It’s a way of looking at the Holocaust that you might never have seen before: what did it mean to be trans person during that time? Gil Yefman, who spent two years as a woman, has created a provocative piece of art called “Tumtum” (slang for “stupid,” but also a term for hermaphrodites, taken from the Bible) that elicits plenty of questions.
It’s a massive crocheted ball, depicting various eyes, vaginas, penises, and secretions. It looks like it would be awfully cozy to cuddle up with, provided you don’t think too hard about what it is. According to Yefman, the title refers to “people who are considered freaks, pushed to the margins of society the way Holocaust survivors have been.”
Yefman’s piece appears in “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn” (To Me You Are Beautiful), his first New York solo exhibit.
Other pieces in the exhibit depict a crocheted doll strapped down, awaiting use as a sex slave. Another shows a baby blanket made of swastikas, and another depicts Nazi leaders as porn models. Perhaps the most upsetting is a collection of bars of soap embedded with bits of hair, ash, and fingernails.
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Yefman’s also known for an installation called “Let it Bleed,” which he created with his sister. It’s an eerily bare room featuring looping video and posters. A monitor shows various people adopting stereotypically feminine dance moves as they cycle through a range of outfits. The people in the video are of indeterminate gender themselves.
Yefman was inspired by the book House of Dolls to explore the history of his people. At the same time that he was learning about sexual slavery, he was feeling betrayed by his body, which led him to eventually transition to a woman before transitioning back. It’s a feminine perspective on the Holocaust that is particularly unique, and might never be explored in quite the same way ever again.
Nowuvedoneit
Ok
Cissy Boy™
The word ?ûm?ûm isn’t in the Bible; it first appears in Rabbinic Hebrew. In case anyone was wondering, it’s not related to the word for ‘stupid’; the initial radical of the former is emphatic while that of the latter is plain. It’s also not quite right to say that it means ‘hermaphrodite’, and not just because that word is offensive and outdated when applied to humans: A ?ûm?ûm is someone who may “really” be of one sex or the other; which one, however, is not clear from a noninvasive inspection of the person’s genitalia. This contrasts with an ’and?rôgînôs—the word is borrowed from Greek and cognate with English androgynous—who “really” is both male and female. I apologize to anyone offended by the failure to distinguish sex from gender, the binary opposition, or the essentialism; they do not reflect my own views, but, rather, are implicit in the textual corpus that I seek to explicate.
Cissy Boy™
@Cissy Boy™: Apparently these comments can’t handle certain characters: the ?s in ?ûm?ûm are supposed to be t’s with dots underneath, while the one in ’and?rôgînôs is supposed to be a schwa (an upside-down lowercase e).
Nowuvedoneit
@Cissy Boy™: words, lol. Thanks for the clear up.
Cissy Boy™
@Nowuvedoneit: You’re welcome.
Mezaien
WHATEVER!.