I never did buy the Cartesian vision of mind-body separation. It always struck me as a kind of ur-text for a contemporary society of floating heads glued to screens, in which the body was an inconvenient afterthought. And yet it is ingrained in our language. For me to even say “your body” or “my body” suggests an essence which is “you,” an essence which is “me” — essences which are separate from our bodies and can claim ownership over them. This “you” and “me” seem to have eternal ownership over this flesh and these bones even in death. “Here lies the body of Jordan Tannahill,” someone might say when standing over my grave many years from now (hopefully). Like the way you would always say, “There’s the old McGregor farm,” pointing out the car window at a ruin in a field near the cottage. But is there some immortal essence that is us rambling around inside our bodies like the McGregors once did on their farm? An essence that will live on in new earthly forms or in some spectral realm, just as the descendants of the McGregors now live in distant cities and have no memory of this ruin? And is it this belief in an immortal, immaterial soul that gives our person, the thing that is I, perpetual ownership over our bodies? Is it for this reason that the person standing over my grave might say, “Jordan Tannahill is buried here” rather than “The body that was Jordan Tannahill is buried here”? We have constructed our language in this way because we do not want to imagine death as an end. Because we do not want to imagine a body belonging to no one.

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.”