-da” – Banks affects an Italian accent over a thumping electroclash beat, lovingly reciting a list of high fashion labels before delivering a characteristically Banksian bar:
 
       “I put the boy in Galliano, now he’s a fuckin’ model / I’mma make him famous, rename him, I’m icin’ out his chain and / Still grippin’ the stainless, stay dangerous, ’cause most of these n***as is brainless…”
 
She’s always at home on any house beat, but Banks is also impressively chameleonic. She can glide from acid house and post-disco to surf rock and bachata, all within the space of a single track. “I make up my own genres a lot of the time,” she tells me with casual indifference. Say what you will about her: The only person who sounds like Azealia Banks is Azealia Banks.
 
But the ferocity that charges this command over language is, not at all coincidentally, the same ferocity that gets her in trouble. When the New York Times profiled Banks in 2012, the first line in the piece made reference to her “filthy mouth”. “I grew up in America,” she says matter-of-factly, “I grew up watching South Park and All in the Family. Like, I grew up reading US history textbooks.” When people talk about her, they tend to lapse into the conditional: “She’s so talented,” they begin, “but…” Press headlines have for years been marked by loose adaptations of “Azealia Banks is making enemies again”, be it record-label executives or bloggers or discarded managers or other musicians, and the hip-hop blogs have made it their collective mission to anatomise every single beef the rapper has ever lived through, cashing in clicks on her passionate sparring and then harkening back to it whenever she releases new music. One downside of modern celebrity is that you can never outrun past versions of yourself.
 
There was a point in time when Azealia Banks was the promising ‘young new face’ on the block with her pick of the litter on record deals, a wide-eyed LaGuardia dropout getting flown out to perform at Karl Lagerfeld’s birthday party in Paris, a 21-year-old force of nature with awestruck cosigns from hip-hop legends like Nas (“She has incredible star power… the total package”) and a then-still-golden Kanye West (who, early on, was keen to sign her). There was no shortage of industry professionals who would have publicly proclaimed Banks as the future of music. She seemed inevitable.
 
Banks belongs to a lineage of artist-critics who, despite the consequences, have no qualms in voicing their displeasures with the grand betrayals of the rotting, patriarchal, white supremacist culture they’ve found themselves born into. And because she doesn’t mince words, the focus sometimes lands on her language as opposed to her argument. “It’s just like, the audacity of these white millennials who are maybe one or two generations removed from a grandparent who would have had me hung from a tree for drinking out of the wrong water fountain,” she says. “The nerve of you to call me a bigot because I am making use of the language that I have been made to assimilate into.” The art has never suffered. But Banks is caught in a double bind where the qualities that fund and make possible her music are simultaneously the ones that thwart and complicate her career.
 
She’s also a Black woman with bipolar disorder working in an industry that fails, at every turn, to offer her any support. “There was a point in time when people didn’t want to book me,” she says. “I had n***as stealing my royalties and all type of shit. Like, there was a point in time when I was so fucking broke that I was sleeping in a storage space. You know, famous and broke.” It’s true that she has said some deeply regrettable things – her occasional transphobic remarks have been particularly jarring – many of which she has apologised for. Neither she, nor her fans, are unaware of these missteps. It’s equally true that tabloids have often elided her queerness when describing instances in which she has been ‘homophobic’. And there’s a failure to acknowledge the ways in which the ballroom scene, where shade is the lingua franca, has inflected both her sound and how she wields language to read other queer people. Some of the frustrations that Banks’s fans have with her are profoundly warranted. But it could be argued that her greatest trespass is refusing respectability, demanding to make music and exist on her own terms, and broadcasting her unfiltered inner monologue as if the world were a small room with a locked door and some close friends inclined to read her in good faith.
 
“I can be a little messy,” says Banks. “Everybody makes a bad joke sometimes. Like, who cares? Quentin Tarantino gets paid $500m to make really bad jokes all the time, you know? Come on. Let me get my shit off.”

 
Azealia Banks was born in Harlem in 1991, to two older sisters and a mother who worked long hours at a retail store on 57th Street. Her father died of pancreatic cancer when she was two, and in the only mental image she has left of him, he is lying in a casket. “That’s why I sound like a Dominican,” she says. “Because I was raised by Dominican caretakers. My mom would throw them a couple thousand dollars and just disappear for five weeks.” (On songs like “Gimme a Chance” and “Salchichón”, Banks sporadically slips into perfect Spanish with the unexpected confidence of Ben Affleck.) Her mother never told her where she was going, never gave an explanation. “I would just be in my head, like, ‘Does my mother not want me any more? Is she coming back? Is she alive?’”
 
She also developed her musicality in part because of her mother, who, when she was around, would do chores around the house naked while listening to Rachelle Ferrell, Chaka Khan, Donna Summer and Whitney Houston. Banks was ten when her mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but their relationship was volcanic long before that. She had to grow up quickly in a home where she was forced to develop a kind of emotional armour. “She would brag about how she did witchcraft and killed my father,” says Banks. On mornings when she had to ride the bus to school after physical altercations, she would listen to Destiny’s Child’s “Happy Face”, and do her best to stop crying so the social workers wouldn’t put her in foster care. By 14, when she began studying acting at LaGuardia, she had moved out of her mother’s home and in with one of her sisters.
 
“I was always being told that I was a bad person, and I guess I kind of just accepted it as the truth,” she says. “And I think a lot of that early indoctrination, especially during my fundamental years, followed me into the music industry – where you would see me lashing out at people and just, like, being bad. Because that’s who I was told I was. When I came into fame and I had all these people showering me with love and admiration, [telling me] I was good and they liked the things I was creating, it was really uncomfortable for me. I didn’t know how to accept any of that. Nobody ever told me that I was pretty when I was little.”
 
Banks didn’t grow up dreaming of being a rapper. It happened naturally. She did grow up with dreams of being famous, but she always assumed it would be for acting, and was genuinely disappointed when she turned 14 and still hadn’t landed a show on Nickelodeon. “I just started rapping because I had some boyfriend who rapped, and all his friends rapped, too,” she says. “And I thought it was so cool.” Writing rhymes became an outlet into which she could funnel her disaffection with the acting career that wasn’t materialising. “I would always come and try to butt into the cipher, and it would be some wack-ass shit. They would just snatch the blunt out of my hand and skip me. And I would just say to myself, ‘One day, I’m gonna come back and I’m gonna get all y’all n***as. Watch.’”
 
Eventually, that day did arrive. She spent two months writing to a Ladytron beat and, when it was finally ready, she came back to the cipher to spit the verse a cappella:
 
         “I’m not the don diva / I’m beyond you don skeezers / I get cake from quick chicks with long heaters / One-seven hot stepping like Tekken / I’mma be a main bitch in the game like Nina.”
 
The verse oozed with the confidence, defiance and provocation that makes Banks such a joy to listen to, and when she rapped it, nobody snatched the blunt from her.
 
    “The fake ID don’t got a mistake / Miss Banks keeps these n***as caught up in a teen angst / They’ve been trying to look, trying to fuck / Since I first came through with the triple-A cup / Now I got hip slip tips in the butt / Now I’m on radar like warm weather fronts.”
 
The room burst into cheers; it was clear she was a natural. This was her first time actually writing a verse, and already she was miles ahead of her boyfriend and his crew. Her friend Johnny Five convinced her to record the song, and she put it on Myspace under the name Miss Bank$. And she kept on writing, kept on recording her demos. Every day after school at 4pm, she would go home, get on Myspace and send the songs to everyone she could. Eventually they reached Diplo, who became an instant fan, and she signed a development deal with XL Recordings, where artists like M.I.A., Thom Yorke and Adele had made their homes. It seemed she was on her way, until it didn’t.

 
The whole lofty, seductive promise of a development deal is that the artist will receive guidance from music executives who are, supposedly, invested in harnessing and cultivating their raw creative spirit. They’re meant to shepherd a musician from being unrefined to a kind of ultimate self-actualisation, which is to say the goal is to fashion them into something genuinely bankable. But any juncture where art and business meet inevitably reveals the faultlines of those competing interests. The music business is a capitalist enterprise, after all, in which the artist obtains the status of product. And it’s often Black women in particular who end up struggling against the definitions of profitability – sex appeal, pop appeal – that are handed down to them by an industry shaped by a white male critical gaze.
 
To hear Banks tell the story is to get the sense that XL didn’t really know what to do with her. She didn’t like the beats that Richard Russell, the label’s owner, was sending her, in part because they were often pulled from the reject piles of other, more established musicians. The label didn’t like the songs that she was sending them, in part because they didn’t conform to the sound the executives had envisioned for her. “It was surprising to me, because it was like, ‘I let you guys convince me to drop out of high school to write raps about sex, but nobody is developing me,’” she says. “I remember them signing Odd Future around the same time and being very, very jealous. Because they were being mentored and I was left by the wayside.” She felt like she was on the outside looking in. She couldn’t understand why nobody thought to put her in the same room as Tyler, the Creator, because they shared a kind of anarchic spirit, and she was a fan of him and Earl Sweatshirt in particular. “I just wanted to feel like I was part of the XL fam.”
 
