Confessions of the Fox

Jack is locked up in prison and scheduled for execution due to his past crimes. He is celebrated by all the other inmates a legend and treated to food and alcohol by the other men.

Voth continues to realize all the ways in which the manuscript has been edited by people past and present. The wolf metaphors used to describe Jack’s genitals were likely added by a “chimera caucus,” an intersex activist group in the 1970s. Voth postulates that the frequent, graphic sex within the manuscript and the focus on vulvas is a direct response to an art installment entitled Étant Donnés (“Given”) by French artist Marcel Duchamp. The art installment allows viewers to see the spread legs of a cisgender woman through a voyeuristic peephole with the subject’s genitalia at the center of the art piece. Voth posits that this art piece only arises from a cisgender, heterosexist dichotomy of shame and desire around sex and genitals; Confessions represents a transgender, non-heteronormative view of “spread legs.” Voth tells the audience of a book he found in his friends’ archives titled Make a Picture of Shadows Cast. This book reveals a hidden back room to Étant Donnés.