I had a conversation with a man recently, who asked me about gendered toys and children. It was International Women’s Day and that was really affecting him, he said. He was pretty down about it. I tried to lift the mood by talking too loudly and making him feel comfortable by acting like I was more uncomfortable than I was. He spoke very quickly and unintentionally insulted me when we talked about a panel I’d been on the week before. He told me that I hadn’t interacted with the woman sitting next to me on the couch. He kept on speaking at a pace I couldn’t keep up with, and I was thinking that I really liked that woman, how I’d been holding my breath all day and exhaled when I saw her pink lady’s jacket and silver bumbag, and the two-seater couch had been too small for four rambling queer bodies so I couldn’t properly turn my head to look at her.
After the panel, the woman and I had messaged each other late at night and complemented each other. A few days later we went to a cat cafe that was really just a glass room. She told me she’d been learning about herbs. Tiny kittens attached themselves to her pink shoes. One climbed up my sequined top and sat on my shoulder.
I laughed at something the man said, which maybe wasn’t meant to be a joke, and then I agreed with him, and worried that he thought I was a misogynist. I knew there was an answer that he wanted that I wasn’t going to give, so I told him I didn’t really care about toys, actually.
I asked my parents for a Barbie doll for my birthday. I was on my parents’ bed, opening my presents. I could feel the outline of a rectangular box underneath the wrapping paper.
'What is it?'
'It’s a box!'
I said.
My parent’s bed is an island. My face feels hot. I haven’t slept. I clutch one end of the box-shaped present and the sticky tape doubles over and sticks to itself. I laugh at the present: the laugh comes out as a different sound as the sticky tape sticks itself to my hand.
'Just tear it.'
There is a gift bag for re-used wrapping paper in the upstairs cupboard — below the sheets, next to the biscuit-tin sewing kit. I know I need to get the wrapping paper to its next resting place before my brother’s birthday in two weeks. My stomach makes an ascending wailing noise; the sound crawls around inside of me. I replay the moment and I open the present with ease, and then it is exactly the same, time stops and starts again, I see something move and I can’t place it, I press into the edges of my body. It feels like the task has stopped being ‘unwrapping the present’ and become ‘unwrapping myself’, which is too much for a six-year-old. I have to push the box-shaped present into the bed and pull against it to open it but the section of the doona I’m sitting in now feels like there is too much doona around me and I can’t uncross my legs to get a better handle on the box. When I lower myself to maneuver the perfect tearing action, I land on something, and there is a cracking noise, coming from the Australian Geographic puzzle-shaped present. The new pyjama-shaped present slips off the bed and slithers away. I focus in on the folds of the paper, and the way the pattern is undoing itself as it rips, turning itself into another pattern until the paper is finally off the box, though still stuck to my hand.
The box reads, 'My First Ken' and 'Ballet Partner of Barbie'.
Ken is wearing a sparkling blue two-piece outfit: a long-sleeved top with paneling down each side of her chest, stars cascading down towards an attached-at-the-front velcroed-at-the-back belt. Her ice-blue pants taper in at the ankle. The panels make it look like she’s wearing a satin vest over the top which is very dressy and very practical. When I touch the sheer material on Ken’s chest it catches on me; it’s heavier than I expect and leaves a faint imprint. It looks like chainmail. I drag it between my skin and hers.
The words, 'Thank you', squirm out of me and drop into the waves of the doona.
It feels like I am being crushed by her broad shoulders and her strong hands and her pomaded hair. In the picture on the box she holds Barbie’s hand, and wraps her other arm around Barbie’s waist and they hold each other steady. Barbie wears the sort of dress I want to live in — layers and layers of tulle expanding over space — weightless. The material swells and spills, like with each step the dress will overflow and pull the both of them to the ground, but it maintains its shape, and then it maintains another shape. It feels familiar — the too-muchness of the way they wear their femininity, a bit ill-fitting and revealing in unexpected places. The material is so thin it is transparent, everything is replaceable and can be easily lost, but the soft shapes cling and curve and nestle their way in as if the fabric were a part of them.
The wrapping paper is taken upstairs to be put with the other wrapping paper and the home-made Christmas cards and the good scissors. It’s just me, Ken, and the Barbie on the open box in the room. When I finally get Barbies for presents I’ll cut off their hair and colour it with highlighters and turn them into baby queers, and when I’m seventeen I’ll get a similar haircut and on that same day, a car on Chapel Street will slow down as it drives past me and the driver will yell, ‘Dyke’, and I’ll be thrilled, though when I’m twenty and two boys tell me I’d be hot if I didn’t look like a lesbian and wear men’s jeans, I’ll be flattered, and ashamed, and then I’ll fall in love over and over again with queers with broad shoulders, strong hands, and pomaded hair.
My parent’s room has an enormous walk-in wardrobe with sliding mirror doors. Sometimes I watch myself in the mirrors and then I sit in the wardrobe and pretend that I am pretending that I am going into another world. I take Ken and the open box with the picture of Barbie and the beautiful dress into the wardrobe.
13/09/2020
Image and words by Kerith Manderson-Galvin
Kerith Manderson-Galvin is a Queer Femme performance maker who makes unconventional works of theatre, live art and durational performance art. Their work is often concerned with queer femininity and making radically soft performance - they can be gentle, fragile, wild, emotional and imposing. Their work has appeared online and at galleries, theatres, gigs, and music and arts festivals across Australia including at: RCC, Provocare, Dark Mofo, PICA. Kerith's Website
