Troy Droussiotis

GLAMOUR GIRL is my cybernetic drag daughter, a multimedia installation consisting of two crocheted soft sculptures, a single-channel video performance, a self-composed soundscape, two digital prints, and multichannel projections on Fifth Avenue and 13th Street—all underpinned by a manifesto on glamour titled "Glamifesto (A Manifesto in Non-Being)."

GLAMOUR GIRL returns to the etymological roots of "glamour," which refers to a witch’s enchantment, redefining it as a metaphysical mode of hyperexistence expressed through the digital, the performed, and the mythical. Glamour functions in the “IM” (impossibility, impracticality, immeasurability, immateriality), an expansive state of nonbeing, and rejects the “UN” (unglamorous, unacceptable, unattainable), a restrictive mode of “not-being.” Reflecting a desire for bodily expansion and abstraction, GLAMOUR GIRL and her manifesto end in the emphatic declaration that to be truly glamorous is to cease to exist in the physical realm.

My thesis paper centers on this re-appropriation of “glamour” in the context of late-20th-century transhumanist and techno-feminist theory. By abstracting the body and thereby immaterializing identity, we find new and more enriching modes of expression, interconnection, and community building. By expanding the body through the digital, the performed, and the mythical, we can eliminate our physical boundaries—where my body ends and yours begins—and become one greater reflexive being.