The Knife Cuts Both Ways

        Serena Jara is a photographer who works out of New York City, and is a trans woman whose work primarily focuses around women of trans experience. One specific woman in whom Jara has come to see as a mother figure, Cecilia Gentili is the storyteller and model featured in the zine The Knife Cuts Both Ways. With Gentili as the model and storyteller, Jara as the photographer and transcriber of Gentili’s words, and Gogo Graham as the fashion designer, The Knife Cuts Both Ways is a zine fully produced by trans women that acts as an ethnography of Gentili’s life and beauty. Gentili shares with us how her Grandmother bought her a wig for her elementary school talent show, insisting she understand it was other people’s opinions of Gentili that had to change, not Gentili herself. She shares her experiences with sex work in a darkly humorous tone, making light of the difficult life she had led.
        Jara says that this zine “creates a non-linear narrative around our photographic relationship spanning the last five years.” She states that “Because Cecilia has acted as a trans mother towards me and several of my sisters, I began to imagine scenarios of intimacy and suspense where she embodied my own dramatized projections of her as powerful, emblematic, and goddess-esque.”