Odd Future courted moral panic and, in its place, found love. Listening to their music was as macabre and as fascinating as witnessing a car crash. The world they conjured was bruised, violent and nihilistic, pushing vulgarity to the very limits of what it could contain; women, when invoked, were typically in the process of being abducted, raped, killed and/or dismembered. The group liked to refer to themselves as “Black nazis”, and made frequent use of childishly scrawled swastikas. In high school I owned one of their t-shirts, black with a giant inverted white cross emblazoned on the back. Labels started bidding wars to sign them; even Steve Rifkind, who launched the Wu-Tang Clan, Mobb Deep and Three 6 Mafia, participated in the madness. In 2011, XL beat out Interscope to land Tyler’s debut studio album, Goblin, and I distinctly recall reading a review in NME that counted 213 instances of the word ‘faggot’ and its variants across the 73-minute runtime. (It didn’t, but the figure stuck.) Odd Future was hypermasculine, brutal, antisocial, stomach-turning – and beloved.
 
Banks, conversely, was too much to handle, though she was just as brazen and destabilised. “It was some misogynoir shit,” she says of her treatment by the label. Her online outbursts and refusal to sublimate herself didn’t earn her the title of “self-possessed” or “boss” or “genius” that might equip a man exhibiting similar behaviour. “I was still finding my voice as a songwriter,” she says. Your art, never mind your image, is a lot to trust someone with – particularly when you’re still a teenager. “I’m someone who, if you want something from me that I don’t want to do, you have to pay. And not, like, 20Gs. I’m not about to switch my whole personality up and have you put this image of me out there for $20,000.” She pauses, laughing in disbelief. “Like, come on. I’m from Harlem. Are you kidding?”
 
Maybe Banks really was being bratty, or amateurish, or demanding. Maybe the label was just trying to mould her into their version of a profitable star and make them all rich. Everyone was, as always, just trying to get what they wanted. But it all soured in the end. XL didn’t reply to her email when she sent them the Machinedrum-produced “L8R”, a filthy hip-hop cut that ends with an ode to “ratchet bitches” and eventually turned up on her critically acclaimed EP, Fantasea. The tension with Richard Russell reached such a fever pitch that, when she sent him “212” – the song that everyone remembers exactly where they first heard, the song she wrote from a place of desperation and anger, the song that Rolling Stone named one of the best of the last century, the song that any music executive worth their salt would go to war to get their hands on, he — and I am incredulous when she says this – dropped her from the label.

 
It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the way Azealia Banks wants or needs to make her art is fundamentally incompatible with the structure and demands of the recording industry. She is uncompromising. Since the atomisation of her development deal with XL, she has fallen out with a handful of other record labels. In 2012, she signed with Interscope and Polydor Records, and began working on her first, and only, studio album, Broke With Expensive Taste. The label spent $2m on the record. But when she turned it in, they complained there was no hit single – nothing that would climb the Billboard 100.
 
Listening to the project, it’s not difficult to understand their confusion. BWET is a brilliant, psychedelic trip that treats genre like an all-you-can-eat buffet. It’s a shiny, intricate mess of hip-house, R&B, UK garage, dubstep, trap, dance-pop, bachata, jazz, drum & bass etc. The label wanted something with mainstream appeal, but Banks had instead set out to make an album that was anti-pop. The project, like the artist, resisted easy categorisation. Somehow, she managed to get out of the deal with all of her songs, and released the album with Prospect Park, once more to critical acclaim.
 
Versions of this story surface again and again throughout the artist’s career. When this profile was initially assigned to me in early January, part of the premise was that Banks had recently joined Parlophone Records, the same UK-based label that signed Ella Fitzgerald, The Beatles and Radiohead. Nearly ten years had passed since she’d released BWET, and another six since her second mixtape, Slay-Z. The new deal brought with it the promise of new music, flickering on the horizon like a mirage coalescing into something real.
 
But a couple of nights before our interview, Banks announced, via Instagram, that she had severed ties with the label after just a few months of being there. They clashed on ideas about the marketing for “New Bottega”, and even though Banks had only signed the deal to find a home for Fantasea II, the A&R team at the label remained noncommittal. “It was that whole thing again I’d heard so many times before. They always come with the whole, you know, ‘Just play the game, play this, play that,’” she says. “But it’s like, what game am I fucking playing? The game of making white people richer than I will ever get off my own shit, just to get it out there? It’s like, no. Starve these n***as out.”
 
The general consensus online, after the news of the split, was that Banks had burned more bridges for no reason. But her comments instantly bring to mind a conversation that the Long Beach rapper Vince Staples had last spring with a reporter at Complex, who made a casual reference to “the music game”. “But what’s the game?” asked Staples, with a knowing smile. A game implies winners and losers. And in the business of music, there’s an impression among label executives that they’re giving artists an opportunity, and so there should be no complaints about anything as base as project ownership. “They don’t call any other genre ‘the game’,” said Staples. “They call the rap game the ‘rap game’ because there’s a bunch of n***as running around, and they don’t want to give Black people shit.”

 
Black musicians have for decades probed the mysteries of other worlds in their art. In his poem, “Astronauts”, Robert Hayden once described the moon as an “Absolute Otherwhere”, and it’s no coincidence that space is the place where so many of our great Black escapists tend to go. To be Black is already to occupy an alternate reality: you are forced to accept as fact that which is not, by any accounts, real, but which still shapes your life in undeniably real ways. “The impossible attracts me,” Sun Ra once said, “because everything possible has been done and the world didn’t change.” Is it any wonder that Parliament, OutKast and Missy Elliott opted out of the merely ‘real’ or possible? Instead they built their own worlds, supplanted the limits of history with the possibilities of biomythography. Which is the difference, says Banks, between a true artist and an entertainer: the former creates a universe for you to live in, while the latter just puts on a good show.
 
I was 14 and feverishly scrolling tumblr when I first saw the cartoon brown-skinned mermaid with the long aquamarine hair on the cover of her 2012 mixtape, Fantasea. The character resonated with the nautical Afrofuturist aesthetics of Detroit techno duo Drexciya, but Banks says she hadn’t heard of them when she adopted the seapunk look. “I was blown away when I found them. Because here you had these two guys creating a myth around slaves who were thrown off slave ships and then grew gills and evolved so their bodies could survive in those conditions. And I was like, nah, we’re tapped in. All music geniuses are tapped into some primordial database of knowledge that exists in the subconscious or the pineal gland,” she says, her laughter dissolving into earnestness. “It gave me this sense of validation, knowing there were other people who felt like that.”
 
I ask her what she means by this. There is a certain type of artist who, confronted with a life that renders their basic survival tenuous, invents a character who can endure and even transcend the precarity of their circumstances. Did the myth of the mermaid spring from a desire to project an evolved version of herself into the world? One who could not only survive, but also thrive, amid the dangers of the deep sea? “A lot of people don’t know that, when I say I’m a mermaid, it’s not just some cosplay thing,” she says. Banks is initiated in Palo Mayombe, an African diasporic religion that was brought to the Caribbean during the transatlantic slave trade, and identifies with the Yoruban deity Yemaya, a protector of women who is often depicted as a mermaid. Like any other non-Abrahamic religion, Palo tends to be derided and misunderstood in the western world. So when Banks went on Instagram Live in late 2016 to show a room with evidence of “three years’ worth of Brujería” – dried chicken blood – caking the walls, it was almost a self-fulling prophecy that she was immediately written off as insane. “That’s why it’s like, fuck you, I don’t want to hear anything about animal sacrifice. Because this is where I’ve found identity. This is where I’ve found comfort. This is who has been watching over me my entire life.”
 
Reporters are invariably plagued by the fear that their subject will not share enough of themselves – that, when the recorder is on and the questions begin, the star will become shy and reticent, retreating into the comfort of their privacy, and the reporter will emerge from the interview having learned nothing at all new. Banks is neither shy nor reticent. She can’t help but bare it all. She’s always bringing her whole entire self, as Carrie Mae Weems once put it, to the kitchen table. She can be commanding and authoritative in one moment and sensitive, almost fragile, in the next. She speaks in the longform and never offers a one-word answer. It’s a way of being I’ve encountered most often among people who desperately want to be understood, and it surprises me that so few people seem to understand her. What does it mean to be given the gift of language and then told that you’re misusing it? To have so much to say and find the people around you can’t stomach it?

 
Lately, Banks has been feeling good. She seems grounded, happy. She has recorded around 50 songs for Fantasea II, and another 25 for Business & Pleasure, the follow-up to BWET, which she says she doesn’t really know how to describe. “It’s rap,” she says, noncommittally. There’s some Spanish drill, and some R&B songs where she feels like she’s really showcasing her singing. “My voice has definitely matured a lot, and I feel really sexy when I sing now. When you’re younger, especially when you come from theatre like I do, you’re kind of listening to yourself as you sing, to make sure that you sound pretty. But I don’t care about sounding pretty. Because I’ve realised that I’m fucking gorgeous.”
 
Banks isn’t nearly as online as she once was, and doesn’t really pay attention to what people say about her there. Instead, she pours a significant amount of energy into CheapyXO, the store she founded in 2017 that sells products like hydrosol mists, acupressure tools, herbal teas and soaps to help alleviate haemorrhoids from anal sex. (There was a time when gay men were tweeting her before and after photos of their literal assholes, as though she was the fairy godmother of their colons.)
 
