Prelude to an Encounter

In the labor of making queer worlds, performance art has always encompassed a central modality. In dire moments and ongoing structural duress, art expands, indexes, critiques, and moves all at once. From singular to social bodies, art gets under our skin. Art worlds mobilize citational histories, kinship, erotics and intimacies, offering audiences a place to dwell within and amongst other bodily strangers, at times in riotous fashion. Cassils, a Montréal artist now based in Los Angeles, is no exception to this tradition. Serving timely critiques of our contemporary political climate through symbolic and material forms of embodiment, sensation, and visual culture, Cassils's body of work offers profound lessons about trauma, violence, erasure, and hope. In a word, Cassils captivates.

Cassils describes themselves as a gender nonconforming trans masculine visual performance artist who uses singular they pronouns. Interrogating the body as social sculpture, Cassils melds their experience in physical training—from combat fighting to weight lifting—with visual performance, often interrogating the visual as a mode of perception and an index of cultural representation. In recent years, their accolades have included a 2015 Creative Capital Award, a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2018 United States Artist Fellowship, and their body of work continues to grow.

This forum offers reflections about Cassils's performance labors in conversation with what has been named the trans "tipping point," an age of somewhat unprecedented visibility and governmental recognition. The concept entered the public vocabulary in 2014 after Laverne Cox graced the front cover of Time Magazine, promising a cultural revolution. True to the spirit of the concept, tipping point always already marks of moment of shift, a flux. Yet despite some legislative gains—largely at the state or city level—trans bodies and lives are regularly mobilized as fodder for the ongoing cultural wars. And still, trans communities resist, building worlds through ethics of mutual care. As Miss Major reminds us, "I am still fucking here."

What are the promises and perils of trans visibility at a moment in which the Trump administration has defined legal "gender" in ways that preclude governmental recognition of trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, and intersex communities? We first gathered to discuss trans visibility politics only five months prior to the Trump administration's decision, primarily in conversation with critical perspectives working to make sense of the paradoxes of visibility and violence. Visibility, write Tourmaline, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, functions like a trap door.¹ Gathered to engage this paradoxical web, Cassils captivated our attention to feel and think through the inventional potential of visual culture. This is the context by which each author in this forum contemplates singular works from Cassils's repertoire. Disrupting familiar representational politics and speaking back to mediated images, Cassils's art challenges our understanding of how visuality can respond to violence, how we might imagine modes of spectatorship, and how we might endeavor to engage bodies, perform embodiment, and transform taxonomies of gender.

"Queer Trans Culture and Invention Beyond Visibility: Experiencing Cassils" draws from five major works from the Cassils archive. The short film 103 Shots responds to the June 2016 mass shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando.² Filmed later that month during San Francisco Pride, Cassils describes the origins of the film as emerging from the testimony of one of the survivors. The unnamed witness described their disorientation of sequencing action within the nightclub based on the (mis)perception of sound. Over the duration of two and a half minutes, bodies break balloons pressed between abdomens, while the sound mix cycles through repetitive pops, mimicking gun shots. In their article, forum contributor Benjamin Zender reads 103 Shots as a "dramatic staging of disidentificatory practice" and repertoires of survival. Paired with a reading of Lyle Ashton Harris and Thomas Allen Harris's photographs, Brotherhood, Crossroads, and Etcetera 1994, Zender locates repertoires of survival in "the way they have learned to hold their bodies in rehearsed anticipation of pleasure and pain in relationship to each other." In turn, Zender offers a reading beyond mimetic representation turning toward the possibilities afforded by disidentificatory sites of struggle.

Preliminarily imagined as a site-specific...