JUICE

Hello.

You can leave your things over there.

Please uncover from the waist down.

Put your legs on here. And slide forward a bit.

Very good.

Now, this might feel a little cold.

„FACTS! AMAZING FACTS!“ headlines a leaflet from 1820, describing a „first rate phaenomena“: 19-year-old Mademoiselle Lefort, described as a „magnet of attraction, in whom the sexes are equally blended“, will be exhibited in England. In her, „feminine beauty“ is said to merge with „beard, a mustache and whiskers“. This exhibition starts off Lefort’s international career. She travels through Europe and lives a comparably independent life. What Lefort felt at the time is unknown. The way her body has been studied and examined by doctors has been meticulously documented.

In 2024, the University Hospital of Heidelberg lists intersex as a disease and advises: “Surgery is necessary in the vast majority of cases.” Surgery would nowadays make it possible “for the external genitalia to look normal – either like a girl’s or like a boy’s“.
In the two-hundred years between these events, medical science will go from declaring inter* people from a biological sensation to an anatomical impossibility. Evaluation by evaluation, the existence of inter* people is dissected, examined, judged and, finally, rendered impossible.

JUICE confronts the categorization of hermaphroditic, illegible and disobedient bodies. The performer River Roux enters a transparent space. Whether museum, strip club or observatory, the gazes directed at her oscillate between desire and disgust, between attraction and shame. Roux examines the fascination with bodies in-between: What is a ‘natural’ body? Who still has one? And what happens to bodies that refuse?