These days, her idea of success has more to do with maintaining a routine. She has just moved into a new home, and is trying to get rid of some of the clothes she has accumulated over the past couple of years. “Some of these designers get mad and be like, ‘I’m never sending Azealia clothes again, because she’s just gonna sell them to her fans,’” she says. She’s far more secure now than she was in late 2017, when she was famous and broke and living in a WeWork office lined by the clothes she was selling on Depop. Now, she’s focusing on the small things: decluttering is one route to peace of mind. Over the past year, she’s had a lot of revelations. “I’ve realised that my existence is not a consequence – I am not somehow cursed because I am of African descent,” she says. “My existence is part of the natural phenomena of the planet Earth, of the flora and the fauna.” She has been trying to break her “karmic cycle”, and reminds herself often that she is, in fact, a good person.
 
At some point near the end of our interview, I recall that Banks was on the cover of Dazed ten years ago. It’s a photograph of her looking prototypically defiant, with her trademark aquamarine hair cascading around the sides of her face and her fingers lifted to her lips, inflating a red condom. The issue was banned in seven countries. I begin to formulate a sentence about her return to the magazine, but she misinterprets my phrasing as an observation about a general comeback. “But I never left,” she insists. “I’ve always been here.” Earlier in our conversation, she said something similar, when she was in the midst of expressing her frustrations with the way that her fans have spoken of her recently, and I swore I could hear her rolling her eyes. “People are always like, oh, it’s the Azealia Banks redemption arc. But who the fuck am I redeeming myself for? You should be trying to redeem yourselves for me.”
 
 
The A-Z of Azealia Banks. By Connor Garrel. Dazed, March 13, 2023.

Azealia Banks made a Hanukkah song. It’s called Queen of Sheba, features a klezmer beat, and is, she says, “hot as fuck”. Not that it’ll see the light of day yet. Kanye West (AKA Ye) “fucked it up” by spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories, she says.
 
We’re speaking in mid-December, ahead of a new single that marks Banks’s return to a major label. By extension, it’s also a return to commentary – an art form the New York City-raised rapper has mastered as much as her diamond-hard and jaw-droppingly dexterous music – if a conflicted one. “I feel like Kanye has made it so garbage to be an entertainer with any opinion,” she says, before teasing her detractors: “If anybody was ever praying for Azealia Banks to finally shut the fuck up, Kanye has provided the platform.”
 
But over the course of two hours on Zoom this, naturally, turns out to be far from the truth. Banks speaks, with a charming and destabilising mix of irony and earnestness, about everything from her new home in Florida, to her one-time friend and collaborator Ye, to her place in the music industry – and why she has decided to return to a major label after splitting from Universal in 2014 and independently releasing some of her best singles ever.
 
Those songs – among them 2018’s glamorous self-confidence anthem Anna Wintour, the simmering 2021 Galcher Lustwerk collaboration Fuck Him All Night – supercharged a gen Z-led reappraisal of Banks as an innovator and prophetic commentator who had been unfairly pilloried. They set the stage for comeback single New Bottega, a booming, stylish house track and the launch of Banks’s second round in the spotlight. She’s bullish about its prospects: “I genuinely feel like, 13 years in, New Bottega might be my Hot 100 debut,” she says, sounding sanguine. Then she adds: “Even if that bitch debuts at 99, I’mma be like ‘A-ha-ha-ha-ha, bitch!’”

 
In 2012, after the runaway success of her bratty and still-brilliant breakout single, 212, Banks signed to Interscope. After two years of label execs saying that her debut album in-the-making lacked hits, Banks grew “tired of talking to these white guys” and begged them to release her, and her record, from the contract. In 2014, she partnered with the label Prospect Park and released Broke With Expensive Taste to widespread critical acclaim. But the optics of leaving a major as a rising star are less than great; combined with Banks’s propensity for public fights, it seemed as if she was yet another internet success story who had burned through her talent early. Now, Banks is signed to Parlophone, because despite her recent DIY success, a major gets her closer to one specific goal: “I deserve respect,” she says, staring intensely down the camera. When not rinsing her peers or joking about haters, she is steadfast and dead serious.
 
Wearing a magenta T-shirt from her skincare company, CheapyXO, and a matching visor, clutching a glass of rosé, Banks explains that her reputation has outpaced her to a degree that has made life difficult. In 2019, she made headlines after being removed from a flight – an incident that Banks and other passengers said was instigated by an attendant asking if she was “going to be trouble”. In 2020, her former manager and Prospect Park head Jeff Kwatinetz sued her for extortion; Banks countersued for breach of contract, fraud and deceit, claiming Kwatinetz groomed her.
 
She is troubled by the idea that she is an easy target. “Even though I know that the internet is not a real place, there are enough people who take it seriously enough to feel like they can put their hands on me in real life,” she says, wearily. “They feel like they can launch frivolous lawsuits and use this villainous, stupid narrative against me. Even just trying to rent a house and have some peace, you run into these people who are like: ‘Oh, I can throw a rock at her, and if she throws a rock back, I can say look, she’s exactly as you say on the internet.’”
 
  
So Banks has stopped looking at what people say about her on the internet. The pandemic gave her a new clarity. She is speaking from a hotel room in Sydney in the midst of a contentious tour in which she and the promoter are engaged in a vicious public blame game over cancelled shows (the one topic her publicist deems off-limits) and turns her life lessons into clean aphorisms: “The same way you need to be careful about the things you eat, you have to be careful about the things that you read.” Now she wonders why she accepted criticism from “people who never knew me, never had any desire to ask me why I was always so sad, so angry. They would just write me off as a bad person.”
 
She says that she’s come to understand that the “selective” rules around acceptable conduct in the white media and on social media platforms will never serve her. She cites the “double standards” of Twitter, where she gets criticised for arguing with the likes of Perez Hilton but misogyny, racism and ableism run rampant. (“If I had a dollar for every Lady Gaga fan or Lana Del Rey fan that has called me a ‘nigger’ on Twitter, I might be a billionaire right now.”) In 2014, around when Black Lives Matter protests began in the US, Banks saw those double standards come into sharp relief. “All these very fucking graphic, psychologically terrorising videos of Black people being murdered circulated, pushed under the guise of being news,” she says.
 
Banks realised that “we don’t have any rights here in America, unless you put your fucking phone down”, so she put her phone down. Besides, she found people online tiresome. “When it gets into like, ‘sexuality is politics’, oh my fucking god,” she says. “People on Twitter are talking about sex all damn day, and no one is fucking.”
 
Living alone in Los Angeles in 2020, Banks says she was “going through it” – “isolating and scared”, rapping every day, focusing on CheapyXO and becoming disenchanted with the politics of a city she characterises as shallow and virtue-signalling. “Every which way I turn [in LA] there’s a Black Lives Matter sign, and then we’re watching swathes of Latino people die every day because they’re considered essential workers,” she says. “There are no Latino Lives Matter signs. That’s not to negate any of the very real issues that Black people in America face, but in a rich state like California, in a neighbourhood like Silver Lake – here’s Jenny with her fuckin’ like” – she adopts a Valley girl accent – “biodynamic wine bar and her vegan cafe. She’s got a Black Lives Matter sign in the window, but sis, did you pay attention to papi who delivered the milk? Did he get a free cup of coffee? I had to go because I can’t do this – either Covid was gonna kill me, or depression. I’m going to fucking Miami.”

 
Why Miami? In Florida, people “mind their fuckin’ business”, she says. Banks feels that the media lies about the oft-mocked Republican haven, and says she feels “way safer” there than in Los Angeles, where she feels that she needs a gun. Part of that, she claims, is down to the governor, Ron DeSantis, the Republican primary frontrunner whom she sees as more pragmatic than most political leaders. “He’s focused on the basic shit,” she says. “There are elderly people in our country without walkers, who don’t have the money to get a septic tooth pulled. If we’re talking about divvying up healthcare funds, those situations should take precedence to facial feminisation surgeries and stuff like that. I mean, I get it – but that’s a cosmetic surgery. Like, does your penis work? Can you pee? You’re not as in trouble as the older woman who can’t afford her dialysis. I think DeSantis is practical about a lot of things.”
 
Banks likes DeSantis for what she sees as some level of common decency, a quality she doesn’t see in a lot of people – least of all Ye, whom she collaborated with in 2012 on a handful of never-released songs. Banks brings him up, describing him as a “grifter”. As we speak, he’s been spouting antisemitic conspiracies and praising Hitler. Her problems with him began in earnest in 2020, when he said at a presidential campaign rally that he and then-wife Kim Kardashian had considered aborting their eldest child. “You’re a fucking idiot for basically sacrificing the mental health of your daughter,” she says.
 
Banks’s tone becomes one of disgust. She’s speaking from experience: she has said she comes from an abusive home and is troubled by the potential legacy of Ye’s outbursts on his children. “Just because you can’t get attention from Kim Kardashian, you turn it on your fucking daughter. Kanye, you’re an abusive asshole and you’re a pussy for picking on that little-ass girl. You are the last person we need to hear from about Black fatherhood and the Black family unit.”
 
