The Helmis on tour. Two weeks in South Korea running around festivals performing a solo of Hamlet. A solo with two people. And puppets. And bondage.
Das Helmi in South Korea
After 10 Years we are back…
In 2007 Das Helmi toured the show Arsenic and Old Lace in South Korea and also made puppets for another group, it was all strange and beautiful…
..Now its going to happen again!!
5 Years ago Florian bumped into Master Lee in Pappelallee and he invited him to do a Hamlet solo… Five years later the plan is coming into reality, that’s how theatre can work!
So, Florian is going to perform Hamlet, a Ghoststory in South Korea this summer! With one Helmi (Florian) and a ballerina (Dasniya Sommer) playing all the Hamlet characters. The whole story is condensed into 45 Minutes full to the brim with Emotions, Surprises, Attitudes, Plot Twists and Musical Treats…
It’s like a game of chess in a head of a maniac!
It will be performed on ( sometimes 2 shows a day):
31st of July-1st of Aug. Gijang Festival
3rd and the 4th of Aug. Miryang Festival
6th and the 7th of Aug. Geochang Festival
And from the 8th to the 13th of August there is a Puppet Workshop in Gijang. The workshop will be used to make puppets for a production of Animal Farm from Master Lee.
Back to what supernaut is really famous for (no, not this, or this, can’t you people clean up your smutty minds?), which is all things tranny, and having got up super-early on a Saturday, walked for an hour, did ballet, ate till I look pregnant, passed out in a food-induced coma, it’s time for tranny adventures on the internet.
Harisu’s getting married! I’ve blogged about her probably enough to seem like a stalker, but she also wants to adopt four children. Her partner is rapper Micky Jung.
Still strangling the internet bandwidth, more video. Helen and Betty of (en)gender were on Dr.Keith this week. Helen’s blog is one of my favourite, of what I guess you could call gender blogs, and I’ve been really moved by reading the excerpts from her new book, She’s Not the Man I Married. The interview (part 1 and part 2), is a funny – and sometimes scary – intimate look at two people who intellectually remind me of Judith Butler in the preface to Gender Trouble, in that cool New York way, and yet when living it, it’s not always so easy. But to see two people clearly in love who are making compromises so as to not lose that, is something very special.
One half of me is like, yeah cool look how progressive parts of Asia are for a transsexual to get married and not a word of outrage in the media, and I wanna say something disparaging about good old colonial Australia and the other former properties of Rex Anglorum, but there’s this sneaking aura of an upcurled lip that replies, yeah so-what-the-fuck? married just like all the other breeders and probably heading straight for suburbia, where’s the strangeness in life? If she’s announced her marriage to a fag love triangle in Brooklyn I’d be awed enough to get a tattoo of her somewhere awkward. Anyway, Harisu who I blog about way too much, is getting married. Maybe.
Transgender Star to Marry New Boyfriend
Transgender superstar Harisu will be marrying a man who is four years her junior, in a ceremony early next year, reported Nocut News Wednesday. The two houses will be introduced officially next month and if things go according to plan the two will be wed in early 2007.
Early this year the two split up, but a television show brought them back together again. The show in fact, was a KMTV show introducing another one of her boyfriend’s, a clothing store manager, who was six years her junior to the public called, “Introducing Harisu’s Boyfriend.”
Someone close to Harisu says, “It would be hard for me to say the exact date, but the two will be introducing the parents next month,” adding, “The two have promised to marry and it will happen sometime next year,” reported Nocut.
During the weeks I ventured west into the mountains, Korea’s Supreme Court was debating whether to permit male-to-female transsexuals to legally change their gender as documented on their birth certificate. I am very happy to hear last Thursday the ruling was allowed, however I’m of the opinion that legal rulings on gender identity are no less repressive and didactic than religious hegemony, and usually through the mediocrity of compromise what could have been a substantive change in cultural perception becomes an indeterminate middle-ground quagmire, too prescriptive to humanely acknowledge the real world of sex and gender.
In short, it does not go far enough, primarily because it explicitly bases establishment of gender identity on that least-seen and most irrelevant piece of anatomy in everyday life. Secondly because it treats transsexuality as a medical condition, or more accurately, pathologises it, in remarkable the same way that being homosexual once could lead directly to lobotomies. I guess it’s better than getting burnt at the stake.
“Gender should be decided by not only physical appearance but also the person’s mentality and psychology, and society’s attitude to that person. This means that gender is decided by diverse factors, and that a person’s mental and social gender, which he or she did not recognize at birth, can be found during his or her social life,” the court said in its ruling.
Following such a definition, the court also suggested five criteria in deciding whether to recognize transsexuals’ new genders in official records.
First, the person should have had a feeling of physical disorientation about his or her birth sex and have felt that he or she belongs to the opposite sex through to their adult lives.
The person should have received psychological counseling to determine their mental sexuality, and also eventually have undergone surgery to have the desired sex’s physicality.
After surgery, the person needs to live a biological and social life that meets his or her new gender. He or she also should not cause severe changes in relationships with others and his or her friends and family should acknowledge the change.
