I was recently lucky enough to curate a month of Sundress Publications’s The Wardrobe‘s Best Dressed, a project dedicated to showcasing outstanding work by women-identified and genderqueer individuals.
My final selection was The Romance of Siam: A Pocket Guide (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2016) by Jai Arun Ravine. Please click on the following links to read:
“Backpakers 2 [White Goes East]”
“Backup, Backdrop, Background (excerpt from ‘Christy Gibson’)”
Jai Arun Ravine is a writer, dancer and graphic designer. As a mixed race, mixed gender and mixed genre artist, their work arises from the simultaneity of text and body and takes the form of video, performance, comics and handmade books. Jai’s first full-length book, แล้ว and Then Entwine: Lesson Plans, Poems, Knots, re-imagines immigration history and attempts to transform cultural inheritances of silence. Their short film Tom/Trans/Thai approaches the silence around female-to-male (FTM) transgender identity in the Thai context and has screened internationally. The Romance of Siam is their second book.