Melting Muscles

Abstract

Abstract This essay considers transmasculine performance artist Cassils's durational piece Tiresias (2010–13) in light of questions around the connections between affect, embodied knowledge, and the capacity of particular forms. Considering the multiple relationships between Cassils and the ice torso that make up Tiresias in its various media, this essay proposes heat as a bodily knowing that is also a specific affective intake, arguing that inquiry into affect should follow the specific pathways of its generation rather than reducing it to a generalized sensation or an always “unexpressed” or “unactualized” potential beyond the scope of particularity. Such a proposal takes an approach both speculative and material to what bodily knowledge might mean for trans studies without reifying a Cartesian dichotomy. In particular, following temperature in Tiresias delimits the tension between the possibility of shifting, in Susan Stryker's words, “the signs of the flesh that discourse fastens upon to situate the body” through the extreme exercise of a body's gestural capabilities and the temporal nature of a body's always shifting form.