Crafting a Sticky Queer form a Corporeal Rhetorical Resistance to the Pathologization of Trans Bodies

Crafting a Sticky Queer Form: A Corporeal Rhetorical Resistance to the Pathologization of Trans*Bodies A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in Rhetoric Studies. ________________________ ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iv Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Pathologization of Trans* people.................................................................... 10 Chapter 2: “Homage” in Detail ......................................................................................... 13 Chapter 3: A Corporeal Rhetorical Lens and Body Rhetoric ........................................... 14 Chapter 4: Blood, Needles, Nudity ................................................................................... 20 Chapter 5: Witnessing ....................................................................................................... 25 Chapter 6: Agency ............................................................................................................ 33 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 36 Appendix A ....................................................................................................................... 41 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 48 iii Acknowledgements To my family, all of the love and support was vital to my completion of this project. Words fail here. All I’ll say is thank you and I love you so much. iv Introduction Blood leaves the puncture wound made by the needle now held in performance artist Kris Grey’s hand. The rivulet flows languidly down their naked body leaving a crimson trail on the pale skin. The transgender artist finishes removing the needle which, until a moment ago, was piercing the bumpy scar across their pectoral line, evidence of their top surgery. They let it fall. The needle lands next to their bare feet planted on the white stage. Over the course of an hour that lone needle is joined by the other nine needles installed along Grey’s chest and, of course, by the droplets of blood leaving the wounded openings. Kris Grey’s performance piece “Homage,” described in part here and in greater detail below, is a visceral performance about the trauma and creation of the trans*1 form. Grey is a New York City-based transgender visual artist who earned a Bachelor’s of Fine Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a Master’s Degree in Fine Art from Ohio University. According to their personal website bio they also“perform, teach, 1 A note on terminology, I utilize trans* with an asterisk to include not only transgender men and women but also the other identities under the trans* umbrella. This is important to include Kris Grey who identifies as gender queer;“trans (without the asterisk) can be intentionally used to describe trans men and trans women, while the asterisk denotes a special effort to also include all non-binary, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming identities, including (but not limited to, and in no particular order) transgender, transman, transwoman, transsexual, genderqueer, genderfluid, non-binary, genderfuck, genderless, agender, non-gendered, third gender, two-spirit, and bigender.” Killermann, Sam. "What Does the Asterisk in "trans*" Stand For?" It's Pronounced Metrosexual. November 18, 2018. Accessed April 08, 2019. https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2012/05/what-does-the-asterisk-in-transstand-for/. and exhibit work internationally”2. Their other work includes themes of trans* and queer identity, embodiment and pathology. In “Precarity”, Grey stood naked balancing the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) on their head to call up images of finishing school exercises for women and pathology of trans* and queer identities that are listed as mental illness in the text.3 In “(Sub)merge”, Grey remained under water for 4 hours in order to honor a story of a queer person escaping police raids in the 1960s by hiding underwater and breathing through a reed4. Grey reaches their audiences through Instagram with over 1,500 followers and over 370 posts.5 While Grey’s “Homage” is not particularly well known, this does not diminish the power of this trans* artist’s contribution to corporeal rhetoric and rhetorical agency. The piece does have important following online and was featured in an ARTFile magazine article. Regardless of fame, it is important to locate and analyze resistive rhetorics wherever they might be found including in performance art spaces. Homage is rhetorically significant and circulates powerfully among audiences. I first saw documentation of performance art piece “Homage” in a crowded dark auditorium in Olin Hall at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington in the spring of 2015. My art class, “Art and Public Engagement” had been invited to the talk and I had arrived late. I hustled in to sit at the back. Grey stood at the front of the room and prefaced the images and videos of “Homage” with a note about their intensity and a 2 Grey, Kris. "Bio." Kris Grey. Accessed April 08, 2019. https://kristingrey.com/page/1-Bio.html. 3 Grey, Kris. "Precarity (live Performance at Ohio University)." Kris Grey. Accessed April 08, 2019. https://kristingrey.com/artwork/4358694-Precarity-live-performance-at-Ohio-University.html. 4 Grey, Kris. "(Sub)merge." Kris Grey. Accessed April 08, 2019. https://kristingrey.com/artwork/2797239Sub-merge.html. 5 Grey, Kris. "Kris Grey (@krisgreystudio) • Instagram Photos and Videos." Instagram. Accessed April 08, 2019. https://www.instagram.com/krisgreystudio/. 2 statement that some people have had visceral reactions to them, including fainting. With such a weighty warning we moved forward together to view the video clips as well as still images of their performance. I was breathless. The friend I sat next to was immediately disgusted by the blood; he sank in his chair. Other members of the audience gasped and shuddered at the images. One person whispered that they felt ill. The images and video were charged with energy and the audience went through a range of emotions. Most obvious were the people shocked or distraught by the images of needles piercing skin and of blood dripping. I felt reverence and a resounding and deep feeling that I beheld something strangely beautiful and special. I felt that Grey was acting on their body in a tender yet violent and shocking way to produce such images. I was immediately interested in the array of responses of the audience members in that auditorium and that Grey them self acknowledged in the myriad of different responses that they had noticed in the past; it seemed to me that the performance produced many affective responses in the audience. I was intrigued by these affects in the audience as well as the role of witnessing the audience(s) took on. I myself had both been a witness to the performance mediated through video and photography and witness to the litany of disparate reactions of my fellow audience members in the space of that dark auditorium. My experience as a witness to Grey’s showing of “Homage” and my position as a student of rhetoric inspired me to think more about the power of corporeal rhetoric, affect, agency, audience, and resistance to pathologization of trans* identities. Four years after my initial brush with “Homage”, I am still fascinated by these themes and the power of this performance as a rhetorical artifact. 3 Given the lack of rhetorical scholarship on trans* and genderqueer experience, my project offers a much needed reading of an embodied rhetorical object centered on trans* resistance. One of few scholars to deal with transgender bodies and rhetoric is Gayle Salamon in her Assuming A Body. In Chapter 3, Salamon uses the only lesbian bar in San Francisco, The Lex, as case study for the mutability of trans identities. The boys of the Lex create a calendar that showcases the varying identities present. Salamon also explores the topic of the body, she writes “What then is meant when we say that the body is a social construct? It means that our bodies are always shaped by the social world in which we are inescapably situated.”6 This understanding of trans* rhetorics acknowledges the social construction and variance that exists for trans* bodies. This social element is important for Grey as they (in their own language) craft their “queer form” in relation to audiences who are inherently socially connected. My project adds to this conversation by centering a trans* rhetorician and mapping the effects on the audiences of the body rhetoric produced. Due to the limited literature on trans* rhetorics, I weave together more general theories on affect, corporeal rhetoric, witnessing, and audiences in order to offer up a rhetorical contribution on Grey’s trans* rhetoric. I identify Grey’s performance as a corporeal rhetoric, drawing on the scholarship of Raymie McKerrow. Grey does not speak during the performance with the result that their body does the talking. The embodied nature of the performance, from the nudity to the deep breathing to the bleeding, make this project obviously corporeal. I will apply Raymie McKerrow’s notion of a corporeal rhetorical lens to analyze Grey’s performance in order to establish the rhetorical nature of “Homage”. I utilize Kevin DeLuca’s notion 6 Salamon, Gayle. Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. New York: Columbia University Press,76, 2010. 4 of body rhetoric to establish that bodies can make rhetorical arguments without language. I push both of these scholars by using affect theory to demonstrate the relational nature of bodies in this rhetorical performance. Grey’s performance is resistive because of its affective nature. Affect expands corporeal rhetoric to account for relationships among bodies and emotions. While affect is, at times,difficult to define, I understand affect as an emotional force which can connect and direct bodies. In the introduction to their book The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth write: “Affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body...in those resonances that circulate about, between and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds”7. This definition is important because it sets up affect as a relational force which connects bodies to each other and other affects. Affect is concerned with the corporeal and is thus useful for my project on the performance of a trans* body. Sara Ahmed writes “Affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects”8. Here the language of connection is again present, affect is a powerful force that, beyond bodies, also sticks emotions and ideas together. Affect expands McKerrow by going beyond the gender binary and embodiment in a vacuum to look at the relational and emotional. Emotion is important when thinking of affect and while the two are not exact synonyms, I lean towards understanding emotion and affect as closely linked in the tradition of Gregory Seigworth and Sara Ahmed. Affective responses to “Homage” like disgust, discomfort, fear, attraction, 7 Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth. The Affect Theory Reader. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1, 2011. 8 Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,29, 2015. 5 arousal or reverence are emotional and connect the bodies of audiences to Grey and to each other. These affective responses also connect to other affects as Ahmed’s notion of stickiness works to circulate and accumulate emotional forces. The notion of Grey’s engaged affective audience and their witnessing role are vital to my project. One consideration is that the audience of “Homage” is mediated in multiple ways. There is the live audience to Grey’s first performance of “Homage”, then there are the online audiences who view images and video from that performance. I am a part of an audience who viewed images and video and heard Grey speak in small auditorium in Walla Walla in 2015. Grey has a full video of their second performance of “Homage” online which generates audiences. Instagram posts create even more audiences mediated by social media. You, my reader, will become an audience through my sharing and your viewing of specific images from the performance inserted into this thesis project. Audience for this project is necessarily diffuse. However, its power not only remains intact but is magnified by its diffuse nature and circulation. The performance provokes intense affective responses in its mediated audiences. Affect, understood as sticky through Ahmed, is generative and connects audiences around Grey’s powerful piece. One important function of this affective audience is their role as witnesses to the crafting of Grey’s queer form and the trauma Grey experienced due to isolation of pathology. Rhetorical scholar Bradford Vivian writes about witnessing to trauma and public memory; “[Witnessing does] not simply document and commemorate, mourn and memorialize but to do so in a manner that allows its members to symbolically witness condemnable injustices or otherwise unimaginable tragedies, and thereby participate in 6 further disseminating the commensurate lessons of history”9. In this definition we get one understanding of the role of a witness (to document, commemorate, mourn, memorialize) but Vivian adds that witnesses serve a function to shape public memory and history. For my purposes, I will not engage in the public memory making function of witnessing. However, the first half of Vivian’s definition is clarifying of the role of witnessing in its acknowledgment of traumatized beings. Sophie Anne Oliver builds on and differs from Vivian’s notion of a traditional witness, she shifts the focus to concentrate on the relationship between the traumatized body and the witness not the unidirectional act of viewing in Vivian’s work. Oliver invests in an embodied spectatorship with its roots in performance art tied explicitly to traumatized bodies (of which Grey is one); “From its earliest manifestations, performance art has sought to redefine discourses of the traumatized body in ways that I suggest may provide the first step towards a model for ethical spectatorship”.10 Importantly in regards to Grey’s performance and the many audience reactions to their traumatized body, Oliver notes that ethical spectatorship or witnessing does not require just one reaction; “performance art encourages a revised formulation of spectatorial ethics, one that is not based only in the imposition of ideal or ‘appropriate’ responses”11. I rely on Oliver’s nuanced and specific understanding of an ethical witness to traumatized body that leaves open possibilities for different audience responses. Bearing witness is important to Grey to undo isolation of pathologization 9 Vivian, Bradford. "Commonplace Witnessing." Oxford Scholarship Online, 2017, 8. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190611088.001.0001. 10 Oliver, Sophie Anne. "Trauma, Bodies, and Performance Art: Towards an Embodied Ethics of Seeing." Continuum 24, no. 1 (2010): 120. doi:10.1080/10304310903362775. 11 Oliver, 123 7 which caused them trauma during their top surgery experience, the myriad of audience affective responses are all a part of that complex witnessing. Through their performance Grey is able to claim a rhetorical agency, negotiated through power dynamics but full of resistive potential. I utilize Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s understanding of rhetorical agency in order to explicate the agentic nature of Grey’s performance. My usage of Campbell’s rhetorical agency stretches the concept from being purely textual to aligning with the embodied. This agency puts Grey into a position to create rhetoric that challenges hegemonic discourses around trans* bodies like the pathologization which they undergo in part due to the classification of gender dysphoria as an illness. Finding nodes of resistance to the pathologization which trans* bodies face is of paramount importance and I argue that “Homage” is an example of empowered rhetorical agency that does that resistance. “Homage” pushes its audience to bear witness to a creation of corporeal agency and poses a challenge to the pathologizing discourse around trans* bodies. I argue that Grey’s performance and its mediated representations in film, social media and photography resist hegemonic violence of the pathologization of trans* bodies, a practice which allows Grey to craft an embodied agency witnessed by an affective audience. In building my argument I first establish the context of trans* pathologization and dehumanization which “Homage” is responding to. Next, I offer a close reading of the performance. Then I will explore the corporeal rhetorical lens which I apply to Grey’s performance and which structures my analysis. Next, I will focus my analysis on three elements of the performance that are especially impactful; blood, needles, and nudity. 8 Then I will reflect on the role of affective witnessing in the performance. Finally, I’ll address the agency which Grey activates through their performance. 