Designing Destiny

Her surgeries were livestreamed to different art galleries around the world. On the screen you could see ORLAN herself being cut open in the face, seemingly unaffected by pain reading a text by the poet Lemoine Luccioni saying “I never have the skin of what I am”. She called the performance series “the reincarnation of St. ORLAN” which not surprisingly led to her big international breakthrough in the 90s. Her new face was a collage inspired by historical paintings of different women, among them was Mona Lisa that inspired her new forehead and whom she chose because of her androgyny. When asked, she would say that it was never about looking more beautiful, but rather to challenge western beauty standards and raise questions about the status of the body in society. She would also claim that “the private is political,”⁴ but what does that mean?

Only two years after women got the right to vote in France ORLAN was born in Saint Etienne, in 1947. Here was where she performed her first performance pieces “Action Or-Lent: The slow motion walks” at age 17, (1964).⁵ In the performances she walked on crowded streets with an intentionally slow pace, to disrupt rules of the public space. This indicates that ORLAN was aware of social injustices from a young age and that it’s always been in her interest to raise her voice and question society with whatever medium she comes by. Although women had a right to vote for the first time in French history, society’s expectations on them were still based on traditional patriarchal values. Abortion was for instance illegal during most of ORLAN’s youth, until the decriminalization in 1975, when she was 28 years old.⁶

ORLAN wasn’t the only one who tried to stretch boundaries between men and women under these years, in fact, things changed a lot around the thoughts on feminism, especially after the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir published her groundbreaking book “The second sex” (Le deuxième sexe) in 1949 that was spoken of as “the first manifesto of the liberated woman”.⁷ The new idea that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman” would inspire the second as well as the third wave of feminism. The most interesting part about this theory was that if the body no longer was a fact, it couldn’t define one’s destiny.

In one of ORLAN’s later surgeries, she used implants that are normally made to enhance one's cheekbones for making the impression of having two horns instead, by placing them on her forehead. She wanted a surgery that didn’t bring beauty but rather monstrosity. As ORLAN intended, the act led to wild debate, in aggressive as well as violent ways. The Swedish program Fläkt och flärd hit their viewer record when they invited her for an interview and streamed a short version of her performance on TV4.⁸ At the time people were disgusted and upset by what they saw and called it pure craziness. Today she often gets compliments on her appearance and sees this as a victory. “People needed time to get used to it”, she said.

Anybody in performance studies actually knows that there are performances that we do in our lives that are not mere performances, they’re not fake. When performative was first coined as a word the philosopher J.L. Austin was trying to understand legal utterances. So when a judge says “I declare you man and wife”, you become man and wife once that declaration has happened. That’s not fake, that happened. Now what if we were to say that in enacting our lives as a particular gender, we are actually realizing that gender anew. We are making something real happen. When gay and lesbian people started coming out or when trans people started living openly, something changed in the world. By appearing, speaking, acting in certain ways - reality changed. And it has changed. We are seeing the changing of terms. We no longer speak about family, woman, man, desire, sex in the same way. Even the Cambridge dictionary acknowledges that something has changed. So when we talk about performative, we’re talking about an act that makes something come into being or an act that has real consequences. We’re talking about the changes of reality.⁹
– Judith Butler

So, when ORLAN operated implants onto her forehead, she extended the way she exists in this world by changing the way that people view her body. Perhaps she even extended the view on what a woman is or what a respectable human could be or could do. Some critics would probably think of her work as a waste of resources that could have been used for a better cause. Did she even need these surgeries? And if she did, what are really the definitions of need in our society? And what does definitions of needs have to say about our definition of justice? Who is allowed to claim their needs? Who is allowed to access healthcare? Who is allowed to exist?

Trans lives are being discussed daily in the media. Today people could tend to be aware of transness regardless of their political views. On the first day of July in 2025 a new Legal Gender Recognition Act came into force in Sweden, replacing the old one from 1972 that until 2013 forced trans people to sterilize themselves in order to get their legal gender changed (Legal gender meaning the gender marker in the resident register, your social security number and your passport and doesn’t include any medical or surgical treatment).

Since July, trans people have been able to change their legal gender without waiting for a gender consultation, which is currently a wait line that is estimated to be around five years, depending on where in the country you speak of. This change requires approval from a healthcare professional, which means that you’re still not allowed to decide this fully on your own terms. The organization RFSL writes that out of the 18 countries with a modern gender recognition law that is based on self-determination, other northern countries are included, but not Sweden.¹⁰ Already by November of 2025, five months after the new law came into effect, the government is discussing its removal.

“The anti-gender political discourse heightens the ordinary anxiety that people have about gender, associating and conflating that anxiety with a generalized fear about the future of the world itself… There are many reasons to fear, but gender is not the cause of any of those conditions that have given rise to a generalized concern about the future of the world.”¹¹
– Judith Butler