Not queer enough, not straight enough: painting with hair as a choreographic expression of pansexual identity / Katariina Korsimaa (2025)

This practice-led dissertation investigates how hairography, scored improvisation and embodied mark-making can choreographically articulate pansexual identity and the affective tension of being “not queer enough, not straight enough.” Hair functions here both as material – painting, dragging, flicking – and as a social marker of queerness, allowing visibility to emerge through embodied and material traces. The project is framed within an autoethnographic, arts-based and queer theoretical methodology, using solo performance to explore how identity is negotiated through movement, affect and residue. The creative process involved working with hair, black paint and large-scale paper, producing a performance that inscribed presence into space through mess, labour and trace. In doing so, the project contributes to dance studies, queer performance, Arts-Based research and Practice-as-Research by positioning hairography and mark-making not as decorative flourishes but as core compositional strategies. Foregrounding process over product, the performance emphasises emotion, instability and material afterlife as both method and message. By engaging with choreographic mess, visual residue and embodied negotiation, the study proposes that pansexual identity can be made felt not through categorical definition but through the lived, fluid and affective labour of performance.