A Clippings Scrapbook: Throbbing Gristle, the Pandrogyne Project, and the Bleeding Edge of Gender

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A body in a sheet lies in the foreground, shrouded in the darkness of the room. Bondage equipment is visible on the back wall. In the light of the doorway, a figure is visible, wearing a dress and smoking a cigarette.
The year is 1993; New York City, West Twenty-Third Street in Manhattan. A body lies in a white sheet on the floor of a BDSM dungeon. Slowly, the body comes to, and another appears in the doorway in a ’60s dress and heels. “And she was walking backwards and forwards with a cigarette in her hand, talking to somebody. And as she carried on walking back and forth, she gradually started to throw off those clothes and change into a really amazing leather fetish outfit. My goodness, who is that? She’s so beautiful. We found ourselves saying out loud, dear universe, if we can be with that person for the rest of our life, that’s all we want. That’s enough.” Those words, and that body, belonged to Genesis P-Orrige, avant-garde musician and performance artist. The body in the doorway belonged to Lady Jaye, dominatrix and nurse. And, in the next several years, those two bodies would become one and the same.
Genesis had been dreaming about the Pandrogyne since the 1980s. In s/her memoir, Nonbinary, s/he reflects; “It was clear to me that pandrogyny was inevitable: that a breakdown of the normal binary idea was going to happen, and that it would be revolutionary.” And Jaye was a registered nurse with h/er own ideas about their corporeal form and gender. “I’ve never really felt comfortable being in a body.”, she told the camera in the documentary The Ballad Of Genesis And Lady Jaye. “I’ve always felt quite trapped in my body.” The abolition of the binary is nothing new–see our April 2025 strip on the work of Thomas Beaty for a much earlier example–but Genesis and Lady Jaye weren’t content with keeping to ideas on paper and tape. Speaking again with NPR’s Snap Judgement, P-Orrige continues, “Going back to William Burroughs and Brion Gysin and some of their work, we thought, well, if they do cut-ups with literature and even with images and even with tape recorders, what if we do a cut up with our bodies so that we become a third being, not just a third mind?” And so, the two embarked on the Pandrogyny project, surgically altering their corporeal forms to resemble one another; and, in the process, abolished the boundaries between them, melding into a singular, genderless being.
A drawing from a scene in the film The Ballad Of Genesis And Lady Jaye, showing Genesis and Lady Jaye wearing dramatic New Romantic styled makeup, standing next to each other in profile.
Another drawing from a scene in the film The Ballad Of Genesis And Lady Jaye, showing Genesis and Jaye lounging on the grass in a sunny grassy park. They are both wearing matching white pantsuits, and Genesis wears a bucket hat, sleeping on Jaye’s arm.
The two underwent a slew of cosmetic procedures to look like each other; matching breast implants, facial modifications, and more. The two dressed like each other, and took on matching gender neutral neopronouns reflecting their absorption into each other and their rejection of the gender roles they were saddled with at birth. And, when Lady Jaye passed on in 2007, Genesis carried on as the pair’s representative on earth until s/her death in 2020. As Lady Jaye put it, “Identity is your only possession, so repossess your self, be possessed by your self, every self, any self you ever wanted to be.” And, to quote Genesis’s words at the end of s/her posthumous 2022 memoir, “There’s always a way. You don’t need resources. You don’t need money. You just need to have an idea that’s strong enough, and that you feel strongly enough about, that you will go against everybody else to say or to put into practice.” “Please go out and try to change the fucking world. End gender. Break sex. Short-circuit control.”

Sources:

Nonbinary, by Genesis P-Orrige and Tim Mohr

The Ballad Of Genesis And Lady Jaye, dir. Marie Losier, 2011.

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