Kiss My Genders review – a sinful, sensational walk on the wild side

Hayward Gallery, London
From glammed-up deer-hunters in high heels to operatic characters from Lou Reed songs, these dazzling works of transgender art are a glorious assault on our assumptions

The sea has no gender. It is the definition of fluid, which is probably why so many photographs of bodies of water are included in this exhibition of artists who question the very existence of stable gender identities. Peter Hujar’s photographs of the transgender community in 1970s New York are shown between two pictures of the dark, untamed waters of the Hudson River. Catherine Opie’s photographs of the Pacific capture a nature that is infinitely suggestive, sea and sky merging in misty paleness until it is hard to tell what’s air and what’s ocean. Why should male and female be any easier to separate?

Kiss My Genders celebrates artists “whose work counters entrenched gender narratives”. There’s certainly not much left of those narratives by the end. From Del LaGrace Volcano’s photographs of drag kings to Ajamu’s shot of a man caressing his erect penis with a hand gloved in black lace, it’s a bonfire of categories. Yet it does more than contribute to the impassioned politics of identity. It touches, in profound ways, on what it is to be human, and why we need this great river of the unfixed.

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