Banks says she saw this cruel streak in Ye when she first worked with him, but it hit her differently a decade ago, when she revelled in being his confidante. Back then, she says, “there was a culture in hip-hop that dark-skinned women were ugly,” she says. “To meet him and hear him talk shit about Kim Kardashian” – around the time they started dating – “it gave me a little bit of glee, because you’re young, and you’re dumb, and you don’t get it yet. When you’re getting all this messaging from hip-hop that you are exactly the type of Black woman that it doesn’t want, and then you meet someone that you like, because the music is so good, and he’s like: ‘I hate this white bitch’ – you’re like: ‘Yesss!’” Later she realised how naive she had been. “As time goes on, it’s like: ‘Wait, you hated my Black ass, too! You hate all women!’”
 
Does she believe there’s a way back for him? “I would hope not – because you have had it very fucked up for a very long time,” she says. “Kanye, did you know that the Bible was the very book used to enslave your dumb ass? Have you ever read the Bible? I’m sure you haven’t. ‘Oh, Hitler was a good guy’ – do you think Hitler liked negroes? It’s way past shock culture and just into stupidity. You deserve to reap what you sow. In the future, when you’re walking down Times Square and you see Kanye West drinking flat Sprite out of a McDonald’s cup out of the garbage can, you can bring it all back to this moment.”
 
When choosing collaborators now, Banks says it’s about “who’s putting the money on the table first”. She’s realised that “this is the music industry and not the music friends”, and that she doesn’t “have any time to be part of some weak white girl’s PR campaign about how Azealia Banks is a bad person”. She’s seemingly alluding to Grimes – in 2018, she arrived at the home of Elon Musk, then Grimes’s partner, to collaborate with her, only to end up deserted and stuck there, live-blogging as Musk tweeted jokes about Tesla stock while allegedly high on acid. She and Grimes shared screenshots of their hostile DM interactions and both artists were subpoenaed in a lawsuit against Musk. (Banks later apologised for the “seriously unexpected consequences” of her actions.) I ask for clarity but Banks has already moved on: “The girls gotta get to New Bottega levels before they’re getting spoken about by the don diva, by the everlasting diva,” she says of herself, in a hammy drawl.

 
Despite being back on a major label, Banks is trying to avoid industry nonsense, “to preserve my own natural ability to create and be inspired by music”, she says. “What is success in music any more? Nobody knows, and for the people who do know, it means scheduling your smiles and crafting some weird character. I think it’s really unfair that people call Azealia Banks a has-been – you are a never-was, and a never-fucking-will-be. You didn’t have the courage to put yourself out there because you were afraid you were going to fail, but I’ve had success. You only have to be right one time to be considered successful, and my batting average is very fucking high.”
 
At this point, success, for Banks, is about “finding happiness after a long, dramatic childhood … What if I’m writing these songs as a form of redemption? That would blow an audience’s mind – you’re not doing this to entertain me?”
 
The past few years have been about Banks getting back to what she’s best at: tearing through beats with ferocity, wit and intense skill. She’s coy about future projects (“I’ve learned to be vague, because I’m working on 10m things”), but is excited about her new output. “People gotta catch up to New Bottega,” she says. “They’re gonna be like: ‘Oh shit, this is Azealia Banks? What has she been up to while we’ve been asleep?’” Fans are already familiar with Banks’s “ode to Italian luxury” – because she leaked it last September. It was available for less than a day and still made Pitchfork’s best songs of 2022 – “as it fucking should”, Banks says. “My music is good as shit! If you can’t get off to your own shit, then you probably should not be making music.
 
“I’ve done this by myself, with knives in my back, rocks thrown at me, kicked off cliffs. And I still keep coming back – you cannot get rid of me,” she says triumphantly. “Y’all have all the help in the world, y’all got writers, y’all got producers, y’all got fucking everybody! And you still sound like shit.”

‘I deserve respect’: Azealia Banks on redemption, Republicans – and Kanye. By Shaad D’Souza. The Guardian, January 20, 2023. 

Somewhere between the election, the pandemic, and the looming environmental catastrophe, a reshuffling of attitudes took hold. In the past year, icons like Britney Spears have been reconsidered in a new, more empathic, context. Similarly, the open secrets of alleged bad actors like Marilyn Manson are finally sticking in the public’s consciousness. It makes sense that 2021 was also the year that the world forgot why it was so mad at Azealia Banks. The musician has never been guilty of much more than speaking her mind, often about the kind of cultural hypocrisy to which we now devote premium cable documentaries.

 
Next week marks the 10-year anniversary of Banks’ first single, “212,” a refreshingly buoyant tune that had an instinctive grip on hip-hop’s many contours. The song pushed Banks into the limelight at age 20, and she spent the years that followed releasing a steady stream of equally transcendent hits. All the while, the public often seemed more interested in her magnetism for online controversy — from a weird encounter with Elon Musk and Grimes to Russell Crowe allegedly assaulting her in his hotel room. (Crowe denied the allegations.) She’s also had her Twitter account suspended a number of times, most recently last year after a series of tweets that were seen as transphobic.
 
To listen to Banks tell it, all the drama is everyone else’s fault. And she has a point. The past decade has seen a contradictory set of standards emerge for celebrities, where words typed into a screen can seem to carry more weight than years-long patterns of harmful action.
 
It would appear that the tide is finally shifting. In the past year, it’s been hard to deny Banks’ unfiltered honesty — and she’s spent the latter half of 2021 selling out arenas as a result. She isn’t even mad that the mainstream is coming around almost a decade late. She’d rather let the music do the talking.
 
How are you? They told me you’re in the studio pretty late.
 
Yeah. I’m always in the studio, always working.
 
Is there an album on the way?
 
Of course there’s an album on the way. There’s been actually lots of music that’s been put out. I guess the music journalists were more concerned with being tabloids than they were with paying attention to the music. I’ve released a lot of brilliant music in the last 10 years.
 
Thinking about the track you put out a few months ago with the Galcher Lustwerk beat, “Fuck Him All Night,” how did you guys connect?
 
We actually didn’t connect. I just heard that beat, and I was like, “Yo, this is crazy.” It reminded me of “Custom Made” by Lil Kim. I was just like, “Yo, this is hip-hop.” I think that a lot of these so-called “hip-hop journalists” kind of forget how to listen to hip-hop music. It goes back to the cliché argument that everybody’s having right now, but it shows. This is all Black music.
 
I feel like you’re somebody who has tapped into house and dance music from the start—
Which is Black music.
 
For a while, you wanted to name that song after Kanye West. What inspired that?
 
Because Kanye trolled me a lot.
 
Can you say more about that?
 
Listen to my music. Listen to the last five years of Kanye West’s music. I’m superior. I don’t have to talk about that which is beneath me. He’s been, I guess, selling sneakers and doing outrageous shit, everything but the music. When Kanye puts some music out that is important, then I guess we can have that conversation. But right now, he’s kind of just like a cultural figure.
 
What inspired your recent post about Lil Nas X, where you called out Dave Chappelle for transphobia and Boosie Badazz for homophobia?
 
That’s something that I’ve been saying from Day One. When I came out with “212,” I was actually the first artist to just be like: “Oh, this is gay, this is our hip-hop” — you hear what I’m saying? And it’s a very deep conversation, which I really don’t care to have. It’s just all these unwritten rules of Blackness, and what’s appropriate for Blackness, and the rules change every fucking day. I was like, “Oh, whatever, who gives a fuck. I’ma make this gay-ass music, and y’all are going to jump to it.” Because when the music journalists really do their job and they really pay attention, they realize that I have been smoking a lot of these rap motherfuckers on all types of shit.
 
You played four nights recently at Webster Hall in New York — almost like a festival dedicated to you. What’s the process behind something like that coming together?
 
The process was just me having fun, having a good time, being happy to be back outside. It felt like the world was healing. I was having my own party, and all my friends were invited.
 
It seems like social media is becoming a bigger force in music than the art itself.
Yeah. But it’s not music. They’re selling ideas, lifestyles, whatever comes out of liberal academia’s ass. And it changes. It’s almost like the unwritten rules of Blackness, it’s like the unwritten rules of just how to conduct yourself. John Lennon wrote a song called “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” and here we are years later calling it one of the best songs of all time.
 
  
So, what do you make of cancel culture?
 
By the way, I think the Beatles suck.
 
What was that?
 
I said, “By the way, I think the Beatles suck.”
 
  
Oh.
 
I’m a Beach Boys girl.
 
True. But how about so-called cancel culture?
 
I mean, cancel culture doesn’t really exist. Only God can cancel something. Just because you don’t like it, doesn’t mean that it’s canceled, it just means you don’t fucking like it, and that’s OK.
 
You don’t feel like you were canceled at any point?
 
No. There was a lot of jealousy. It just seems like all of these rules for self-expression and identity apply to everybody but Black women. And [the backlash] kind of helped me free myself from the pain of the identity of being a Black woman. Like, “Of course, yes, I look in the mirror every fucking day, I don’t need help knowing that I’m Black. But you’re not going to tell me what kind of music I can and can’t make, and you’re not going to tell me what I can and can’t say because I’m Black.” Russell Crowe choked me, spat on me, and called me a nigger, and now he’s in a Marvel movie.
 
How do you not feel angry at the world for being late?
 
Because who’s got time to get mad? There’s only time to get money.
 
Is there anything that you see coming up now that makes you feel excited or inspired by the next generation?
 
Not really. No. And I don’t mean that to be a hater. But like I said, the music industry now, it’s not a music industry — it’s the most devalued art form in all the art forms. Because with streaming and everything, people are getting desperate, and they’re doing everything else but making good music. Doing videos and all this other stuff, but it’s like, the music sucks. … Once everyone started doing three hours of makeup to do a 15-second TikTok, I kind of tuned out.
 
