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Susanne Oberbeck
& Genesis P-Orridge



SO: If you were a woman with 50 penises (maybe you are?) and you wanted to write a love song, what would it sound like? (You could add that you would want it to top the charts too, in a country of your choice.)

GP: We* would want to really explore a reawakening of the human species that would, in a sense, give the human species a loving self-respect. We’ve explored this—and have had moments where we really did blend our consciousnesses, became one. And what we came to perceive or believe was that the genetic code in the early eras, like the Stone Age, survived because we as a species had this very aggressive, instinctual, fight-or-flight adrenaline aspect to our behavior. As humans got more sophisticated with tools, they brought themselves to a place where the environment was no longer a place that was innately dangerous. But we’ve never bothered, as a species, to upgrade our behavior. We should be ashamed of ourselves as a species, that we are still arguing and bickering and destroying each other over these ludicrous concepts of tribal sameness or spiritual sameness. We wondered: Where is the programming that could change behavior? How do we change behavior? And we came to the conclusion that DNA is the programming. DNA is the superior life form on the planet. Human

beings are merely disposable containers. We have to have control over those cheap suitcases. They’re not that efficient anymore, and they’re going to become less and less efficient as the climate changes and as all these other crises occur. It seemed to us that if you could create a species of pandrogynes, of hermaphrodites, it would become much more immediately apparent what the issues of behaviors were, because that binary conflict—being male or female and behaving in particular ways to fulfill stereotypes—would immediately be erased. And it would take away a huge negative legacy of misunderstanding and miscommunication.

So we decided to, at the very least, represent those ideas in our determination to explore and propose them by changing ourselves physically. Surrendering our personal bodies to each other and to pandrogyny, at the same time. It was a loving surrender to each other and a conceptual surrender, in order to make it clear how serious we are about what we say.


*Here the use of the third person plural refers to a theoretical joining of the bodies and identities of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and his late partner Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge. This union is the goal of their pandrogeny project, in which the two received radical surgeries in order to become more physically similar.

Susanne Oberbeck and Genesis P-Orridge were recently involved with Creative Time's program Hey Hey Glossolalia
Click here to see the publication

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