9 Chapter 1: Pathologization of Trans* people Grey themselves cite pathologization as an oppressive part of their trans* experience. In an ArtFile Interview in 2013, Grey says “One of the things that’s being hotly debated right now is the pathology around trans* experience. In order to get hormones or be able to have surgeries, you must be diagnosed with a mental illness. Gender Identity Disorder or GID has been listed as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association since the mid 70’s.12” In labeling all trans* people as inherently ill, they are oppressively pathologized. In fact, the rhetorical act of labeling one as ill through pathologization is the prerequisite to receiving gender affirming measures like surgery and hormones. It is important to note that this diagnosis occurs privately, in isolation and under professionalized medical scope. These qualities of pathology set up Grey’s rhetorical contribution as resistive. Pathologization is harmful to trans* people. The National LGBTQ Taskforce notes the problematic nature of pathologizing trans* identity on their website saying; we must understand that as long as transgender identities are understood through a “disease” framework, transgender people will suffer from unnecessary abuse and discrimination from both inside and outside the medical profession. As long as gender variance is characterized by the medical field as a mental condition, transgender people 12 DeBrincat, 1. 10 will find their identities invalidated by claims that they are “mentally ill,” and therefore not able to speak objectively about their own identities and lived experiences.13 The pathologization of trans* people as sick is fundamentally a rhetorical process of naming, a process which can undermine trans* people’s ability to even talk about their own experience. This rhetorical label of pathologization works to dehumanize trans* people and negate their identities. Pathologization invalidates trans* identities. This makes Grey’s crafting of their queer form a move against invalidation towards the resistive affirmation of their identity. Jenny Rice writes on the notion of pathology in a rhetorical context saying that pathology is “the sense that something is defective or misaligned, the feeling that something has gone off the rails in a discernible way”.14 Trans* bodies are labeled as defective and in need of fixing due to their pathologization. Understanding pathologization as rhetorical is vital for my project because Grey resists pathology through their own rhetorical contribution of corporeal and affective intervention. In Sarah Topp’s writing on the pathologization of intersex people, she highlights the rhetorical significance of pathology. She writes: The potential for some names to empower and for others to harm is especially evident when contextualized in a medical setting. The language of illness, disease, diagnoses and medicine can be particularly powerful for individual understandings of self.”...Medicine and its attendant ‘discursive 13 "(In)validating Transgender Identities: Progress and Trouble in the DSM-5." National LGBTQ Task Force. December 13, 2012. Accessed April 08, 2019. http://www.thetaskforce.org/invalidating-transgenderidentities-progress-and-trouble-in-the-dsm-5/. 14 Rice, Jenny. "Pathologia." Quarterly Journal of Speech101, no. 1 (2015): 35. doi:10.1080/00335630.2015.995921. 11 practices, such as diagnosis, have been central to the construction of the subjectivity and the objectification of people’ (Gillman et al., 2000: 391). This is because the choice of terminology and the way it is presented to an individual ‘may have a profound effect’15 While intersex and trans people experience different pathologizations, there are similarities that elucidate trans* experience. The rhetorical and linguistic nature of pathological naming in medicine have material consequences for its victims; be that through legal discrimination, denial of rights, negative relationships with family or poor sense of self and humanity. The rhetorical power of a diagnosis, the naming of a body as ill has material consequences. Notably, naming a body through diagnosis can cause that individual to understand themselves negatively through the invalidation of pathology. It is important to note that diagnosis occurs under privatized and medicalized conditions. These rhetorical diagnoses make trans* people into objects under pathology, passive recipients of a medical label. Pathologizing labels dehumanize trans* people, thus striking a blow to their very subjectivity. The rhetorical power of pathologization necessitates a rhetorical challenge. Through their performance, Grey makes themselves into an acting subject in a public forum thus disrupting the privatized medical context and objectifying force of pathology. 15 Topp, Sarah S. "Against the Quiet Revolution: The Rhetorical Construction of Intersex Individuals as Disordered." Sexualities16, no. 1-2 (2013): 187. doi:10.1177/1363460712471113. 18 12 Chapter 2: “Homage” in Detail In the first performance of “Homage”, Grey stood naked on a small white stage in a bare room with two open windows flanking the stage allowing in natural light. Along their pectoral line were a row of ten 3 inch needles piercing the flesh there. Grey’s scars from top surgery were emphasized by the needles. Methodically and meditatively, Grey looked down, took a deep breath and then pulled out the first needle. They inhaled and exhaled deeply, holding the needle at waist height before purposefully dropping the needle where it fell at their bare feet. The room was so silent that the needle’s impact with the stage was audible. Grey returned to breathing meditatively. Minutes passed. Grey eventually turned to their other side of their chest and began again the cycle of breathing, removing, and dropping of the needle. Soon blood from the new orifices began to run down their body, veering into their center before dripping on to the floor. Over the course of an hour, Grey removed needles from each side of their chest, alternating sides. More blood flowed and more collected on the stage next to the fallen needles. Grey’s feet had spatterings of blood on them. The blood running down their middle slowly dripped to the floor. Grey’s tone was calm and serene with slow deep breathing throughout the piece. The audience, off camera, are reverent and quiet. The room held an intensity yet Grey radiated a calmness. I invite you, my audience, to engage with images from the performances in my appendix. These photographs and snapshots from Instagram provide a way into viewing and engaging with “Homage”. Though I integrate the images into my analysis, I encourage you to peruse them beforehand so as to have time to experience your own affective response. 13 Chapter 3: A Corporeal Rhetorical Lens and Body Rhetoric One would have a difficult time reading “Homage” through a traditional rhetorical paradigm which relies on the linguistic or textual. The silence, the naked body, the blood; each of these elements demands a corporeal lens to read their rhetorical power. A corporeal reading and attention to the body is vital because the entire performance is without language. The silence makes the naked body the source of rhetoric. The second corporeal element is the bodily reactions that Grey performs; the deep breathing and the bleeding are bodily functions which take on as much if not more meaning than a spoken rhetoric; a corporeal rhetorical lens becomes the way to analyze these bodily aspects of the embodied performance. A corporeal rhetorical lens establishes “Homage” as a rhetorical object. Raymie McKerrow argues for a corporeal rhetoric in his article “Corporeality and Cultural Rhetoric: A Site for Rhetoric's Future”. To contextualize his argument, McKerrow writes that women have long been excluded from rhetoric and in order to rectify that history it is necessary to alter rhetoric’s relationship to embodiment, moving away from gendering or sexing: a corporeal rhetoric forsakes oppositionality in favor of an allencompassing perspective on the rhetorical act. The sense of rhetoric envisioned draws on but goes beyond the feminist account of the body. As such, the 14 body is neither uniquely gendered nor sexed, and is no longer seen as a part of a mind/body binary. 16 McKerrow argues that there is no place for oppositionality in gender or rhetoric. Importantly for my project, he continues on to say that the body is not uniquely sexed or gendered. This move denaturalizes the oft formed connection between the body and the feminine or female. My project builds on this disruption by forwarding a specifically trans* body and rhetoric. McKerrow disrupts the gender binary and the mind/body binary in an important way that opens up space for my work on trans* corporeal rhetoric. Grey’s body is queerly formed and offers rhetoric from that positionality. Critiquing the mind/body binary, McKerrow explains that historically the body has been tied to the feminine along with emotion, nature and the private sphere as opposed to the masculine which is coupled with the public sphere, the mind, reason, and culture17. This is a tradition that goes back to Plato and Aristotle which feminists have attempted to rebalance, however, McKerrow goes further and pushes to erase the gender binary altogether. McKerrow’s corporeal rhetoric sees a body that is not necessarily sexed or gendered.18 This opens up space to look at bodies outside the gender binary, in my case: a genderqueer/trans* body. I am interested in analyzing how Grey’s body “speaks” without their verbal contribution due to the encoding of meaning. It is also of interest the ways in which as a genderqueer body, Grey may resist the coding or may relate to those signs differently ie 16 Mckerrow, Raymie E. "Corporeality and Cultural Rhetoric: A Site for Rhetorics Future." Southern Communication Journal63, no. 4 (1998): 319. doi:10.1080/10417949809373105. 