You have a big fan base on TikTok. I’m surprised you’re not posting there yourself.
 
Because I’m not a fucking con artist.
 
I’m curious what you think about NFTs.
 
I’d like to keep that private because I don’t want to … I’m not in the mood to give out free game. I’ve given out a lot of free game.
 
What was Covid like for you?
 
I mean, what was Covid for anyone? Everybody was afraid that they would go to the wrong corner and die.
 
Have you learned anything during the pandemic and this new situation?
 
No. I think the memes of yesteryear were way more intelligent, way funnier, way brasher — they were less censored. I think there’s a lot of bullshit tied into this whole being all-accepting of things, and diversity and whatever. Even the nature of the word “diversity” that comes out of corporations’ mouths still implies that people are “other.” People of color are other. And who gives a fuck? Again, I don’t need some corporation to tell me that I’m a person of color.
 
Are you optimistic about the future?
 
I’m optimistic about Azealia Banks. I love Azealia Banks. I think she’s incredible.
 
What’s something that you’ve always wanted to say in a publication?
 
Larry David, call me.
 
Cancel Culture Is Fake, TikTok Is Lame, and Her New Music Slaps: Azealia Banks Opens Up. By Jeff Ihaza. Rolling Stone, November 22, 2021.

 
It’s three in the afternoon on the first truly hot day of the year, and inside the Greenpoint photo studio the loud whistling of a fan combines with the blaring of Azealia Banks’ discography to create a feverish cacophony. Outside the floor-to-ceiling window of the studio, the heat makes a haze of the far-away Manhattan skyline, which we have been staring at for hours. “And when I step in, them bitches they know,” sings Banks on “No Problems”, the final song on the 2018 re-release of her critically lauded 2012 mixtape, Fantasea. There’s a poetic irony about listening to these lyrics while we’re on hour three of waiting for the Harlem native to step in on set, without a real word as to to her whereabouts or the reason behind the hold up.
 
“Ten minutes ago she said she’d be here in 40, which really means she’ll be here in an hour,” someone finally tells me, which I relay on set. I make note that once we’re close to hour four of waiting I’m going to have to leave for an appointment - information that is met with a grunt. “If she isn’t here by then could we reschedule this evening?” I ask, “I can meet her any other day.” “You can email us the questions,” replies her manager without so much as looking up from his computer. “I’d at least like to talk to her via phone so there’s a conversation,” I push back. We concede to figure something out, which isn’t much of an answer, but more of an answer than we’ve received all day long.
 
 
At this point, the music has been changed and the volume lowered. There are about nine of us in the studio, and we all look up from our phones at any sound that could indicate Banks’ arrival. The tension, combined with the heat, are palpable, and as the clock nears the four-hour mark I finally leave. Outside the building a car is parked, and as I round the corner I catch a glimpse of the passenger in the backseat - it’s Ms. Banks, looking out the window.

 
It takes three weeks to finally book a 25-minute conversation with Banks to talk about her highly-anticipated album, Fantasea II. “Sorry, I have the Itis. I just ate like a big fucking plate of food,” Banks says, excusing her consistent yawning throughout the interview. I’m surprised to learn the vocalist and writer is 5’3", not because I had ever particularly thought about her height, but because the self-proclaimed mermaid always seemed height-less, as if that were a feature that didn’t pertain to someone as talented as she is controversial. It’s only after speaking to her over the phone that I become curious enough to research it - her voice is big and commandeering, which, unlike her height, is unsurprising.
 
Azealia was only 20 years old when she released the song “212”, which became an instant classic while also cementing her place in an industry that was excited to see what the talented wunderkind had under her sleeve. A year later, she released Fantasea via Twitter, a mixtape that further showcased Banks’ talent - both in merging a slew of genres and in her vocal capacity; combining singing and rapping with an ease that leaves even some music veterans in the dust.
 
This amalgamation of musical references comes from her “general liking of music,” she says. “Well I guess it’s math, when you break it down... But I really like to challenge myself in that way, I like to find new feelings and I like to play with old themes and old things from the past,” she continues. “I like to find new ways to make things work and make things sound fresh to myself.” For example, she compares the vocal hook on “Moving on Up (Coco’s Song)” (from the RZA-directed movie, Love Beats Rhymes, which also marked Banks’ acting debut), to Mariah Carey, and continues to name Destiny’s Child, Lil Kim, house music, and R&B as influences she grew up listening to.

 
Following Fantasea, Banks announced she had begun working on her debut album, Broke With Expensive Taste, a project that suffered through years of delays, but which ultimately resulted in another round of positive reviews. In the following years, Banks became busy with other projects, including the aforementioned RZA-directed film and another mixtape, Slay-Z, released in 2016. With so much work between her debut and her latest venture, it’s interesting that her newest work takes on Fantasea, and I’m curious about the differences between that project and its upcoming second volume.
 
“Everything just sounds more mature, I think. Other people may disagree, other people may go back and hear some of the Fantasea tracks and think that they're better than the ones on Fantasea II,” Banks says. I ask what were the biggest differences she felt in making this album: “I've gotten more of a handle on my musical abilities. Back then I was just starting to make music in a mass quantity... So, it's kind of bittersweet revisiting my first Fantasea project, because I remember where I was in that place. I was this young girl who was just coming onto the scene. I remember that time being really colorful, but this time around I've just, I don't know how to describe it, but I guess those are the words that I can use. It's... bittersweet.”
 
It’s nearly impossible to talk about Banks and her career without including the controversies that have followed her from day one - they are, after all, big components towards the delays, label-changes, and general roadblocks that have oftentimes overshadowed her music. In fact, two days before our first scheduled interview, Azealia’s name was doing the cyber-rounds because of a feud with rapper cupcakKe over Banks saying she needed to get her breasts done (cupcakKe posted their DM conversations on her Twitter), and the day before we finally talk, Banks had initiated a new feud - this time with Cardi B, through criticizing the fellow New Yorker while doing an interview on The Breakfast Club. Banks’ story is replete with instances that she has both initiated and been subjected to, which leads me to ask, “Do you want to forgive those that have wronged you? Do you want to ask for forgiveness from those who you have wronged?”

 
“This is the thing,” she says, “It's like people get way too dramatic about things. Who cares? People do shit. People have done shit to me, I've done shit to people. It just fucking happens - you live and you learn and you move the fuck on. Honestly, I don't know what people's obsession is with me being like this. People are always like, ‘Are you a miserable person?’ Oh my fucking god. Like I'm at home hanging out with my dogs, baking cookies, writing songs, watching TV, and doing my goddamn thing. People love the drama and then they like to pretend they don't. And then they're always like, ‘Oh, how could you say that?’ And then they’re talking about it for fucking two weeks and it's like 'shit, let it go.'”
 
I ask, “While we're here, is there anything that you would want to clear the air on in any sort of topic or --”
 
“No,” she interjects. “I don't even think anyone cares. That's the truth. Aside from the fact that I don't care, I think people really don't care for this type of shit… I really, really don't. I think a lot of it disturbs people more than if it weren't such a focus of the media and the people in the media. I get that it's the media's job to report news, but somehow, somewhere, especially in the future, the media is going to have to decide what's news and what's not. Even nowadays there's so many people on the Internet being reported on; there's no kind of exclusivity over the content that a lot of these media outlets put up. There's no kind of curating in a sense. Everybody's just writing about fucking every little thing that happens on the Internet and eventually people are going to run out of employees and run out of money to pay people to write about things that happen, and in time twist these stories and do all these things to make one person the villain over the other.”
 
I ask if she feels a bit more in control of the perception people have of her with the release of Fantasea II, or if it feels like a second chance. “I don't know, I guess... if you look at my place in life - the Internet world - I guess so, but I think people are just going to believe what they're going to. Some people... they don't want to forgive me for things. Some people would rather not engage, and that's fine. But as far as the music goes [it’s] just so undeniable this go around that I will see a lot of that stuff kind of become what the fuck it is.”

 
 “I'm an adult,” she continues, “I'm allowed to have my own opinion. I'm not a little girl who needs to be chastised for every fucking thing she says and thinks. And I'm not fucking around on this project. When I was a kid I used to fuck around a lot. I mean like, a fucking dork, a young dumbass, you know, enjoying the sound of her own voice. But yeah, it's time to hear some fucking music shit.”
 
I point out that a lot of what has been said about her in the past is that she can get in the way of her own music and talents being heard. “Do you agree with that,” I ask, “or do you think you've become the public and the media favorite villain because of, or regardless of, your talent?"
 
“Well, if I weren't the person that I am, I don't think I would have a semblance of the cultural relevance that I do, you know? With black women in music, it's really easy to be forgotten about when you're not really subscribing to the whole... I guess, hyper-feminine idea of what a female artist should be. When you're not being a fantasy of what society thinks the perfect woman is as a female artist, it's really easy to get cast aside, and even when you are doing that, it's still really easy to get cast aside. My voice and my opinion is in tandem with my music, [and it’s] something that makes me really special."
 
