"... being any gender is a drag.": Patti Smith, quoted in Levine, Martin P. (1998). Gay Macho, New York: New York University Press.

... and uncle saint jude says... you gots to be a man or a woman or else you just aint HUMAN!

The melange that is Monstrous_Gorgeous [aka t0xic honey aka Abject Precious Object/Subject aka Virginia Barratt] is currently a writer who reads. She is interested in trans/formative performative presentations in the world: on screen, on textbodies, and bleeding all over your floor. She has a background as a multimedia artist, performer, media lecturer, web producer, yoga teacher and accidental academic. Virginia was a founding member of the cyberfeminist collective VNS Matrix, who exhibited and lectured internationally through the 1990's VNS Matrix remapped the technological topography of the time with a feminist/postfeminist/emerging feminisms spin, remapping grids into organic formations and amorphous shapes with leaky boundaries. VNS Matrix spoke in tongues of blasphemous porno-ecstasy as we merged with machines in the blinding light of the technoscreen. The future was so bright they never went without our shades. As viral mutations, they ate themselves and shat themselves out as composting entities, growing new forms and creating new life.

Virginia have been published haphazardly and perform similarly. Her work appears in such publications as Otis Rush, Slit Magazine and independently produced zines. Other places too, many many other places. like in big much more important books and stuff. She has also taught multimedia at university over the last decade, and now begin their first undergraduate degree, a BA (writing) at Southern Cross University. When not reading and writing, when not mesmerised by one screen or another, she farms within an aspirational lifestyle of self sufficiency and sustainability with a small queer farming family. She milks their cow (Rosie) every day and makes yoghurt. She thinks that growing their own food is just about the best thing in the world. She blogs about farming. This is a great pleasure.

i 1st encountered Virginia in the early>mid 90s during my 1st explorations>experimentings within the net. i remember flash-point bumbling thru new_synth areas + being shadow_guided by a fellow australian aussie gal from VNS Matrix: back then Virginia was iconically representational of what i could [= subsequently did] become. she repres[t]en[dril]ted the uncategorised: digital>projected>performative>gestating: all melded with such [uns]hack[l]ed + fluid strength ["gender? wha? reality? huh?"]. her work with VNS Matrix + her solo-htmled wordtracts acted as a mammothly propelling spur that shoved me in2 developing my code_rawness + byte_immersion.

One of the first projects created by VNS Matrix was a giant billboard and manifesto, sitting [not so] pretty - monstrously - monstressly - on a busy stretch of road in the then urban ghettoland on the edges of Newtown. "A Cyberfeminist Manifest for the 21st Century". A gender problem/a hybrid entity/a phantasmagorical futurepast creature giving birth to words [i]en[ci]ticing gendered feministing bodies to take up tools and break codes and de[con]struct binaries. A movement, a shudder, a shiver, a rumble round the globe... In dedicated workshops they guided people through wor[l]ds [dis]embodied, peopled by spectral bodies dressed in text. Back then, they listened to the modem song while boundary riding the edges of a virtreality in the static blitz of carrier fire. I see in Mez's work the ec[static] and perpetual unfolding and infinite meaning creation of a higher code birthed into the all unknowing immersive hivemind - a perpetually becoming multiplicity. The cyberfeminist project shimmers, ghostlike: remnants murmuring in her poetics, remembered.