17 18 McKerrow,317 Mckerrow 319 15 through surgery or disruption of social codes in their performance of their crafted queer form. I understand queer form to be a queer body that is created in a resistive relation to heteronormativity. The body is also historical for McKerrow:“The body as physical presence is connected to its own history, but this does not necessitate seeing it only in the terms in which history has named it as feminine.”19 While the body has historically been read as feminine,“Homage” disrupts and questions the relationship between the body and the feminine. Grey’s body has its own history, one that includes the choice to have top surgery and begin to craft a queer form. These challenges to a traditional history foreground the importance of my project’s focus on trans* embodiment. These understandings of and background on the body elucidates my project because of its rhetorical corporeality. Notably, McKerrow challenges a feminine only form and demands that corporeal rhetoric disrupt the gender binary. Moving beyond the feminine body is valuable for my project of engaging genderqueer and trans embodiment. Corporeal rhetoric is a lens that allows seeing rhetoric as embodied, it is “an attitude that one takes toward the rhetorical act”20. By taking this attitude and applying it to “Homage”, I am able to explore the ways that performance and rhetoric are tied together as well as the manner in which “Homage” is an embodied rhetoric. McKerrow explains “An embodied sense of rhetoric as a performance that one does, rather than as an analytic, objectified extension of who one is”21. This quote demonstrates the challenge McKerrow strikes against essentialist notions of the self and the body for an in-process 19 McKerrow, 318. 20 McKerrow,320 McKerrow, 323 21 16 notion of embodied rhetoric as becoming through performance. This is significant for “Homage” as a performance. Corporeal rhetoric is a necessary project to expand what rhetoric means and to claim a wholeness for the rhetorical situation; a wholeness that is only made possible when rhetoric rejects the binary opposition between mind and body and embraces corporeal rhetoric and embodied language. Affect fits in well here, given its relational approach to bodies, emotions, and ideas. My work pushes beyond this binary to center queer and trans* bodies; bodies which McKerrow opens the door for with his rejection of the historical and compulsory relationship between the body and the female. Though McKerrow corrects this simplistic view, his rejection of gendering does not specifically account for gendered experience of trans* people which is the contribution my work makes. I also push corporeal rhetoric like Grey’s performance to engage with affect. The inclusion of affect enables a look at not only rhetorical bodies but at the affective relationships among them. My work contributes to McKerrow the inclusion of the relationships between bodies through affect. Grey’s work enables us to imagine a specific gendering of the body (a trans* one) in order to open up possibilities of differently sexed and gendered bodies imagined and crafted by rhetorics. The corporeal rhetorical lens can easily be expanded to engage queer and trans* bodies like that of Grey. A scholar on embodied rhetoric, Kevin M DeLuca writes about Earth First!, ACT UP and Queer Nation; three groups struggling to communicate messaging against hegemonic power and poor odds22. Two of the three groups highlight the history of stigmatization which kept queer bodies out of sight. ACT UP and Queer Nation used 22 Deluca,10 17 their bodies in die-ins, kiss-ins and a myriad of other body centric protests that challenged silencing discourses. The stigma that these groups challenged makes demonstrations of queer bodies even more powerful. DeLuca explains “These groups are in hostile territory with little control. What they do have some control over, however, is the presentation of their bodies in the image events that attract media attention. Their bodies then become not merely flags to attract attention for the argument but the site and substance of the argument itself.”23This is central to DeLuca’s argument that bodies in and of themselves make arguments in powerful ways. Specifically his notion of body rhetoric challenges the idea that argumentation is linguistic only; “The body is front and center in their arguments for it is the body that is at stake.”24 These stakes are high because queer bodies are often targeted for violence, this context makes it extra powerful that those bodies are displayed as unapologetically queer. ACT UP fearlessly occupied St. Patrick’s Cathedral with a disruptive “die-in” resulting in police forcibly removing them. This die-in occurred in response to pronouncement by religious leadership that condoms were forbidden resulting in outcry by the queer community that the pronouncement would literally kill its members. The die-in literally communicated that message with the disruption of the space with bodies. Their bodies made the argument, they told the story. Likewise, in Grey’s performance, the body is at stake and the body makes the arguments through its presentation and performance. While DeLuca explains the power of bodies to make arguments without language and for bodies to be rhetorical, McKerrow and DeLuca depart around the importance of sexing and gendering the body. I 23 24 DeLuca, 10 DeLuca 17 18 take up McKerrow’s argument that corporeal rhetoric is powerful in its challenge to binary sexed and gendered bodies and borrow DeLuca’s concept that bodies make arguments. McKerrow and DeLuca’s work on corporeal rhetoric and body rhetorics, respectively provide vital background for reading Grey’s performance as rhetorical. By reading “Homage” through corporeal rhetoric and accounting for body rhetoric, I am better able to understand gender and the performing body. McKerrow decouples sex and gender as well as disrupting the traditional connection between the feminine, the body, nature, and the private sphere or the masculine, the mind, culture and the public sphere. For my project, McKerrow’s corporeal rhetoric is not just for feminine bodies but instead is open to a trans* body like Grey’s. McKerrow and DeLuca establish “Homage” as a corporeal rhetorical object that makes bodily arguments. 19 Chapter 4: Blood, Needles, Nudity Three important elements of Grey’s performance are the blood, needles, and nudity. These three do some of the most dramatic work visually. Blood, needles and nudity are also pieces of the performance that have particularly fraught histories, especially put into a trans* and queer context. Queer blood is historically pathologized. Needles are linked to medicalization such as stitches and injections. Nudity is a form of intense vulnerability. These three elements of “Homage” do important rhetorical and affective work. Queer blood has long been stigmatized and pathologized. From the AIDS crisis to the FDA banning of queer blood donation that persists today, queer blood has a history attached to it. Jeffrey A. Bennett’s book Banning Queer Blood explicates this history well. Bennett writes about the ban that “the rejection of this [queer] blood illustrates a complex cultural management, a disciplining of citizenship...Advocates of the ban have concocted, deployed and stubbornly adhered to detrimental constructs of queer men.”25 This history of fear and discrimination makes Grey’s decision to open wounds that bleed so striking. Grey’s removal of the needles results in rivulets of blood flowing down their body. The streams of blood veer into the center of their body, dripping off their genitals and collecting on the floor at their feet. This bleeding is notable in part because of its public nature. It is rare that bodies are shown in public bleeding, especially on purpose. 25 Bennett, Jeffrey A. Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2, 2015. 