She continues, "I've been banned from Twitter for a lot of different reasons, I’ve probably had my Instagram follower count stifled [with] shadow banning censorship, all kinds of things like that. It's just indicative of the personal power that I have beyond being the musician. And yeah, of course, sometimes you can get a little heated and things could get a little out of hand… [but] that happens for everybody. I have the potential to do more than just music and be more than just a musician.”
 
We return to the topic of villains, a label that has been thrust upon Azealia for nearly the entire length of her career. I compare her being labelled to the similar ways in which other notable black female musicians, like Nina Simone and Lauryn Hill, have been - and continue to be - portrayed by the public and the media alike. “Why do you think the world needs a villain that fits that trope? That can be cast aside, and need not be heard?”
 
“I'm not sure, and I kinda don't really want to know. I think the answer would really scare me.”
 
It’s important to note that there is a dichotomy amongst the controversies that are part of the Azealia Banks story. There are the feuds, which are fodder for gossip sites and social media, and then there are the less-publicized instances during which Banks has consistently made the public and the media reflect on themselves and their unchallenged consumption of popular culture. Her first famous feud was with Australian rapper Iggy Azalea, with Banks calling out Iggy’s “blaccent” and questionable lyrics. At a time when appropriation, racism (particularly misogynoir), and the patriarchy weren’t topics of any mainstream conversation, Banks was more or less shunned and largely condescended to.

 
 “You've always been outspoken about white patriarchal injustices before it was a mainstream thing to discuss. This is obviously something that's very much at the forefront right now, but you were ostracized for it. How do you feel about that?” I ask her.
 
“I mean I, myself, and the conversation… I don't know, not to sound arrogant or whatever, but I guess I've explored enough of those topics in my personal time, and in my mind I've done enough research that... I don't know. I guess when somebody has something new to say about it, then I'll be interested, but I mean, everyone finds things out in different ways. Everybody grows at their own pace."
 
She continues, "I went through my learning journey and it was a bit tumultuous and I think everybody else is having… I don't know what they're experiencing, but it's really shocking when things start to make sense to you. Kind of thinking that that's just the way things are; like white supremacy, patriarchy, whatever social path system we have here in America. You think that that's the way things are supposed to be. But then we grow up and you realize that those things are the way they are because of centuries-old planning. It's really freaky to think about. And I certainly don't have all the answers for everything.”
 
I try to diffuse the tension by asking Azealia what she has to say to all of her fans, especially those who have stuck around her through all the difficult times. “I love you guys so much. This summer is going to be great. The music's great.”
 
The music is great, but that’s never been the issue with Banks. From “212” to the debut single from Fantasea II, “Anna Wintour” (an anthem as diverse and as impactful as her general repertoire), her consistent delivery of experimental tracks is what keeps Azealia a fan and critic “underdog” favorite, regardless of all the controversy that comes along with her. “I think the little mermaid is growing up a bit,” she says. Whether the world will see that too remains to be seen.
 
No, Azealia Banks is not here to apologize. By Ana Velasco. Highsnobiety,  June 15, 2018. 

All the news on Azealia Banks, covered by NME  and Pitchfork

Erica Rutherford : That Which Is

 

Frames within frames. A bed and an orange chair. The black-dressed figure kneels against the bed. Her clothes capture light in folds. Her terribly pink face is faceless—a flat surface missing its features. Her hands are fingerless. She is plains of paint, just as she is flattened by kneeling. Grief, anguish, or pleasurable submission, her facelessness refuses to show the emotional demand I place on her. Just as the canvas frames what it frames, the chair frames the body, frames the shape a body takes held in its rigidity. These frames—like the white framing of the figure itself, that pleated light—become indistinguishable from the flattened edges of the figure. Her body is a frame; she is flattened and does not so much struggle to emerge from the frame but, curiously, becomes the frame.
 
The more I look, there is nothing to see but framing. The painting proposes “her” as a frame, reflexively gesturing to the function of gender as frame. Framing as a technology of representation. Also, framing as a setup: gender is a setup, even those we choose or refuse (no-gender is also a gender setup). All these framings discipline, something that this figure yields to. But in doing so, I wonder if this figure also enacts a refusal to be known through the frame by being known as a frame. That is to say, in fore-placing the work of framing, the painting also gestures to what a frame never captures, never knows, never can show.
 
About her own painting, Erica Rutherford (1923–2008) writes: “Featureless faces opened their mouths in silent screams, as if horror at their deformity. Bodies were shockingly naked, with nothing to conceal their hermaphroditic lack of differentiation. If they had arms, they flung these out in despair into the surrounding darkness.”
 
Rutherford finds her figures trapped between the absolutism of visibility (the role vision has in classification) and embodiments that have no representation. A paradox: overly visible and unseen. Existence that is nonexistence—that does not exist as existence itself. This is not utopic or liberatory; it is catastrophic. Her painted bodies witness the violence that the viewer (me, for instance) inflicts upon them in wanting to know—simultaneously naked (transsexual women are always already naked, contrived to be our sex first) and forced to scream out of mouths that are not theirs, not ours. What better description is there for the representation of transsexual women? “Her”—the race and sex that make this pronoun mean—is a problem that is central to Rutherford’s self-portraits in the 1970s.
 
1.

Bodies remain trouble. Irrefutable, unknowable, and seductive, bodies are what thought wants to escape but never can. All thought emanates from bone, muscle, skin, and nerve, and yet to think is as far as we can feel our own disembodiment. Audre Lorde and Judith Butler puzzled over the contradictions of embodiment, recognizing how systems of power and domination—particularly white supremacy and patriarchy—shape and reshape bodies as well as the feeling of bodily life. Even as they both suggested bodies are potentials—erotic and performative, respectively—everywhere violence defines the concatenation of bodies. They recognized that the unbearableness of bodily being thwarts every effort to represent—to think—bodily potential or plentitude. It is no wonder that thought—for this thinker—longs for a reprieve from—to literally, get out from—the impossible demands of bodily existence. And yet, Lorde and Butler both understood that disembodiment or transcendentalism were the very drive of white supremacist patriarchy.
 
In trans studies, body trouble is paramount. Through ever-changing names—transsexual, transgender, trans, trans*, genderqueer, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming—trans studies has no more central a problematic than embodiment. Trans studies has followed the feminist principle that gender ought to be capacious, disrupting the presumptions that biological assignment of sex (male/female/intersex) scripts gender. Following this feminist tenet, trans studies has shown: 1) gender is relational, shaped as much by sociohistorical forces as by subjective processes; 2) nonbiological agencies override anatomy and the material body, contesting ontological orders; 3) gender is a condition of the autopoietic subject that can be invented and destroyed even as the social order (patriarchy and white supremacy) hyper-invests in ever-narrowing sex conscriptions.
 
Gender promised a reprieve from the difficulty of bodies—from sexed and sexual bodies—that thought wanted, especially in trans thinking. The capaciousness of gender—indeed, its ability to suggest ideation, agency, and sociality—emboldened proposals for trans heuristics. Trans is no longer obliged to be about gender or bodies, subjects or identities. Trans now finds attachment to any number of objects, disciplines, media, histories, and much more.
 
Many of these are arguably advancements in theory, but there remain reasons to question how an ever-expanding trans—built upon a logic of dematerializing gender—has made questions about bodies and sexes difficult to ask, even politically precarious to pose. Are there differences between bodies framed by the general term “trans”? For instance, are there material divergences between estrogenic and androgenic hormonal changes to bodies, or for those trans subjects that maintain their endogenous states? If not essential differences, might there be consequential and material differences between, say, white transsexual women (with a pronoun “she”) and brown gender nonconforming femmes (with a pronoun “they”)? Do these differences shape livability, survivability, not only in terms of racial embodiments but sexual ones as well? And most troubling for the maxims of trans studies, does embodiment differently materialize the experience of trans masculinity from femininity? How might the generalizability of trans have enabled transsexual men to mis-conceptualize the lived experiences of transsexual women? What attention is needed to think well about differences that a trans theory simply distorts, often with transsexual women remaining unthought or worse?
 
This essay is an effort to think sexual differences—specifically, those of transsexual women who became through estrogen and surgery, which is also to say some women. Possibly, it means women who took canary-yellow Premarin® tablets as an act of wanting one’s self so exquisitely that only the language of necessity could approximate this desire. Needs are often primal wants that are too unbearable to describe as lust. These estrogens might have been prescribed with anti-androgen and progesterone pills. Likely, it means women who have been oversubscribed, undersubscribed, or mis-subscribed to the point of panic attacks, blood clots, strokes, unending nausea, and heart attacks. But also, women who have experienced nongenital orgasms that feel like bones cracking into lush velvet; a woman whose nipples achingly leak milk when she is afraid. All these—and numerous other contradictory effects of medicalized anti-trans violence, structural racism, and economic inequality—define them.
 
Premarin® meant, as it did for me, a woman who is sensorially redone—not male to female, but a sexed subject differently done in the effort to feel her body. Hormones, in this way, are not the same as medicalized embodiment, but instead are a supplemental register of sensation that is limited by sensory anatomy even as senses are excited over the edge of themselves. Simply, hormonal change remakes sensoria, and this begins to modify corporeality that subtends the senses. Touch, smell, and sight are disarranged, but not in the manner of some reductive “I see now as other women see”—that narrative is a hope for becoming a woman through her re-essentialization. Instead, bodily sensoria are percussed beyond our sense of sensed self. Sense vibrates, deranging the “feel of this” or the “look of that.” These transsexual women do not become “more woman” with hormonal change. No. But they do—I do—become another sex, not female and not male, but no less materialized sexually. This sexuality is not biologism, not essentialism, not absolutism. Which is not to say this sexuality is not consequential, differential, and substantial.
 
