But try as I might to think beyond the strictures of language, as I stand here in the doorway I cannot escape the thought that I am looking at your body and you are not there.

VIII

VIII

In the fall of 2013, performance artist Gia Bachmann moved the entire contents of her apartment into the front room of Videofag and lived there for a week as a durational performance installation. Born male, Gia began transitioning in the late nineties, and over the course of the next decade transformed her body through over sixty surgeries and hundreds of illegal silicone injections financed primarily through sex work. She was not interested in being a “passable” woman. She wanted to look fake. She wanted to “become plastic,” a living Barbie doll, a simulacrum of the idealized and fetishized female body. But she was a feminist who could recite Judith Butler and bell hooks off by heart. A feminist who routinely pissed off other feminists who considered her body a reinforcement of patriarchal attitudes and body fascism.

“They look at me and immediately dismiss me as superficial,” she once said to me. “Or emblematic of the oppression of women. But honey, I can deconstruct those bitches twelve ways to Sunday.”

During her performance installation passersby could stop and watch Gia, through Videofag’s large storefront window, riding her exercise bike or applying makeup in front of her vanity or lighting candles and meditating. At night she projected a variety of videos on the walls — a live feed of herself moving about the space, footage of her past surgeries, footage of herself as a webcam girl, and news reports of the arrest and trial of Luka Magnotta, a man whose murder, dismemberment, and partial cannibalism of exchange student Lin Jun had recently shocked the world. Magnotta also happened to be an ex-lover of Gia’s, as had been frequently reported in the media at the time, and this durational performance in our front room was a kind of public exorcism of him from her psyche.