20 Usually, bleeding people are immediately put under the control of medicalization, to staunch the flow of blood. Grey is not the first artist to use blood for its power and impact. Jordan Eagles uses queer blood in his art to protest the ban of queer blood.26 Andres Serrano used blood during the AIDS crisis to start dialogues on queer contagion and other artists have used blood to spark responses.27Grey bleeds on purpose and in public, sharing their queer blood with an audience who is invited to view and share space with the blood. In thinking about contagion and queer blood, it is significant that Grey bleed in public as a queer subject. Grey’s queer body intensifies the impact of bleeding because of the stigma attached to those corporealities. Queer blood is “scary” because of its supposed relationship to HIV, to contagion. To have their blood in such close proximity to their audience is a disruption of the normal sanitization and distancing that usually occur. By exposing their audience to queer blood, Grey pushes the boundaries of stigmatized blood in order to aestheticize their queer bleeding. Another interesting intersection is the way the blood flows off of Grey’s body (as seen in Figure 1); in dripping down their center and off their vagina, the bleeding is reminiscent of menstruation. Menstruation is another form of bleeding that is kept private that here seems to be referenced in a public context. This echo of menstruation is also interesting because it reminds the audience that men and genderqueer people menstruate 26 "This Artist Combines Gay Blood With Pop Culture to Protest America's Ridiculous Donation Policy." Hornet. January 23, 2019. Accessed April 08, 2019. https://hornet.com/stories/gay-blood-jordan-eagles/. 27 Dazed. "All the times Artists Used Blood for Radical Work." Dazed. October 30, 2015. Accessed April 08, 2019. http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/27205/1/ahistory-of-the-relationship-between-blood-and-art. 21 too, that it is not just something women experience and in fact some women do not ever experience. Grey’s body and blood complicate binary notions and bring bleeding into the public eye and importantly, into the view of the audience. One visceral image from the first performance of “Homage” shows needles, covered in blood and gathered around Grey’s feet. The image (Figure 2) is shocking, putting the viewer ill at ease. The needles near the vulnerable feet call up a danger of used or “dirty” needles, of contagion especially related to the fear of HIV/AIDS and intravenous drug use. The connection between HIV, drug use and the queer community in the imaginary of what contagion looks like functions to create fear and disgust in the audiences. Needles are also important because they are that which opens the body, which spills the blood and thus the vehicle of contagion. Grey uses needles to open their orifices on their body and spill blood. The power of the needle is in its transformational usage to change Grey’s body and highlight the site of transformation on Grey’s chest. Needles also call up explicitly medical contexts; of stitches, of IVs, of blood draws all performed by medical professionals. Just as Grey creates openings with needles, needles can close up wounds with stitches. When utilized “properly” in a medical sphere, needles are controlled by medical professionals. This is another resistive element of “Homage” because Grey is operating the needles and is not a medical professional. Using needles “properly” occurs under medical professionalization. Instead of safely and clinically stitching up wounds, Grey inverts this understanding of needles and uses them to open wounds on their body in a public non-medical non-professional context. 22 Another important theme with needles and medicine is that needles made the sutures that completed Grey’s top surgery that left the scar that is so prominently displayed. Those needles closed a medically induced wound in order to transform Grey’s body. Grey’s usage of needles to reopen wounds around that scar left by needles calls up the medical context while putting an important resistive twist on their presence. Grey is operating their needles outside of medicalization in order to craft and claim their queer form. This departure from the norms of needles is part of the resistive potential that disrupts pathologization and its professionalization and isolation. Grey’s nudity is an important part of their performance. Nudity exposes the scars from top-surgery, the focal point of Grey’s intervention on their queer form. The nudity also exposes Grey’s genitals. This is interesting because of the fetishizing discourse on trans* people’s genitalia in which the public “wonders” about or covets what trans* bodies have between their legs. Articles by Samantha Allen28 and Eva Reign29 describe the fetishization of trans* people and their genitals, documenting “chasers”, people who seek out sexual relationships with trans* people while also belittling or dehumanizing their trans* partner. Grey disrupts this discourse by blatantly showing their genitalia, their identity is secure and the focus is on their scars from top surgery. This nudity is significant in part because trans* bodies, especially trans* genitals, are usually hidden or obscured by clothing choices which support gender identity. Often this hiddenness 28 Allen, Samantha. "The Ridiculous Straight Panic Over Dating a Transgender Person." The Daily Beast. November 04, 2017. Accessed April 08, 2019. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-ridiculous-straight-panic-over-dating-a-transgenderperson. 29 Reign, Eva. "Trans Women and Femmes Speak Out About Being Fetishized." Them. July 21, 2018. Accessed April 08, 2019. https://www.them.us/story/trans-womenfemmes-fetishization. 23 denotes a dysphoria associated with genitalia. Grey’s body resists biologically imposed notions that cisgender people often demand of trans* people, their body complicates the gender binary and disrupts cisgender biological essentialist notions of bodies. The full exposure of a naked trans* body is fundamentally an exercise in vulnerability. Grey’s nakedness creates a tender connection with the audience. Their body is not protected by clothing and the eyes of their audience may look wherever they want. The affective connection between the audience and Grey is heightened by the nudity because the audience is confronted by a vulnerable body; an action which may call to mind their own form and the clothes they are wearing. It is important to note that vulnerability is especially poignant when performed by a trans* body because of the heightened vulnerability facing them from anti-trans* violence and hate crimes. The Human Rights Campaign notes that this type of violence is an epidemic and that many trans* people are gruesomely murdered with the crimes rarely being solved.30 Given this context of the vulnerability of trans* bodies, Grey’s choice to fully expose their body (a body predisposed to violence) is a show of empowered vulnerability. Another consideration is that of “passing” or the ability of trans* people to “pass” or be perceived as cisgender. By performing naked, Grey gives up any attachments to passing, they are representing themselves as clearly and fully a trans*body. In showing their fully naked trans* form, Grey rejects discourses of passing, which are often represented as desirable. This choice is important in their crafting of a queer form and in claiming their agency. 30 Human Rights Campaign. "A National Crisis: Anti-Transgender Violence." Human Rights Campaign. 2016. Accessed April 08, 2019. https://www.hrc.org/resources/anational-crisis-anti-transgender-violence. 24 Chapter 5: Witnessing In this section, I’ll move beyond my analysis of the performance itself to look at the ways in which Grey’s audiences participate in witnessing. Grey has re-performed “Homage” on two occasions as well as presented stills and video at various other speaking engagements and gallery spaces. Grey has also posted images from the performances online and on social media such as Instagram. I rely on images and an interview from the first performance in 2013 and have a full video recording of the 2014 performance. There are also images from the 2014 and 2015 performances I will reference and Instagram posts with comments that I will engage. For the most part, I will treat these parts as facets of one whole object. By collapsing these performances into one I am able to look at the repetition of the performance and audience reactions across the same actions. These various performances and mediated representations of them each tap into different audiences, beyond those actually in the room(s) with Grey, whose reactions contribute to the discourse and witnessing that Grey’s performance prompts. In this way Grey has a multitude of audiences that participate in witnessing. I have found that the audience has powerful emotional and sensory responses to the performance across mediation and in different mediums, i.e. live performance versus still image on social media.31 This object retains its potency when mediated whether viewed live or experienced through photographs years later. The mediation projects the 31 One thing to note is that, as Grey tells it, in their experience, the audience response of fainting was only present in mediated contexts not the live performance. I found this surprising and cannot offer an explanation although I think it argues for the power of images and videos outside the live performance. Grey describes live audiences breathing with them during the performance, I wonder if this shared calming mechanism is absent in mediated contexts and thus audience members become overwhelmed. Regardless, this project has power whether mediated or not. The fainting is a testament to the object’s power and the audience-rhetor relationship. 