Queer geographies and the rhetoric of orientation

Abstract

Amidst biting wind and bone-chilling rain on April 29, 2017, a cascade of bodies dressed in black descended on the doorsteps of the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska. Situated in the center of so-called “flyover country” and the heart of Omaha’s Old Market District, the Bemis’ midcentury brick walls have long served the community as a space of pleasure and care. What was once a grocery warehouse now serves as an internationally renowned destination for artists and cultural producers of all kinds, curating a range of public programs to invite community participants to fuse the aesthetic, spatial, and civic. On this day, bodies ranging in age, gender, ethnicity, race, orientation, and ability gathered together to imagine the task of pushing a bronze monument weighing two tons over rutted cobblestones, up hills made of concrete askew. Created by the Los Angeles based trans masculine artist Cassils, the monument named “Resilience of the 20%” references a 2012 statistic that marks a rising tide of anti-trans homicides, serving as witness to bodies broken by the blows of interpersonal and structural violence. The monument’s provenance resides in an on-site performance of “Becoming an Image.” Situated in a room in the Los Angeles ONE Archive, the performance calls attention to the missing T’s and Q’s in the ONE’s classificatory infrastructure. Cassils attacks a 2,000pound block of animation clay, striking blows with clenched fists, kicks, sweat, and breath. Inspired by the absence of trans bodies in the archive, the performance physically embodies that privation by producing the vestigial of violence otherwise impressed into the bodies and psyches of trans and gender non-conforming communities around the world. Reimagined through public choreography, “Monument Push” repurposes the monument as a medium for mapping spaces of violence and resistance throughout the Old Market District. Over the course of four hours, fingers rubbed against the frigid alloy,