This is not rape

This is not rape dismantles the cultural scaffolding of sanctity, martyrdom, and aestheticised violence, embedding within these ruptured structures a queer body — a self-portrait charged with the tension between visibility and erasure, fetishisation and the right to exist beyond binary categories.

The work deliberately confronts the visual legacy of sacred art — crucifixion scenes, the archetype of Christ as both victim and revenant. Yet here, that tradition — marinated for centuries in cisnormative, masculinised codes — is seized and rewritten from the perspective of a trans, nonbinary body that eludes containment.

At the core of the composition: a cross, disfigured and bleeding with red pigment, glossed with resin, its edges fractured into a pixelated glow. The cross is at once an echo of religious iconography and a scaffold for violence, appropriation, fetishisation. The body affixed to it is not an abstract redeemer but a queer body, suspended between expectation, brutality, and the ongoing labour of reclaiming autonomy.

But this cross is no simple relic of martyrdom — it doubles as a phallus. The penis here functions as a trap of social perception, etched onto the body by the gaze of others. The act of nailing the body to the penis becomes a ruthless metaphor for how binary expectations excise the multiplicity of trans identity. The penis — both one's own and estranged, internalised and constantly reprojected by cisnormative fantasies — exists here as both relic and battlefield.

The work wrestles with Christological imagery — with the suffering body, but equally with the figure of the rebel, the exile, those cast to the edges by systemic violence. Madonna’s Confessions Tour crucifixion restaged this same fracture — between pop spectacle and the brutal politics of public scrutiny. Similarly, René Magritte’s Rape cleaves the surface of imagery itself — exposing violence embedded in representation. This is not rape weaponises this fracture, colliding symbolism with the raw fact of lived embodiment.

Magritte's practice unravelled the illusion that language or image ever fully contains reality — as in Ceci n’est pas une pipe. This is not rape inherits this logic, subverting the visual grammar of faith and force. The title operates not merely as reference but as disruption: this is not rape, yet its residue scars the frame. This is not Christ, yet it bears the weight of every violence mapped onto marginalised flesh.

The work rejects pity, rejects the anaemic promise of binary inclusion. It stages a visual insurgency — a zone where the trans, queer, nonbinary body refuses reduction to anatomy, gaze, or normative script. It is a body nailed to the phallus and simultaneously stripping that symbol of dominion — rewriting its meaning, unmaking its threat.

This is not rape is both an assault on consecrated aesthetics and a queer articulation of embodied complexity — a body persisting in defiance, ferocity, refusal. It is an image that disarms tools of oppression and forges from their wreckage a sovereign, insurgent sanctity.