25 performance to more audiences and circulates powerfully through different platforms gathering affective power as it sticks to more audiences and affects. Ahmed explains that “signs become sticky through repetition; if a word is used in a certain way, again and again, then that ‘use’ becomes intrinsic; it becomes a form of signing”. 32 While Grey may not achieve the exact stickiness of a clearly defined sign, they do access the power of repetition to develop stickiness. The repetition of images from “Homage” on Grey’s Instagram allows stickiness to connect people and emotions together again and again; one example might be responses of appreciating beauty, thus signing “Homage” in those ways for more audiences. Ahmed also explains how it is important to note that affect’s “stickiness depends on histories of contact that have already impressed upon the surface of the object”33. These histories could include the histories of queer contagion or pathologization which impact the way the object circulates. Affective connections circulate as witnesses engage and respond. Witnessing plays a role in this piece’s power. Grey explains that much of the trans* experience is influenced by medicalization and pathologization and is without witnesses. While Grey names both medicalization and pathologization, I focus on pathologization as the main discourse that needs to be resisted due to its insidious nature exemplified in the classification in the DSM. Trans* bodies currently must be pathologized in order to have access to medicalization, in other words trans* people must be labeled as sick in order to have access to confirmation surgeries. Grey says in their interview for ARTFile magazine “The way I’ve acted on my body through the use of 32 33 Ahmed, 191 Ahmed, 190 26 hormones and surgeries is a way for me to craft a queer form. But most of that alteration happens without witness and under the rule of medicalization and pathology. This piece was a way for me to correct that for myself in front of witnesses.”34 The audience bears witness to Grey’s act of creation of their body. A creation which challenges the isolation and pathologization. The audience witnesses to Grey’s crafted queer form. The crafting process that occurs during the performance is augmented by the witnessing function of the audience. By witnessing to Grey, the audiences, including the mediated ones, generate affective responses. These responses, whether that be disgust, arousal, reverence or something else entirely, buoy the power of the performance and its circulation. All of the audience responses to Grey’s performance represent an unsettling; Grey pushes their audiences out of their comfort zone to reside in a space of productive discomfort. Oliver writes that “The model of spectatorship suggested by performance art takes as its very foundation the discomfort of the viewer”35 Discomfort and performance have a rich relationship. Discomfort is also an affect with power. Sara Ahmed writes about the utility of discomfort in her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion. She writes “We can posit the effects of ‘not fitting’ as a form of queer discomfort, but a discomfort which is generative, rather than simply constraining or negative. To feel uncomfortable is precisely to be affected by that which persists in the shaping of bodies and lives.”36 The audience is made to feel a queer discomfort by Grey’s performance, that feeling sticks them to the performance through their various 34 DeBrincat, AM. "Empowered Vulnerability." Kris Grey - ArtFile Magazine. Accessed April 08, 2019. https://www.artfilemagazine.com/Kris-Grey. 35 36 Oliver, 122 Ahmed, 155 27 expressions of unsettlement; fear, arousal, reverence. The discomfort indicates that the bodies are relating to one another. In feeling these ways, the audiences are shaped by Grey’s performance and by the affect they both produce and respond to. Crafting oneself by reopening wounds in order to share energy, as Grey does, hinges on the communal nature of the performance. The audience helps to take the crafting of the queer form out of the hidden clutches of pathologization into a moment of connection and community through affect. Those affective responses turn bodies toward one another, through an unsettling process of discomfort that is generative. Grey’s rhetorical performance prompts affective responses that connect bodies together thus bringing Grey out of the isolation of pathology into relationships with the audiences. As Sophie Anne Oliver explains, witnessing to performance art pieces expands traditional moral witness that rhetoric scholar Bradford Vivian, for example, writes about. Performance art “rejects the distinction between active artist and passive spectator and forces us as viewers to acknowledge our own role in the performance of representation; by becoming conscious of the presence of our own bodies in the act of spectatorship we may be better equipped to resist the temptation to turn away from the traumatized body of the victim; instead, we are called upon to accept this body, along with our own, as part of what it is to be human”37 Thus witnesses are part of the performance which interpolates them into accepting and engaging the performing body and its trauma. This witnessing is relational between 37 Oliver, 128 28 the performing artist and embodied witnesses. It requires an ethical response and engagement with the other and with their trauma. The body of an audience member must literally turn towards and engage with the body of the performer. This is a humanizing and empathy building process. Oliver emphasizes the role of bodies; the audience must be conscious of their own bodies and of the acceptance of the traumatized body along with their own, of the relationships between them. Borrowing Ahmed’s language, these bodies “stick” to one another in order to humanize and accept the traumatized body of Grey. Because pathologization works to dehumanize trans* bodies, Grey’s performance is a radical request to recognize and be in solidarity with a trans* body, their trauma and their agency. The pathologization of trans* people as fundamentally sick because of their identities is a dehumanizing process. Grey’s performance demands an acceptance of trans* bodies by the audiences which challenges the dehumanization under pathologization of trans* bodies. This piece invests in an affective relationship between a witnessing audience and Grey. The performance proclaims the humanity of Grey in empowered yet vulnerable spaces; it is important to note that audiences are also vulnerable in their exposure to the performance. Audiences must grapple with their contact with queer blood and nudity, needles, and all the affects they produce. Grey’s performance is provocative in its relationship to pathology, it refuses to allow the queer form to be sanitized, and instead it does its critical work in the messiness of the form. In these spaces, both online and in person, the audiences provide emotional investment, empathy and thus witnessing for Grey. While an audience or audience members could “turn away” from the performance in disgust or fear, Grey reports that mostly audiences 29 breathe with them in the space. Even online reactions represent a turning towards and an engagement with the performance even through fear or shock (as the poster who almost fainted but still comments points to)(Figure 6). Ahmed explains how even a response of discomfort or disgust is still an affective investment into the performance and sticks bodies together around those affects. Grey’s audience has their own role in the performance, in not turning away from the traumatized body. Instead audiences experience their bodies in relation to Grey’s crafted queer form. Oliver states that this connection between bodies is fundamental to the human condition. The connection that Grey experiences with their audience who bears witness to the performance is a mutual and tender one. Grey discusses the power of sharing this psychic trauma with an audience as opposed to the surgery experience in isolation and pathologization; “I wanted to literally open up wounds that had healed on my body to reactivate the psychic energy stored there. It was important to be able to share that energy with an audience to have witnesses to this corporeal agency sited on a trans* body.”38 Grey highlights the importance of sharing affect with their audience as a mode of connection and agential power. Oliver writes that “performance art challenges us to view the traumatized body in new terms, opposing our preconceptions of the body as object, alien, other and asserting the significance of the corporeal as a site of resistance and expression in the face of trauma.” 