The bodies of these estrogenic women, these differently sexed women, are altered by social forces responding to them just as they are anatomically reacting to biochemical changes. Patriarchy and white supremacy—both are what make gender/sex, they are also the materials that make her—are cataclysms that all bodies are processed through no matter their resistances or privileges. Every effort to resist sex is also a confirmation of the racism and sexism of cultural and historical orders that translate such efforts.
 
Transsexual women are no different; we too become through these same catastrophes, we self-fashion with, from, and through the carnage of this violence. Even though my transsexuality makes me other to female or male, other to essentialism but no less material, my survivability (how I will die) is shaped by a very narrow social translation of my otherwise-ness. And yet, this is not to say that the desire to refuse social order is only purposeless, uninventive, or simply regressive. This is one of the paradoxes of wanting to change sexual difference into sexual differences.
 
Sexuality and sensation are these transsexual women. Not just in euphoric or positivist senses. Some wants are conscious and intentional fantasies that shape decisions. While others—often held hidden within those choices—are unrepresentable and intolerable, a negativity that magnetizes beyond what we know but is no less than what we want. Sensation sounds luxurious, but it is also the noise of “you fucking faggot” that vibrates into her body. A white man’s fists punching as he rapes is also assembling, as did his earlier oeillades. The systemic neglect of a neighborhood, planning decisions made to immiserate and segregate, environmental degradation and other structural forces are also the sensuousness that makes these women’s pharaonic bodies even as the curvature of her eye is altered by estrogen, seeing differently her place in this same neighborhood.

 
Both want and sensation necessitate bodies, and even the wish to be bodiless is a bodily fantasy. There is nothing new about this statement, but the discourse of trans (from its study to its activism) is framed not by differences or specificities but by generalities, sharedness, and cohesions. Dean Spade recently posted on Twitter: “Black feminist thought and Black lesbian analysis and organizing are and have been essential to trans liberation. We can’t build a trans politics that actually improves trans lives (instead of just using trans lives to justify and decorate the status quo) without it.” Rightly invoking the centrality of black feminist and lesbian thought for thinking about the racial logic of sex/gender systems, Spade’s “trans” and “we” eschew a similar commitment to difference and specificity. Could it be that an unspoken white trans masculinity is this “we”? Is this “trans liberation”? The very distortions that Lorde diagnosed—a repudiation of difference—are evoked here in a call for justice. This is not specific to Spade—he is but an example—but a more extensive problem within trans discourse—so many different subjectivities talking as one.
 
The generalizability of trans—not unlike the whiteness of liberalism—Spade’s point—obliterates the different (and often contradictory) organizing and building required to improve transsexual women’s lives, to improve black and brown transwomen’s lives. I agree with Spade: black, brown, and white transsexual women must grapple with the problem that femininity is capacitated through the fungibility of black femaleness. Femininity is a racial logic, and the desire for femininity is made possible through the sexuating capacity of antiblackness. This complexification of transsexual women’s lust for femininity deserves attention; we deserve the work of nuanced and difficult thinking. We can grapple with the racist logic of our own figuration—something that a generalized “trans theory” or “trans liberation” or “we” cannot provide. It is time to deconstruct “trans.”
 
 
 
2.

Frames in frames. A frame splits the figural body and the rectilinear shapes, canvases, pictures of the space the figure occupies, her space. “Her” is framed through style, but it is no less a frame, no less a structure of perception. What frames her space are fragmented language and blocks of color. The frame of language is foregrounded through its fragmentation; since I do not know the meaning of “new” or “ter pape,” I am confronted by the representational force of language, its hold for meaning. Her pinkness, her color is repeated in surrounding squares—surfaces that come to mean skin, epidermalization. Her and her pinky-whiteness are framed as frames. The frame we call gender is here a surface, an epidermalization. “Her” is produced out of surface, produced out of the racialization of her surface. Everywhere the painting points to the technologies of seeing, to the frame’s administration. And again, this faceless figure is a refusal of the frames that make her up, but only through the contradiction of becoming frame herself.
 
3.

How to think about a transsexual woman’s differences? By “a,” I mean a specific account among many. It could be called my transsexual method—I turn to art. For me, there is artfulness in transsexuality, and it is not her physician’s. Trans studies and activism advocate for the conservative position of transsexual women as needy literalists. Given that anti-trans violence imbues the sociopolitical climate, this position is understandable, but it conceals lustier questions with ontological certitudes—it is anti-sexual. The very act of her need for Premarin® or breast implants, or facial feminization and orchidectomies, are wants in the form, style, and feel of one’s sensuous self.
 
The misogyny and racism of surgeons and endocrinologists are obstacles for her want. Medicalization does not define a transsexual woman—just ask her. Medicalization is what repudiates her want even as it makes her otherwise to herself and others. She is not plasticized through medicalization. On the contrary, she is confronted with the limits of a cultural order (what structures her consciousness and preconsciousness, and the authority of the super ego) that materially translates her bodily sexuality, her art. Transsexual women’s bodies are accretions of intimate and subjective want made legible and experiential through the aesthetics of the cultural. What is art but a constant fight with—if also a reliance on—the protocols of aesthetics? Susan Stryker writes, “Nothing other than my desire brings Him [surgeon; but also, Medicine] here.” She continues: “Materiality always resists the symbolic frame. I beg it, then, to throw all language off and become ungendered flesh, but language clenches this meat between its teeth in a death-grip.” Invoking Lacanian terms, Stryker describes a paradox of transsexual women’s “desire”—what we desire happens within materiality’s resistance to representation, to representation’s commitment to the cultural. But, transsexuality is not the return of a real materiality stripped of the symbolic—of the really real—but about how sexuality intensifies and invents matter, even as it is conscribed by the cutting relationship between symbolic and real registers. In begging materiality, Stryker wants to reverse the cutting relationship that the symbolic performs. But perhaps her desire reveals that some women want what is also foreclosed—they want their want. If transsexuality is sensuous intensity, it is so because of sexuality; what I would call her artistry.
 
Art and aesthetics produce a fractious join. Transsexuality is sexuality’s inventiveness with an impoverished reality, nothing more than the alibi for a brutalizing symbolic. It may be too contentious to say that transsexuality is artistry with modifications of sex as indexical signs of wantonness, but I offer this as an-other imaginary, an-other ego ideal for transsexuality. An artfulness at lusty odds with (and within) the cultural. This conversation risks but must avoid collapsing artistry into self-fashioning. Might her transsexual art-making aim toward a reprieve from the technology of selfhood? If art is the work of passion, her art also wants more than the cultural prescribes, more than the frameworks provided her. The art of transsexuality must not be confused with technologies of the self—seeing transsexuality as art places it as intervention in the material, rather than as confirmation of the reality’s authenticating and totalizing function. By “art,” here, I mean transsexuality’s sexualization of the sexed body, and the fashioning of sex as an act of artistry.

 
4.
In Nine Lives: The Autobiography of Erica Rutherford, Rutherford documents her varied life as an actor, filmmaker, theater designer, printmaker, painter, activist, and professor in England, the United States, Spain, South Africa, and Canada. A member of the Canadian Royal Academy of Arts, she painted for over forty years and was shown in major galleries in North American and Europe. Rutherford’s style ranged from abstract expressionism—murky fields of color that give way to swaths of luminosity that defined her work in the 1960s—to an oneiric modernism akin to Ken Kiff. Rutherford’s work in the dreamlike paintings of the 1990s step past the divides between abstraction and figuration by suggesting that fantasy is not opposite material reality but a contingent force in making the world.
 
During the late seventies, while undergoing sexual transition, Rutherford experimented with self-portraiture. Starting with a posed photograph of herself, she would paint from this photograph not to achieve realism, but to look at the function of photography, particularly its frame. Her flattened figures seem to merge with the apparatus of framing, both the photograph and the canvas. She pushes against portraiture’s cromulent function, and with it a modern conception of photography as capture. This period of work, I argue, refused photography’s privileged relationship to rendering transsexuality visible: from linear progressions of before and after to seeing transition as sexual binarism from zero to oneness, male to female, and also the collapse of the referent to the image-matter. Photographs accompanying transsexual memoires confirmed this narrow understanding. For the reader, the photograph demonstrated a seeing it—the indeterminate pronoun “it” working to materialize the transsexual transition. In contrast, Rutherford’s painted-self challenges photography’s conceit that it captures what really is.
 
In Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, an inaugural text for trans studies, Jay Prosser writes about the connection between Rutherford’s paintings and her transition:
 
‘’A painter, Erica Rutherford paints self-portraits based on photographs she first takes of herself dressed as a woman—also concretizations of an imperceptible self … These portraits begin by envisioning the woman Rutherford wishes to become and are gradually transformed as she transitions into a record of that becoming.’’
 
For Prosser, Rutherford’s paintings are the sexual abstraction of her photographic becoming—to be, to be a woman, is photographic. Through photography, a transsexual emerges as a subject materialized into a real self. Here, Prosser pivots around the photographic referent to cohere the transsexual real with bodily matter.
 