A couple of articles on the current legal and cultural positions of transsexuals in Japan and Korea broadly illustrates a few important points. Firstly, Asia generally, and the more post-industrial countries like Japan and Korea specifically are making a mockery of the lack of progress in English-speaking countries on the issue of gender. This is despite the slightly incoherent journalistic postulation that gender is a choice, and that transsexual people – in the same way gays ‘choose’ who they fuck – are engaged in an elective activity and could ‘choose’ to be ‘normal’. Irrespective of their (the reporter’s) confusion, the place where identity matters – in the courts and in jurisprudence – seems to have a more pragmatic grasp of the issue.
The second point is that fundamentally religion in all its forms is evil and is quite unequivocally the most pestilent curse to befall humanity. When a reverend (they do not deserve capitalisation) states, “God did not endow mankind with the right to choose sex”, he, and the combined corpus of religions are exercising their primary agenda of enslavement and destruction of the single attribute that makes humanity so wonderful: diversity.
Contra religion’s war on human identity, both these articles clearly underline the huge importance of the internet in changing people’s lives for the better.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court opened a public hearing to make guidelines for lower courts on whether to allow transsexuals to be able to change their gender in their family registry.
It was the first court hearing on the gender change issue in the country’s judicial history.
After more than three hours of heated debate by advocates and opponents from medical and religious circles, Chief Justice Lee Yong-hun shook his head and said, “It’s a very difficult question.’’
The court plans to make a decision after another hearing next month.
During Thursday’s hearing, Lee Moo-sang, a urology professor at Yonsei University’s Medical College, said transsexualism is determined in the perinatal period.
The medical doctor suggested the government establish a system in which the court permits transgender people to be able to undergo sex-change operations and also legally change their gender after receiving a diagnosis from psychiatrists and surgeons and the consent of their family.
Rev. Park Yeong-ryul, head of the conservative Protestant Christian Academy for National Development, argued against Lee’s opinion, saying “God did not endow mankind with the right to choose sex.’’
Japan’s first sex-change operation was performed in 1998, and its first transsexual and gay politicians were elected to public office in 2003. A groundbreaking legal reform allowing some transsexuals to change their officially registered sex took effect the following year.
The advances — the result of long years of work behind the scenes — have given Japan’s sexual minorities rising self-confidence and a greater willingness to come out of the closet despite the country’s long-prized conformity and disdain for displays of individuality.
“These changes have been way overdue,” Fujio said at a recent interview in Tokyo. “I think the law got people thinking, ‘If the country has recognized these people, they must be acceptable after all.’”
Greater visibility and legal change are part of a general trend in Japan toward more personal freedom.
Technology and tradition have also played a role. The Internet has spread information about alternative lifestyles to people who in previous generations would have been isolated. Meanwhile, Japan’s lack of deeply-rooted moral or religious censure of sexual minorities has made the transition easier.
Lady, the hot trash Korean transgender manufactured pop band noone has listened to but everyone has seen pictures of, now has a blog. Or more likely someone has made a blog pretending to be them. Anyway, Lady – now that’s what I call music. (But there used to be four and now only three? What happened to Binu?)
Rounding off the month’s stories of chick-with-dicks even The Independent finds Lady irresistible, but being news need some controversy, so find it in the (currently) coolest band in the world apparently getting hacked at for using their shemale status as a marketing tool. Uh duh! Of course they are, just like Harisu, Dana International, and everyone else I’ve forgotten. For every person who thinks Lady are freaks and will feel the wrath of god or some neanderthal rubbish, there’s another 50 who think, ‘wow, cool, buy it now!’. As for talent, for fucks sake, who cares as long as they look good?
The group’s path to stardom hasn’t been entirely smooth. Lady have come in for scathing criticism from the media, who accuse their record company of trying to cash in on the novelty of “sex change stars” and of manufacturing a pop act whose selling point lies in sexual status rather than talent.
It’s a really nice idea that a post-operative transsexual can change their gender on their birth certificate and every other document, but it almost completely misses the point. It is scientific and legal hubris and deceit to attempt to assign gender based on an arbitrary determination of what’s between someone’s legs and whether what is found there corresponds to parochial yearnings of what constitutes male and female.
Stupid judges need a) a compulsory course in reading the complete works of Judith Butler, and b) need to stay the fuck out of people’s pants until they can understand it’s a bit more interesting than black and white. Or to be a bit clearer, just because someone is a transsexual and wants to legally and officially be a she instead of a he or vice-versa doesn’t automatically mean then want to perform roadworks on their genitals.
Han Chae-yoon, head of the Korean Sexual Minority Culture and Rights Center (KSCRC), said that in Korea, their official genders, even after surgery, depend on judges’decisions because of the lack of legal ground.
“Being determined a man or a woman in society can determine an individual’s happiness over her or his entire life,” Han told The Korea Times.
“It is nonsense for judges to decide one’s gender at their own mercy in accordance with their tastes and values because of the absence of a relevant law,” she added.
She didn’t quite have the same effect in Cherry Blossoms as Buck and Allanah do in Allanah Starr’s Big Boob Adventures, but I love Harisu nonetheless, so when she gets interviewed by the Malaysia Star, of course I’m going to reprint the entire thing here, along with pictures … mmm … Christian Dior …
Four years ago, Harisu starred in an advertisement for a South Korean cosmetic company. In the ad, she is gazing at the camera. She then breaks into laughter, tilting her head back to reveal an Adam’s apple. It later became known that the Adam’s apple was computer generated. The advertisement created a huge sensation, especially when she went public with the fact that she is a transsexual.
