Alok Vaid-Menon

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Alok Vaid-Menon (born July 1, 1991) is an American performance artist, poet, and LGBTQ rights activist based in New York, New York, who performs under the name ALOK.

Vaid-Menon identifies as gender non-conforming and transfeminine, and uses singular they pronouns.

Early life and education

Vaid-Menon was born in College Station, Texas, as the child of Malayali and Punjabi immigrant parents who immigrated from Malaysia and India, who went on to work as a researcher and health care executive. Alok was mocked for their ethnicity and gender identity as they grew up. They felt that they were unable to come out on their own terms because they were not aware that they were different until they were banned from doing so and told who they were. In reaction to this abuse, they began their art practice at a young age. "Italing art gave me the freedom to live." I needed somewhere to put the pain into perspective." They began to use poetry and style to destabilize other people's beliefs, defame shame, and even declare themselves on their own terms. They began to post their artwork online and received positive feedback because they were unable to express themselves physically due to fear of violence.

In honor of Stonewall's 50th anniversary of the local LGBT community, Alok returned to College Station to host a Pride festival with the local LGBTQ group.

Alok's son earned a bachelor's degree in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, as well as a master's in sociology in 2013.

Personal life

Urvashi Vaid, a LGBT rights activist, advocate, and writer, was Alok's aunt.

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Career

Alok's performance style is known for its stream of consciousness, soundscapes, political parody, and emotional range. They remark that their style, as well as their identity, is in constant flux and refuses to simplify categorization, and that performance is one of the few places where people can truly be authentic anymore. In this way, Alok's performance is about world-making, where the audience will relate to one another with "a dedication to vulnerability, play, interdependence, and magic." The magic of Alok is simply that it is ephemeral, and that it will never be replicated in the same way again. They also teach theories and histories that have been buried as a way of pedagogy.

Alok's work has a variety of themes that resurfaced. They unpack the essence of transmisogyny, reflect on the continued assault on trans and gender non-conforming people, and rethink the representation of TGNCs. Femme in Public, Alok's first book of poetry, a reflection on transfeminine people. They toured a world book fair, collaborating with local trans artists and organizations to advocate for trans justice. "The majority of people in Vice believe that trans is what we look like, not who we are." We're treated to the spectacle of our appearance." "There is a long tradition of trans-femme bodies being reduced to metaphor, metaphor, and nightmares," Alok says, "and it's been seen as stand-ins for theories, fantasies, and nightmares." They draw attention to the fact that, although gender non-conforming people are the most noticeable in public, the mainstream LGBT movement has still left them largely unnoticed.

Alok has pledged to combating "the global crisis of loneliness" by creating public spaces for processing pain and building meaningful links. This work involves reimagining and deploying technology as a conduit for intimacy. Alok developed an artist-in-residence program at The Invisible Dog Art Center in 2019, where they created "Strangers are Potential People" and hosted a "Valentine's Cry-In" to create a space for public mourning and exploring alternative modes of intimacy and interdependence. Alok facilitates "Feelings Workshops" around the world to learn new ways of communicating with ourselves, one another, and as a way to promote emotional stability and wellbeing.

They contest Western rationalism and a desire for reductive categation, insisting instead on the intricacy and enormity of everyone and everything. They want to create work and ways of relating to each other that are less understood and more about being felt. Art, they say, is one of the few places we can come nearest to approximating truth. "You reduce something as popular as a human being into a word," they say in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. Words only represent truth, and art is where we go to find truth when we really want to know truth. Ace Lehner explains that there's more to the non-binary world of art than what meets the eyes in "Trans Self-Imaging Praxis, Decolonizing Photography, and Alok Vaid-Menon's Work. Transposing a compelling challenge to photographic discourse as an identity and an analytic, it is a compelling argument." (page 1). Many trans people have been featured in Alok Vaid-Menon's works of art; Vaid-Menon says it's impossible to express gender in a work of art; however, they have the most to overcome this challenge, as shown by their art. However, Vaid-Menon does not only photograph their work, but they also write, design clothing, a clothing line, and make videos describing and encouraging others. Patricia Berne, Jamal T. Lewis, et al., also included Vaid-Menon in the film "Beauty Always Recognizes Itself": A Roundtable on Sins Invalid" by Patricia Berne, Jamal T. Lewis et al. Each artist discusses how beauty, injustice, bigotry, and misogyny have influenced their art in this journal article. “I am often told that I am ugly as a gender non-conforming, transfeminine person,” Vaid-Menon writes. (2422) 2432). They have since chosen to challenge their artwork to highlight these topics, but to do this, they need to be aided, even within the LGBTQ+ group.

Beauty, according to Vaid-Menon, can be a cruel system of laws that must be followed. Vaid-Menon's "Genderless Future" explores what needs to be done to normalize veneration for non-binary and LGBTQ+ fashion as well as "degender the fashion community" (Menon, M.10:00 min), encouraging gender equality in fashion rather than simply about gender. Valid-Menon has also written a book describing why people should think of gender as more than just the traditional black and white. "The gender binary is a societal belief that there are only two distinct and opposing genders: man and woman," they state in "Beyond the Gender Binary." This belief is backed by a system of power that exists to promote conflict and division, not to celebrate innovation and diversity (page 1). Vaid-Menon focuses and points out the numerous flaws that are ubiquitous in people's minds around the world. The primary aim of these organizations is to enable and encourage a person to see beyond man and female gender boundaries.

Alok has created three gender neutral fashion collections, which are known for their joyful color and celebration of skirts and dresses as gender neutral. Fashion design became a "materialization of the life [they were] living" in a way to encapsulate what they were writing and thinking about. They were first inspired by imagining what they would wear if they didn't have to fear violence. They're using fashion to challenge what sort of aesthetics are seen as natural and those that are perceived as artificial in their new work.

Vaid-Menon, in a 2019 interview with Business of Fashion, called for complete degendering of fashion and beauty industries.

For New York Fashion Week, Alok has walked for many fashion companies, including Opening Ceremony, Studio 189, and Chromat. They have worked with numerous companies, including Opening Ceremony, Harry's, and Polaroid Eyewear. They have appeared in fashion journals and journals such as Vogue, Vogue Italia, Bust magazine, Wussy Magazine, and Paper magazine.

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Awards and recognition

• Live Works Performance Act Award (2017)
• Vogue: 9 Trans + Gender Non-Conforming Writers You Should Know (2018)
• LogoTV Pride 30 (2018)
• NBC Pride 50 alongside James Baldwin and Audre Lorde (2019)
• OUT Magazine 100 (2019)