BUTCH CUT

Intermission 02. - 09.12.2025

BUTCH CUT is a queer community building project, dedicated to empowering Butch, trans, and non-binary identified people, that has been understood from the outset as a place of re-capitulation: a place for queer self-care, a brave space to talk about mental health. A third space where vulnerability and wounds can be shown, so that we can begin to heal them and go back out into everyday, late-capitalist resistance with strengthened self-confidence and a sense of solidarity.

Hank D. Wüstenberg puts it this way: "Hairstyles have always determined gender identity and divided it into two clear categories: men's and women's haircuts. But what do people do with their hair if they don't fit into these two boxes or want to break out of this binary category system? How do we signal the contours of our desires to other people without speaking? How do we manage to generate self-esteem through hair when the majority of society makes us feel at all times that we don't ‘fit in’, don't ‘belong’ or are ‘too weird and exhausting’ with our ‘special gender requests’? What spaces do we need to heal ourselves so that we can continue to fight? How do hairstyles create feelings of belonging—of community and affiliation? [...] In a time of growing right-wing forces and the scapegoating of gender-queer and transgender people, I see this work as an important contribution to preserving our hard-won, newly granted rights, in order to shift the focus away from fear and toward the everyday resistance and solidarity that we can create anew every day. Hope and preparation are the best weapons against ignorance and fascism."