39“Homage” invites its audiences to share energy with Grey at the site of trauma on their chest which is a mode of resistance. Grey’s body rhetoric resists hegemonic pathologization and performs a creation of their body at its site 38 DeBrincat, 1 39 Oliver,128 30 of trauma. In this way “Homage” allows us to see the traumatized site on Grey’s body while also engaging that trauma through agency and the crafting of the queer form One interesting facet of the witnessing is in the strong reactions this performance conjures, even in mediated contexts. While looking at Grey’s Instagram I found a post from February 9th 2018 which was an image of “Homage”, specifically of Grey pulling out a needle (Figure 7). There were some comments on the post one of which said: cheapalex “I almost passed out”. Grey responded to the post saying “@cheapalex that’s actually very common when I show images of this performance. I’ve never had someone pass out at the live performance (that I know of) but I’ve had lots of folks in different places pass out when I show still images or video from this performance 😮”40 This acknowledgment that people often have intense and physical reactions to the piece bring me back to what drew me to this piece in the beginning which was the intense and disparate reactions people have to such an intense piece. It is interesting that Grey notes that passing out is a reaction only occurs when the images or video are shown, not the live performance. The mediated images and video produce the fainting response unlike the live performance. While I cannot say definitively why this is, I suppose that this fact testifies to the intensity of the images and video, of the power of the mediated performance. Mediated performances are just as impactful as the live performances. Passing out is not the only reaction that interests me. On the same post: adrianoacabral commented “This is beautiful. You are beautiful” in Figure 4.41 Another 40 41 Grey, Kris. “Homage 2013” February 9th, 2018. April 8, 2019. Grey, Kris. “Homage 2013” February 9th, 2018. April 8, 2019. 31 commenter Zedlightheart commented “Beautiful image...” Grey made a post February 8th, 2018 of a close up of the needles under their nipple. Strange_kindness78 commented “Yum” (Figure 3)42. These other reactions to “Homage” demonstrate the vast differences in audience experience from disgust to reverence to arousal. In Figures 5 and 7 a sheet of paper that had collected the blood from the performance to look like a print is shown43. The figures show the commentary on the beauty of the blood prints. Grey writes about the emotional experience of finding these physical manifestations of “Homage” and how they almost did not show them do to the intimacy of the prints. Grey’s decision to share these intensely personal prints gives another example of their investment in an affective audience relationship as well as their willingness to be vulnerable. The response from commenters of the print’s beauty demonstrate the affective connections they enable. Grey’s audience has invested emotional and sensory responses which is to say a connection between Grey as rhetor and their audiences. This powerful connection initially drew me into the performance as an object of important rhetorical significance. These comments that the witnesses put online connect them with the broad community of witnesses that Grey has cultivated over years and different platforms. The contributions of praising the beauty and expressing attraction underlines Grey’s impact on viewers. Grey’s performance implicates audiences as witnesses and importantly opens up a communal agency. 42 Grey. Kris. “Save the date!” February 8th, 2018. April 8,2019. 43 Grey, Kris. “These large-scale blood prints are on display” February 23,2019. April 8,2019. 32 Chapter 6: Agency Grey’s crafting of their queer form in front of witnesses is ultimately about agency. I understand agency as complex and negotiated among audiences and Grey. In Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean”, Campbell defines agency using five categories. The first is that agency “is communal and participatory, hence both constituted and constrained by externals that are material and symbolic”44. The relational nature of Grey’s performance maps well onto this first prong. The audience participates in the performance in their role as witness. They are simultaneously external to the performance and a vital part of it, both occur in a communal manner. Grey’s agency is also connected to the agency of the participatory audiences who are empowered to bear witness. The second aspect is that agency “is invented by authors who are points of articulation” while Grey is an author and one point of articulation, the many audiences that emerge are also points of articulation and thus sites of potential agency45. Both Grey and their many audiences are inventors of agency as they articulate affects and arguments. The third element of agency is that it “emerges in artistry or craft”. Here I’ll refer back to Grey’s own interview in that they are working to “craft a queer form”. Grey’s agency emerges in their identity as an artist and in the crafting they do of their form in the performance. The fourth is that agency “is effected through form”. This maps on to Grey’s performance because of the centrality of the trans* body/form in the creation of agency. Further, the performance itself is a form that articulates agency. Grey accesses 44 Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. "Agency: Promiscuous and Protean." Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies2, no. 1 (2005): 2. doi:10.1080/1479142042000332134. 45 Campbell, 2 33 their agency in their affective connections with the audiences and their own corporeal rhetoric. Lastly, agency “is perverse, that is inherently, protean, open, ambiguous, open to reversal.”46 Grey works to reclaim agency in light of oppressive pathologization, a fraught and ambiguous undertaking. This undertaking is complicated and nuanced by the agency of the audiences who become empowered witnesses and participants in the performance. While I argue that Grey’s performance and agency challenge hegemonic pathologization, I acknowledge how this is an ongoing and negotiated process not a one off, quick fix to all of pathologization. Rather, Grey offers one node of resistance. Campbell notes that “Agency emerges out of performances or actions that, when repeated, fix meaning through sedimentation. Agency equally emerges in performances that repeat with a difference, altering meaning”.47 This performative and repeating nature of Grey’s performance, especially the physical action of repeatedly removing needles from their chest, is exactly the kind of agential action Campbell is discussing. Not only does Grey repeat the same action in removing the needles from each side of their body but the performance is repeated when images and videos are presented for audience like when Grey posts images on Instagram. Each iteration of “Homage” is a repetition but one whose meaning changes and develops with new audiences. This repetition is a sedimentation of meaning and agency which is referential to Judith Butler’s understanding of performativity of gender48. Campbell and Butler are thus in conversation over the nature of repetition. Ahmed has her own contribution on repetition 46 Campbell, 2 Campbell, 7 48 Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2011. 47 34 in relation to stickiness. She explains that repetition of an affect compounds meaning and relates bodies together. Repetition helps to form embodied affective agency. “Homage” argues for a queer corporeal rhetoric that enables creation of a nuanced rhetorical agency. Importantly, “Homage” expands Campbell’s notion of agency beyond the textual to the corporeal and the affective. This extends Campbell so that Grey’s work can be understood as agential and affective. 