The State Is the Thing Our Bodies Weaken

T Fleischmann's Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through leaves you longing. It leaves you longing in a way that creates the feeling of absence, or excess, of something just out of the frame. The kind of longing that knows itself to persist despite an object-cause—whether that object is a crush or a stable sense of gender. And it is precisely in these spaces longing produces that T Fleischmann fills with an insistent and rigorous life structured around pleasure. Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through is utterly consumed with and by pleasure: not simply describing the pleasure of being and loving with gender deviant bodies, but the production of that pleasure. In the production of this pleasure, Fleischmann resists the traditional form of the memoir as much as they indulge it. "I don't want to give any more of my touch to language. I just want language to generate more touch" they write. Through inscribing and uninscribing their gender, their lovers, their feelings of loss, longing, and closeness to fleeting notions of having, Fleischmann's book is a blueprint for a world that is always in flight of the forms of being that constrain us.

Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through is a hybrid work structured by the pleasure and resistance that circulates in the relentless geometry of longing. Interweaving three distinct genres, Fleischmann braids together a prose poem meditating on the artwork of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a self-described daily writing practice of describing ice, and an autobiographical sex diary cum embodied theory machine. Always finding ways to take back public space, turn queer relationships into unidentifiable forms, get high and fuck in art galleries, Time Is the Thing paints a picture of queerness more interested in destroying capitalism and the state than solidifying itself as an identity category to be recognized and included in the popular imagination. The patchy narrative resists linearity, as friends bleed into lovers and back again, and relationships are always marked as much by geographic distance as distance from hetero norms, morphing as Fleischmann travels from rural Tennessee, to punk houses in Chicago, to museums in NYC in search of works by Gonzalez-Torres. Fleishmann's obsession with Gonzalez-Torres emerges out of a shared haunting by the loss of loved ones to the AIDS crisis and marks a mode of processing Fleischmann's own shifting relationship to the gay community through which they came into their sexuality. If dominant narratives of transness often look forward with the hope of approaching the feeling of being a "man "or "woman," and look back at the pain of a repressed childhood, Fleischmann is gentle with all the forms their body has taken as it moves through time.

In the spaces between the generic fractures of the book are where the decadence of feeling one's gender lies, before gender comes to swallows you. It's telling that Fleischmann invokes the suffocating monolith of gender identities in the same sentence as they pity the fascists: "I know how painful it is to be defined by something so large that it seems to swallow every bit of who you are." If gender norms and traditional forms of relations are here to swallow us, pin us down, make us dutiful citizens and efficient workers, Fleischmann's life and narrative are here to uninscribe what contains us, especially when it offers that empty promise of the American Dream: a sustained sense of safety, security, and happiness. What if womanhood and manhood only represented uneven proximity to safety and power, rather than true embodiment? Then it becomes a thing to play with, to long for as much as to break, in order to truly feel, rather than simply hope to be.

Writing about Fleischmann's book feels like what I imagine Fleischmann feels writing about Gonzalez-Torres' paintings...