The Girl Who Melted Dallas (2025)
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The Girl Who Melted Dallas is a site-responsive ritual developed for Château IV and performed inside the historic Aldredge House in Dallas, Texas, a mansion whose architecture is saturated with the whiteness, hierarchy, and Southern femininity that have long policed and excluded women like me. Inside this setting—this shrine to lineage and property—I staged a trans-feminine apparition that refused containment: a pink ritual designed to melt the psychic machinery of Dallas. The performance also carried the private ache of my mother’s misgendering, the gaze of avoidant, straight male spectatorship—wounds that followed me into Texas, simmering beneath the pink softness and ritual warmth.
The performance began as a slow processional walk through the house. I wore pink lingerie layered with a sheer pregnancy gown, a costume that held sex work, fertility, and vulnerability in the same breath. In my hands was a snow globe of Dallas, topped with a candle whose melting wax pooled around the city inside it. From this candle I lit bundled sage, letting smoke trail through the corridors as I drifted past portraits, staircases, and glass cabinets—a cleansing ritual and an infiltration. The procession was both haunting and reclamation: a trans body moving through rooms built to exclude her, rewriting the house’s atmosphere with every step.
This culminated in the live kissing-booth ritual, where I invited strangers to whisper a wish into my ear and kiss me before kissing a sacred stuffed dolphin crafted by indigenous people in Colombia. The wishes had to benefit the collective; they could not touch money. In a city where the headquarters of the Dakota Access Pipeline’s funders loom, this act, both intimate and ceremonial, reframed the anxiety of sex work and the sexualized Latina body into a portal of blessing, a transmutation chamber where desire could be rerouted toward communal healing.
The “melting” in the title invokes both Texas heat and trans alchemy: the ability of softness to dissolve architectures of patriarchy, petrocapitalism, and inherited familial hurt. The Girl Who Melted Dallas declares that the trans-feminine body, when placed within the very rooms meant to contain her, becomes a shamanic engine—capable of liquefying empires from the inside.