Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory Vol. 20, No. 3, November 2010, 347–353 DNA, AND: A meditation on pandrogeny Krista Miranda * Performance Studies at New York University Never before has a generation felt such a rage to live, destroy gender, destroy the control of DNA and the expected. Every man and woman is a man and woman. – Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge In their ‘‘pandrogeny and breaking sex’’ manifesto, Genesis and Lady Jaye Breyer P- Orridge rant against the ‘‘fictional character’’ of a ‘‘self’’ determined by fixed notions of identity, gender, and the body. While there are many implications of pandrogeny, which involve troubling the binaries of masculine/feminine, self/other, mind/body, and nature/culture, one could argue that, at its core, the project’s philosophical drive boils down to the following statement: ‘‘we are malleable and committed to being malleable.’’ Reading sections of the text in their film Pandrogeny Manifesto (Andronis and Lee 2006), both bodies in the frame, the silent figure in the foreground, blurred but always present – or reciting the manifesto simultaneously as two voices blend into one – the artists propose the idea of a queer futurity dictated by experimentation, evolution, and the ‘‘re-union of the fragmented self to create a self- determined identity.’’ Fragmentation, according to this project, is one that occurs not only within a single bodily self, but also between the bodies, lives, and identities of disparate individuals. Identically dressed in black and white striped shirts, both with cropped blond hair, Genesis and Lady Jaye perform their manifesto in front of a red background, reading from a prayer card with the figure of Jesus on the back: ‘‘In the beginning, all were perfect. The first man was the first woman. The first woman was the first man. Until the whispering began. She is here. He is her.’’ They embrace each other, breast to breast, attached by the thorax, their physical and gestural identicalness an expression of both romantic love and a desire to create a third entity, not through biological reproduction, but through corporeal and behavior modification. This third being, the pandrogyne named Breyer P-Orridge, is composed of both Genesis and Lady Jaye. By refiguring their distinct corporeal aesthetics toward the idea, ‘‘not the ideal,’’ of identicalness, the result is the achievement of a ‘‘conceptually more precise body’’ that eradicates their previously separate, and purportedly socially determined, selves. Through pandrogeny, then, Genesis and Lady Jaye undermine theories of embodiment that conceive the body as a fixed, autonomous entity, sealed *Email: krista.miranda@gmail.com ISSN 0740–770X print/ISSN 1748–5819 online ß 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/0740770X.2010.529266 http://www.informaworld.com