35 Conclusion Four years after first encountering “Homage”, I am still struck by the rhetorical power of this object. While pathologization isolates and traumatizes trans* bodies, Grey’s performance is a corporeal and affective rhetoric that challenges and resists that pathologization. The corporeal lens establishes that Grey’s performance of their crafted queer form is rhetorical. This rhetoric creates an affective connection amongst audiences who are asked to bear witness. It also generates a complex and communal agency for Grey and their audiences. Witnessing disrupts the isolation of pathologization and the audience turns towards Grey’s body with their own bodies in affective responses. This also disrupts the privatization of the diagnosis and surgery in trans* experience because suddenly there are witnesses to these functions. The communal agency generated by the performance is resistive because Grey achieves it through the crafting of their queer form in front of affective audiences. Affect explicates the emotional responses of audience members and connects bodies together relationally. Affect also expands corporeal rhetoric to go beyond the gender binary to think instead about specifically queer forms and the resistive relationships between bodies. My engagement with the corporeal rhetorical lens functions to expand McKerrow’s thinking from genderless bodies to trans* and queer forms, begging the question of corporeal rhetoric in a trans* context. Necessarily, I aim to move understandings of rhetoric and the body beyond the typical relation of body with the feminine or woman. By making room for trans* bodies in rhetorical studies, I hope to push for more trans* embodiment in the field. In my choice to utilize a corporeal rhetorical lens in my analysis of “Homage”, I underscore the importance of connecting 36 bodies and rhetoric without re-centering one gender or type of body. I have found that usually in Rhetorical studies the default is to code the body as female. By instead foregrounding trans* experience we open ourselves to trans* rhetoricians and their bodily rhetoric and force an expansion of traditional bodily rhetoric to both include and reflect on trans* experience. By starting with the specificity of trans* corporeal rhetoric, one’s conceptual lens can be applied to traditionally coded bodies in order to complicate and nuance the analysis. This also allows us to look at what discursive structures and problems are facing trans* bodies; ie medicalization, pathology, fetishization, etc. Expanding rhetoric to engage trans* bodies also produces the effect of rethinking what bodies can produce rhetoric and in what ways. This is especially important given DeLuca’s point that bodies that produce rhetorics outside of language; Grey’s corporeal rhetoric is an affective example of this. Understanding “Homage” using affect allows a delving into the relationships among bodies that is so central to this project. I was initially intrigued by “Homage” because I witnessed a diversity of affective responses in the audience that I was a part of. What does it mean when a rhetorical object produces fear, disgust, attraction, reverence and more all at once? My answer is that something affective is going on. The myriad of affects existing between Grey and their many witnessing audiences connect the bodies together and explicate their relationality. A primary relationship I interrogate is that of witnessing. Grey’s participatory audiences are as vital to the project as the needles in Grey’s flesh. The audiences witness to Grey. They (or we, as my reader and me who witness to images within this work) honor Grey’s crafting of their queer form. The audience brings the action out of the 37 secrecy and shame of pathologization into the light of public performance through their witnessing. By witnessing to Grey’s performance, audiences participate in the challenge to pathologization of trans* bodies. They turn towards the pathologized body, taking it out of isolation. This collective challenge to pathologization persists as Grey’s work is circulated to more and more audiences. This circulation magnifies the disruption of pathologizing discourse and contributes to the communal agency that the performance produces. “Homage” and its audiences engage a powerful communally-created rhetorical agency. The performance and the affective investments made by the audiences disrupt the dehumanizing and objectifying effects of pathologization with the production of a negotiated agency. Performance art is another area in which my thesis offers some conclusions and opens up many questions for further study. My analysis of “Homage” calls for seeing performance art as a site of resistance to pathologization. Grey’s claiming of a complex rhetorical agency through performance resists the disempowering process of pathologization that Grey underwent during their top surgery. By performing a reopening of wounds in front of an audience, Grey disrupts the isolation of pathologization. In generating rhetorical agency through performance, Grey is asserting themselves as a rhetor who resists the powerful pathologization of trans* bodies. This could serve as a model for performance artists as rhetors in order for them to take control of their forms and find nodes of resistance to hegemonic discourses. While, I recognize the enormity of hegemonic and violent discourses like the pathologization of trans* bodies, I also ask my reader to acknowledge the ways in which challenges to those discourses may arise out of surprising or humble spaces. Performance art is one of those spaces. The power of 38 performance art to produce discourse and call upon and mobilize audiences cannot be understated. As Oliver explains, performance art has a special relationship with the audience. Performance art creates an audience who turns towards the traumatized body of the performer, an action that creates nodes of community, empathy and resistance. My writing on this has lead me to wonder about the power of performance art. As Jaclyn Pryor writes, citing Jill Dolan “performance can bind us, move us, and allow us to imagine what a more socially just world might look and feel like”.49 I argue that “Homage” binds and moves us relationally and forwards a challenge to make the world more just for trans* and queer forms. The power of performance art to create connection, affect and justice invites questions about what and how performances can do. How might performance art be a unique space of audience-rhetor interaction? Can the empathy and turning towards the traumatized body of the performer be replicated in other spaces or contexts outside of performance art? If so, how? While I do not offer a concrete answer to these questions in this project, it is worthwhile to ponder these gaps in knowledge as rhetoricians. Another are for further exploration is the nature of the self-inflicted violence that Grey does to their body. What is the significance of self-inflicted violence? My reading is tentative in its assertion that Grey’s violence is a resistive reclamation of their form and part of the challenge to pathologization. Self-inflicted violence is definitely a topic that could use more exploration. I could envision rhetoricians looking at different types of self-inflicted violence from self-harm to self-immolation to tattooing to suicide bombing 49 Pryor, Jaclyn I. Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,16, 2017. 39 and beyond. What is resistive, if anything, about acting on one’s flesh in that manner? Are there differences in degrees of self-violence? While that scope escapes my project, it is an interesting and potentially fruitful path for some other project. As much as my work offers conclusions it also necessarily prompts many questions. For example: What other corporeal rhetorics can challenge the pathologization of trans* bodies? What might be another node of resistance? How might a trans* rhetoric address both trans masculine and trans feminine embodiments? These questions demonstrate the importance of continuing work on trans* embodied rhetoric. “Homage” was my starting place into trans* corporeal rhetoric, paying special attention to rhetor-audience relationship, however, there is plenty of room for rhetoricians to find and explore other trans* embodiment both in and outside of performance art. My utilization of affect theory and the concept of witnessing provide one specific angle on Grey’s trans* corporeal rhetoric. Expanding this part of the field provides opportunities for more resistive trans* rhetorics. 40 Appendix A Figure 1 41 Figure 2 42 Figure 3 43 Figure 4 44 Figure 5 45 Figure 6 46 Figure 7 47 Bibliography "(In)validating Transgender Identities: Progress and Trouble in the DSM-5." 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