Illness as Metaphor in Cassils's Trans Performance

In the introduction to their 2017 edited collection Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, editors Tourmaline, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton argue, "In today's complex cultural landscape, trans people are offered many 'doors'—entrances to visibility, to resources, to recognition, and to understanding. Yet, … these doors are almost always also 'traps'—accommodating trans bodies, histories, and culture only insofar as they can be forced to hew to hegemonic modalities."¹ Pivoting toward critical potentialities, they continue: "Yet, in addition to doors that are always already traps, there are trapdoors, those clever contraptions that are not entrances or exits but secret passageways that take you someplace else, often someplace as yet unknown."²

We might resonate this account with the inventional possibilities of illness as origin and metaphor of trans performance—to query illness as door, or trap, or trapdoor for Cassils's visual art.³ Cassils's own account (what forum editor E. Cram has described as "Cassils's body biography") invites such consideration. In a lecture titled "The Resilience of the 20%" at the 2015 Creative Capital Retreat, Cassils narrates a childhood shaped by illness: from ages nine through thirteen, they encountered an undiagnosed illness, and upon a major health eruption, they were diagnosed and shown to have been "rotting from the inside."⁴ Bleeding ulcers, blood transfusions, and tubes confounding the difference between interior and exterior populated their ill body.

Alongside Cassils, I want to imagine the inventional potentialities of illness. Contemporary invigorations of invention have "'scattered [the concept] across an array of activities, moods, and spatio-temporal openings that feed all manners of knowing, making, doing, and being in the world,' [recognizing] … multiple modalities and … multiple origins."⁵ This account of invention intersects with imperatives in performance, which Bryant K. Alexander defines as "a critical reflective and refractive lens to view the human condition and a form of reflexive agency that initiates action."⁶ In everyday life, activism, and scholarship, queers have long practiced myriad forms of invention—making do and making anew from available materials and resources, generating new materials and resources, permitting ourselves the art of failure and leaning into backward feelings, and cultivating and transforming selves and communities from positions of exile, alienation, ambivalent privilege, and elsewhere.

Identifying as a "gender non-conforming trans masculine visual artist,"⁷ employing materials like urine, skin texture, and shape-shifting musculature, and working in mediums such as performance, photography, and sculpture, Cassils contributes to and innovates in the project of queer worldmaking. Acute, enduring illness in youth rendered the body salient and vivid as medium and agency, Cassils explains: "In both my art and my personal life, I queer my knowledge of nutrition, biomechanics, and physiology to render through my body an expression of gender."⁸ Via illness and queerness, then, Cassils "perform[s] trans not as something about crossing from one sex to the other but rather as a continual becoming that occupies a space of indeterminacy, spasm, and slipperiness."⁹

Illness: Trap, Door, Trapdoor

The dangers of illness as metaphor are generally well known or imaginable: agents of order have routinely transformed ostensibly neutral or medically "accurate" descriptions of physical "disorders" into social, cultural, and political pathologies, fabricated "cures" for already existing conditions, and recommended or imposed "prophylaxes" against latent or potential expressions of disorder. Dangers like these were so strong for Susan Sontag during her own experience of cancer that she was compelled to conclude that the best solution was not to counter bad metaphors of cancer with better metaphors but to get out of the cancer metaphor business altogether.¹⁰ Sontag's thesis was strangely arhetorical; however, nearly a decade later in specific reference to AIDS, she amended her thesis in recognition of "the struggle for rhetorical ownership of the illness,"¹¹ a revised thesis that better affirms practices of resistance and counterpublicity by people diagnosed with illness and illness activists, including people with HIV or AIDS and HIV and AIDS activists.¹² True, concerning rhetorics of HIV and AIDS, the virus and the syndrome were easily articulated...