 
In discussing the above photograph in Rutherford’s autobiography, Prosser goes on to say:
 
“A painted self-portrait is situated behind the photographic Rutherford. In the painting, the seated figure is feminized through body contour, posture, and clothing, but the face is featureless—a blank space as undetailed by the feminine as the still-masculine face of the photographic Rutherford seated before her.”
 
Prosser continues: “The self-portrait is a blueprint for the transsexual subject in transition: like the photographs in the autobiographies for readers, visual means of making the transsexual’s gender real.” The real of her photograph, for Prosser, is her feminine failure—a failure the painting does not record. But, what if Rutherford’s painted portrait reflexively argues against the framework that her transsexuality is forced to represent here? Might the photographs she takes of herself be what Rutherford paints against, knowing that the photograph aims to render her transsexuality in terms of male to female, a sexual transition predicated on authentication and autopoiesis? Rather than collapsing her material body with the photographic referent, or confusing the real with matter, Rutherford’s paintings provocatively attend to the imperceptibility of perceptual frames.
 
Prosser understands how the apparatus of representation—for Second Skins, it is the narrative form of biography, which values a linear timeline and conflict resolution—attempts to capture the subject represented. Narrative progression has few better tools than transsexual transition to organize time and the arc of a story. However, Prosser concludes his book with the realness of sex as photographic, showing how the indexicality of photography’s referent substantiates the logic of sexual becoming. His study of “second skins” (his theory of transsexuality) ends with photography to lend it its own narrative resolution. Instead of recognizing the linear role photography plays in biographical accounts of transsexuality, Prosser turns to the photographic image as his theory of transsexual realness and bodily being. For Prosser, transsexuality is photographic: to be (seen/skinned) is sex itself: “For transsexuals surgery is a fantasy of restoring the body to the self enacted on the surface of the body.” Taking literally Roland Barthes’s assertation that photography is an indexical (literally “light … is a carnal medium, a skin”) record of “that which has been,” Prosser’s account of transsexuality is about that which is, about the realness of transsexuality as image, as photographic. Prosser is certainly not alone in building an account of transsexuality on a modern presumption of photography, but more consequentially, it seems to me that much of trans studies—what we might call its canon, its political orientations, its central commitments—has relied on an investment in the being of trans that it draws from photography as its defense and—perhaps even more impoverishing—as its logic. Trans studies has a photography problem.
 
Prosser’s meditation on Rutherford initiates his argument about trans becoming that he theorizes through a particular photographic reading of Freud’s enigmatic statement about the ego as “not merely a surface entity, but … the projection of a surface,” that ultimately collapses the image-matter of skin and transexual being. In Prosser’s careful critique of Judith Butler, he demonstrates how she misreads the distinction Freud makes between body and ego. For Butler, the body becomes “itself the psychic projection of a surface.” For Freud, Prosser notes, the ego is a “product of the body, not the body as a product of the ego.” Butler conflates materiality with the mental projection of the surface of the body—collapsing the differences between Lacan’s mirror stage and Freud’s conception of the ego. Prosser makes the case that transsexual phenomena “illustrate the materiality of the bodily ego rather than the phantasmatic status of the sexed body: the material reality of the imaginary and not, as Butler would have it, the imaginariness of material reality.”

 
In structuring this critique, Prosser turns to the cinematic imagery of Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning (1990) to show how Butler’s account of transsexuality is metaphorized away from the sexed and raced materiality of the body. In Butler’s own discussion of this film, she defines the camera as a metaphor of transsexualization: Livingston’s camera performs phallic maneuvering through transsexual women who want sex change (specifically, genital surgery), turning black and Latina transsexuals into confusions of phallus and penis. Prosser explains this confusion as a repetition of Butler’s misreading of Freud, again de-literalizing transsexuality. But what is interesting here is how similar Prosser’s turn to photography as metonymic of transsexualization is to Butler’s cinematic approach.
 
If, as Prosser suggests, the transsexual’s body image “is radically split off from the material body,” then the description of feeling “trapped in the wrong body” becomes uncannily similar to the capture of the referent in the emulsion of the photograph. An interior negative of the body image is printed—with surgery and hormones as processing fluids—onto and as the material body. “The skin is the locale for the physical experience of body image and the surface upon which is projected the psychic representation of the body.” Prosser recognizes the problem of Lacan’s occularcentrism of subjectivity, noting that that Freud emphasizes bodily sensations as forming the ego. However, he pursues the substantiation of the transsexual feeling of wrong-bodiliness such that
 
‘’surgery deploys the skin and tissues to materialize the transsexual body image with fleshy prostheses in the shape of the sentient ghost-body. The surgical grafting of materials endows the transsexual with the corporeal referents for these imaginary and phantomized signifieds, restoring their substance.’
 
Photography, it would seem, is the form of transsexuality, creating a photo-ontic. Haunted by referents—appeals to the real—transsexuality happens between referentiality and representation. The problem with transsexualization as photograph is revealed in Prosser’s wish that the referentiality of transsexuality is captured (trapped) in photography.
 
The consequences of the photo-ontic of Prosser’s reading become clearer in his later book Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss, where he critiques his own autobiographical impulse in using a photograph of himself to end Second Skins. Guided again by his reading of Barthes, Prosser recognizes that his literal (what Barthes described as studium) reading of transsexual photographs missed what photography cannot show (the photograph’s punctum) in its capture: affect. In returning affect (punctum) to transsexual photographs, Prosser writes, “This failure to be real is the transsexual real.” For Prosser, transsexuals never achieve their referents, never achieve the longing for their sexed referent. It is the un-becoming of sex bound with an overdetermined sexual visibility that defines his transsexuality. Yet, transsexual being remains, problematically, photographic.
 
Yes, Prosser’s punctum allows for the affective, but it continues to rely on a photo-ontic. By “photo-ontic,” I mean how the seduction of the photographic referent produces a collapse between image-matter and being in theorizing transsexuality. Even the trauma inflicted by the surgeon who cuts her up through an acting-out of racialized sexism—any transwoman who has modified her body knows exactly what I mean, either as fear or actuality—remains within this photo-ontic framework for understanding transsexual beingness. Prosser writes “The photograph incarnates because it takes the body of the referent ... I may never recover my first skin. But the realization of that loss is my second skin.” His photo-ontic: not being is transsexual being as enacted through the logic of photography. Image-matter, even in its most evanescent and affective form, defines transsexual being. The implications of transsexual-as-photograph are that the transphobic logic of spectacular spectacle defines transsexuality, obscuring other “bodily sensations” that mark the work of sexuality.
 
5.
Rutherford writes:
 
‘’Then, at the moment when they seemed most to threaten me, they staggered, dropped to the floor and in helpless crouched postures withdrew themselves. In this position, though smaller, they still thrived, fattening themselves, assuming sensuous curves of a sexuality they could never know, growing breasts that obtruded indecently from their infantile bodies until they appeared malformed infants, aberrations of nature. Capriciously, they now assumed joyful colors, reds and yellows, as if to ensure that no one could ignore their presence.’’
 
Instead—and what I can read from Rutherford’s refusal—let us take seriously the sexuality of sex change: the want that cannot be fully metabolized by the social (ego ideals that refuse ideal egos) while modifying the real’s own becoming, its ongoing materializations, sexualizations, and concatenations. Perhaps instead of Rutherford’s paintings as naive accounts of her becoming a woman, her painting proposes that photography is the naive technology for representing transsexuality (let alone for modeling transsexuality on). Rutherford does not show who she is becoming but shows what forces—and cultural aesthetics—are at work in delimiting that emergence, that potential. Working against photography as record, against becoming real through photographic logics, Rutherford’s paintings draw attention to those technical modes of perception that limit what the body is or might be. And more specific to Rutherford: What if a realist theory of photography has produced reproducible narratives about transsexual women’s lives—even to ourselves—that refuse bodily difference and those experiences that exceed the sex/gender schema?
 
But Freud continues to define “projection of a surface” as a sensuousness that is derived from the body, but not as a literalization of the surface of that body. Embodiment—the sense of feeling bodily—is a sensuous rapport between affective states we might call inside and outside. At every point in this relay, fantasy makes sense of sensations refracted through an inaccessible, but no less significant, materiality. In other words, bodily sense is produced through sensuous excess, not through a precise organ of sensation. Might, then, transsexuality not be simply about skin—one organ dedicated to touch and vision—but an excess that has no representative? Despite Prosser’s critique of Butler’s imagistic (and as such, performative) reading of the body ego, he also organ-izes the body ego through a phenomenology of photography (a studium-only account of the body—what literally is present-ed—as described by Barthes in Camera Lucida), with transsexuality as idealized example. The referential surface—what I read Rutherford’s art working against—is the frame that delimits transsexuality into a visibility, into a logic of the photo-self as sex. For Rutherford, transsexuality is not ontologically a skin to be imagistically realized. Instead, transsexuality is what infuses the body (even as limit) with sexuality as a register of fantasy always aiming toward what is yet unknown, the otherwise that designates transsexuality.
 
What would it mean for Rutherford’s paintings if we returned sexuality (not identity, but libido) to transsexuality? To “assume sensuous curves of a sexuality [we] could never know”?
 
Painted Camera, “”Her”. By Eva Hayward.  e-flux. April 2021.